Creative Quotes

I like Debrah’s idea of offering the T-shirt sayings she found in a catalog.  It inspired me to  pass along a few quotes about the challenges of writing and other art forms.  These gems come from the wide margins of Julia Cameron’s books on creativity, the series that begins with The Artist’s Way.  (I love the white space in her books.)

I hope you find one or more bits of wisdom to sustain you through the holidays and the coming year.

To create is always to learn, to begin over, to begin at zero.  –Matthew Fox

To believe your own thought, to believe that what is true for you in your private heart is true for all . . . that is genius.  –Ralph Waldo Emerson

Originality does not consist in saying what no one has ever said before but in saying exactly what you think yourself.  –James Stephens

Poetry often enters through the window of irrelevance.  –M. C. Richards

Only a mediocre writer is always at his best.  –W. Somerset Maughm

Shoot for the moon.  Even if you miss it, you will land among the stars.  –Les Brown

Nothing in the world can take the place of persistence.  Persistence and determination are omnipotent.  –Calvin Coolidge

It is necessary to write, if the days are not to slip emptily by.  –Vita Sackville-West

This is the practice school of writing.  Like running, the more you do it, the better you get at it.  –Natalie Goldberg

I don’t wait for moods.  You accomplish nothing if you do that.  Your mind must know it has got to get down to work.  –Pearl S. Buck

The only true happiness comes from squandering ourselves for a purpose.  –William Cowper

We learn to do something by doing it.  There is no other way.  –John Holt

Everywhere I go, I find a poet has been there before me.  –Sigmund Freud

One does not discover new lands without consenting to lose sight of the shore for a very long time.  –André Gide

Let the beauty we love be what we do.  –Rumi

I don’t have a lot of respect for talent.  Talent is genetic.  It’s what you do with it that counts.  –Martin Ritt

To live a creative life, we must lose our fear of being wrong.  –Joseph Chilton Pearce