Eric Maisel Quotes - Page 4

Artists are often poignantly careless about making and keeping friends.

We can carve time out of thin air, or we can fill up even infinite stretches of time with nothingness. These are our choices.

Many people are embarrassed to create in public. It feels unseemly to them, like kissing in plain view... Make a spectacle of yourself.

The wise artist makes peace with the fact that he will understand less than he had anticipated.

The artist's task is to become a successful eccentric, a strange but wise duck able to venture out of solitary confinement and mingle among society.

Go directly to work' means... when an idea strikes, you drop everything and when your work bell tolls, you answer it.

Abstraction is itself an abstract word and has no single meaning ... Every word in our language is abstract, because it represents something else.

Affirmations are not bound up in rules. An affirmation can be long or short, poetic or plain. If you love a phrase and find that it helps you, that is a valid affirmation.

An artist must struggle to accept the shape of this universe - and achieve some important successes.

A long, deep breath is the equivalent of a full stop and the key to centering.

You can sweat by not practicing or you can pick up your clarinet. There's good sweat and there's bad sweat.

You honor your writing space by recovering, if you are an addict. You honor your writing space by becoming an anxiety expert, a real pro at mindfulness and personal calming. You honor your writing space by affirming that you matter, that your writing life matters, and that your current writing project matters. You honor your writing space by entering it with this mantra: “I am ready to work.” You enter, grow quiet, and vanish into your writing.

It goes against an artist's grain to retire. But whether he retires or not, he will age... What work will get done in the remaining time? ...Can he find a little peace in this twilight? Or must he still rush on, restlessly and hungrily, to the very end?

The artist, who must venture into the studio and risk there, and then venture into the marketplace and risk again, is obliged to learn how her defences work, so that she can drop and raise her guard instantly.

It is the artist's job to revere beauty without being enchanted by it, to aim for it but also to aim for truth and goodness - just in case they, and not beauty, are the real things of value.

To obsess too virulently is to walk alone in anxiety. But to obsess too little is to wall oneself off from one's own creativity.

If you create you will also wait, and while you're waiting you will want to be patient but not idle... responses from the world often take a long time.

Keenly aware of their limitations, artists often remain insecure even as their list of successes grows.

An alive piece of art may be more alive than much of its audience, and with this odd truth artists must make peace.

While artists fervently believe that the art marketplace was invented by the devil and remains in his henchman's hands, they have no choice but to carry long spoons and sup there.

No muse shoots darts of insight into the unsuspecting artist.

Artists disbelieve and dispute society's most cherished notions.

Art is manipulation, the management of material, the directing of fate... Who does that directing?

Remind yourself of the value of detaching from work that's out of your hands and committing to new work that wants to be born.

An inability to choose is a hallmark of anxiety... The too-anxious artist, afraid to choose, will halt dead in the water.