“The reason creativity wilts inside of us like a vase full of snipped wildflowers is the very same reason love fades. Somewhere along the line, we stop noticing. We can never stop noticing. The moment we stop noticing, we might as well be dead. We’re alive and breathing but we feel nothing at all. Creativity and love dies when we feel nothing at all. And so we notice so we we can feel because, in the words of Klinkenborg, noticing means thinking with all your senses.”
Cole Schafer
“A lot of the time, creativity comes from structure. When you have those parameters and structure, then within that you can be creative. If you don’t have structure, you’re just aimlessly doing stuff.”
Kobe Bryant, via Think Like A Monk (Page 132)
“Creative work needs solitude. It needs concentration, without interruptions. It needs the whole sky to fly in, and no eye watching until it comes to that certainty which it aspires to, but does not necessarily have at once. Privacy, then. A place apart––to pace, to chew pencils, to scribble and erase and scribble again.”
Mary Oliver
“The creative does not live off wins. The creative lives off the work. That’s what keeps her nourished.”
Cole Schafer (January Black), One Minute, Please? (Page 66)
“My aunt and uncle in their country home taught me how to be okay with sitting still, a quality that has been as important to my career as anything. To be a decent writer, you have to be okay with either writing or doing absolutely nothing. I’m a firm believer that the only way to be creative is to sit around and do nothing until you get bored enough to entertain yourself.”
Cole Schafer
“The only reason Alan [Watts] talks about mysticism, philosophy, or Eastern traditions is because he enjoys it. He sees himself like a ‘spring bubbling from the side of the mountain’ – if a traveller drinks from the spring and enjoys it, that’s fine. But that’s not the purpose of the spring. The spring just exists.”
Ali Abdaal
“The greatest impediment to creativity is your impatience, the almost inevitable desire to hurry up the process, express something, and make a splash.”
Robert Greene, The Daily Laws (Page 93)
“We all possess an inborn creative force that wants to become active. This is the gift of our Original Mind, which reveals such potential. The human mind is naturally creative, constantly looking to make associations and connections between things and ideas. It wants to explore, to discover new aspects of the world, and to invent. To express this creative force is our greatest desire, and the stifling of it the source of our misery.”
Robert Greene, The Daily Laws (Page 90)