Words of Wisdom

“To create one’s own world, in any of the arts, takes courage.”
—Georgia O’Keeffe

“You can’t wait for inspiration. You have to go after it with a club.”
—Jack London

“You can’t use up creativity. The more you use, the more you have.”
—Maya Angelou

“You must take an obsessive pride in the smallest details of your craft. And you must be willing to defend what you’ve written against the various middlemen—editors, agents and publishers—whose sights may be different from yours, whose standards not as high.”—William Zinsser

“A man should hear a little music, read a little poetry, and see a fine picture every day of his life, in order that worldy cares may not obliterate the sense of the beautiful which God has implanted in the human soul.”—Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

“Don’t think. Thinking is the enemy of creativity. It’s self-conscious, and anything self-conscious is lousy. You can’t try to do things. You simply must do things.”—Ray Bradbury

“Music is enough for a lifetime, but a lifetime is not enough for music.”—Sergei Rachmaninov

“You’d like to be able to go to work and have everything be smooth, but there’s some weird artistic gene in some of us. It can feel like a curse, because it makes you push yourself to make things better and not allow them to be easy. That’s how you get the good stuff.”—Eddie Vedder

“In writing songs I’ve learned as much from Cezanne as I have from Woody Guthrie.”—Bob Dylan

“Every artist was first an amateur.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson