#writ

Inside" Children Inside each of us are the children we were at each developmental stage. With regard to our creative dreams, these inside children can prevent us from living them by "acting out" in order to try to get our attention. Your inner 5-year-old is not going to patiently wait as you learn intricate metalworking techniques or study impressionist painting. Yet, your inner 10-year-old may be perfectly suited to learn and observe new skills. What's really needed is parenting of these inside children so that we bring them to age-appropriate activities. ↗

— S.A.R.K.

#creativity #dreaming #procrastination #writing #age

That afternoon he told me that the difference between human beings and animals was that human beings were able to dream while awake. He said the purpose of books was to permit us to exercise that faculty. Art, he said, was a controlled madness… He said books weren't made of themes, which you could write essays about, but of images that inserted themselves into your brain and replaced what you were seeing with your eyes. ↗

— Steven Millhauser

#writer #writing #art

The novel is perhaps the highest art form because it so closely resembles life: it is about human relationships. It's technique, page by page, resembles our technique of living day by day--a way of relating. ↗

— Joyce Carol Oates

#writing #art

At least I understood that writing was this: an impulse to share with other people a feeling or truth that I myself had. Not to preach to them, but to give it to them if they cared to hear it. ↗

— Brenda Ueland

#creativity #writing #writing-life #art

Tortured Soul 101: The depth of despair one experiences during the creative process (as experienced say, in an abysmally blank page or canvas) is directly proportional to the scope and power of the work that emerges when it breaks. ↗

— F.T. McKinstry

#creativity #writing #art

The artist must manage to make posterity believe that he never existed. ↗

— Gustave Flaubert

#artists #writers #writing #art

I like to be aware of a book as a piece of writing, and aware of its structure as a product of mind, and yet I want to be able to see the represented world through it. I admire artists who succeed in dividing my attention more or less evenly between the world of their books and the art of their books . . . so that a reader may study the work with pleasure as well as the world that it describes. ↗

— Annie Dillard

#writing #art

...the best way to know the Truth or Beauty is to try to express it. And what is the purpose of existence Here or Yonder but to discover truth and beauty and express it, i.e., share it with others? ↗

— Brenda Ueland

#truth #writing #art

Writing is turning one's worst moments into money. ↗

— J. P. Donleavy

#moments #money #turning #worst #writing

...what is art to the dilettante but the initiation of the sacred few to the exclusion of the profane crowd?... ↗

— John Geddes

#elitism #exclusivism #writing #art