Julia Cameron Quotes - Page 10

In recovering from our creative blocks, it is necessary to go gently and slowly... These are baby steps. Progress, not perfection, is what we should be asking of ourselves.

It is not the act of making art that is painful. It is the desire to make something and not acting on it that causes pain....A day when I don't write is less happy. This is not discipline. It is affection, enthusiasm, adventure-any number of other words besides discipline.

And why are we supposed to be serious about God? Did God show up and crack the whip? “You there, Annie in Ohio, I see you laughing a lot and frankly it really pisses Me off . . . “ (50)

All too often too often we try to push, pull, outline and control our ideas instead of letting them grow organically. The creative process is a process of surrender, not control.Mystery is at the heart of creativity. That, and surprise.

Just as blood is a fact of your physical body and nothing you invented, creativity is a fact of your spiritual body and nothing you must invent.

To write is to right things. A path will emerge.

Workaholism is a block, not a building block.

Exercise often moves us straight from stagnation to inspiration, from problem to solution, from self-pity to self-respect.

I believe that when we ask to be led, we are led, and there's nothing too small or esoteric for spiritual help.

It is important to remember that at first blush, going sane feels just like going crazy.

No matter how sophisticated our lives may be we need to think of ourselves as creative children.

When it was suggested that I write a memoir I said, 'I'm not old enough. I'm not distinguished enough.' But I went home and sat down to write, and the material for the book just came flooding into my hands.

For today, all you need is the grace to begin beginning.

Setting skepticism aside, even briefly, can make for very interesting explorations. It is not necessary that we change any of our beliefs. It is necessary that we examine them.

I ask to be made beautiful like the trees are beautiful, each growing according to a unique plan. Lop off a limb and and the tree will accommodate it's loss, still growing and still beautiful. It is my hope to be able to flourish in a similar fashion, taking on the shape and dimensions that is intended for me.

Writing is a spiritual practice in that people that have no spiritual path can undertake it and, as they write, they begin to wake up to a larger connection. After a while, people tend to find that there is some muse that they are connecting to.

When we put the pen to paper, we articulate things in our life that we may have felt vague about. Before you write about something, somebody says, 'How do you feel?' and you say, 'Oh, I feel okay.' Then you write about it, and you discover you don't feel okay.

I am what I am again: a writer. I have metabolized the injury into art.

I am due at the page.

Our modern ideas of 'functioning' through things are really quite inhuman. We have this idea that no matter what is going on we still have to color between the lines, act normal.

We talk about self-expression but need to pause and remember that self-expression requires a self to express.

Love is not love if it is compelled by reason and driven by logic - love exists in spite of those things, not because of them. It is a emotion which needs no fuel to fire it or oxygen to feed it; if you have to look for the why, then stop looking; it was never there at all.

As a writer, I find holidays often disturbing, not liberating, in their disruption of tempo, their open-ended time.

While there is no quick fix for instant, pain-free creativity, creative recovery (or discovery) is a teachable, trackable spiritual process. Each of us is complex and highly individual, yet there are common recognizable denominators to the creative recovery process.

And [now] I think I’ll probably write a lot about birds. My new house has a deck that wraps around my writing room; my writing room has many windows, and outside the windows I’ve hung bird feeders … for enticing different species. So I imagine I will be writing about that.