Reads tagged with “creativity”
Patti Smith on Listening to the Creative Impulse and the Crucial Difference Between Writing Poetry and Songwriting
“In times of strife, we have our imagination, we have our creative impulse, which are things that are more important than material things. They are the things that we should magnify.”
Elena Ferrante on the Myth of Inspiration, Writing on Demand, and the Central Truth of the Creative Process
“Words draw out words: one can always write a banal, elegant, heartfelt, amusing coherent page on any subject, low or high, simple or complex, frivolous or fundamental.”
Staying Alive: Mary Oliver on How Books Saved Her Life and the Greatest Antidote to Sorrow
“The world’s otherness is antidote to confusion [and] standing within this otherness — the beauty and the mystery of the world, out in the fields or deep inside books — can re-dignify the worst-stung heart.”
The Third Self: Mary Oliver on Time, Concentration, the Artist’s Task, and the Central Commitment of the Creative Life
“The most regretful people on earth are those who felt the call to creative work, who felt their own creative power restive and uprising, and gave to it neither power nor time.”
Rilke on Writing and What It Takes to Be an Artist
“Go into yourself and test the deeps in which your life takes rise; at its source you will find the answer to the question whether you must create.”
Leonard Cohen on Moonlight, the Mystique of Creativity, His Influences, and Why He Loves It When People Cover His Songs
“It’s also very difficult to untangle influences because you represent the sum of everything you’ve seen or heard or experienced.”
There Is a Crack in Everything, That’s How the Light Gets In: Leonard Cohen on Democracy and Its Redemptions
A generous reminder that we must aim for “a revelation in the heart rather than a confrontation or a call-to-arms or a defense.”
May Sarton on the Cure for Despair and Why Solitude Is the Seedbed of Self-Discovery
“Sometimes one has simply to endure a period of depression for what it may hold of illumination if one can live through it, attentive to what it exposes or demands.”
The Courage to Despair: Goethe, the Inner Tension of Creativity, and What It Takes to Be a Great Artist
“[The artist] must be shaken by the naked truths that will not be comforted. This divine discontent, this disequilibrium, this state of inner tension is the source of artistic energy.”
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