Dancing with the Gods Quotes

“All work nourishes the soul of your creative imagination. And all work increases your understanding of your craft. Sometimes a work takes a flower, sometimes it merely enriches the soil. And sometimes the seed of an idea, long abandoned and even forgotten, emerges suddenly in a place where it was least expected. And sometimes the blooms that it produces are the most beautiful of al.”
― Kent Nerburn, Dancing with the Gods: Reflections on Life and Art

“The moments when you are feeling most lost are simply the moments when your art is seeking new growth.”
― Kent Nerburn, Dancing with the Gods: Reflections on Life and Art

“The greater your success, the greater the forces that will try to confine you.”
― Kent Nerburn, Dancing with the Gods: Reflections on Life and Art

“Your dream of being discovered by the public will become the burden of being defined.”
― Kent Nerburn, Dancing with the Gods: Reflections on Life and Art

“If your art cannot support your life, your life must support your art.”
― Kent Nerburn, Dancing with the Gods: Reflections on Life and Art

“It is not for you to say whether or not your work has life: that is between your work -the child of your creation now living a life of its own- and those who encounter it.”
― Kent Nerburn, Dancing with the Gods: Reflections on Life and Art

“You need to trust that your art, once created, has a value apart from you, just as a child, come into the world, has a value separate from the parents who gave it life. When you give in to self-loathing, insecurity, or stage fright, you are looking at your work from the outside, and the outside is a shapeless darkness that contains all your self-doubt and fears.”
― Kent Nerburn, Dancing with the Gods: Reflections on Life and Art

“When you allow your fear or your insecurity or your unrealistic belief in perfection too control you, you are betraying that possibility of life. You are saying that you do not have faith in the artistic child born of the union between your imagination and your talent. You are measuring your art by your own standards of excellence rather than trusting your art and letting it make its way into the hearts of others by its own devices.”
― Kent Nerburn, Dancing with the Gods: Reflections on Life and Art

“You are not making art, but art is being revealed through you.”
― Kent Nerburn, Dancing with the Gods: Reflections on Life and Art

“Mr. Mailer's work probably gave me hope that there was a way to be intelligent without being an intellectual.”
― Kent Nerburn, Dancing with the Gods: Reflections on Life and Art