Big Magic: Creative Living Beyond Fear

Most of all, be ready. Keep your eyes open. Listen. Follow your curiosity. Ask questions. Sniff around. Remain open. Trust in the miraculous truth that new and marvelous ideas are looking for human collaborators every single day. Ideas of every kind are constantly galloping toward us, constantly passing through us, constantly trying to get our atte

If you do say yes to an idea, now it’s showtime. Now your job becomes both simple and difficult. You have officially entered into a contract with inspiration, and you must try to see it through, all the way to its impossible-to-predict outcome.

Do what you love to do, and do it with both seriousness and lightness. At least then you will know that you have tried and that—whatever the outcome—you have traveled a noble path.

I knew that conventional success would depend upon three factors—talent, luck, and discipline—and I knew that two of those three things would never be under my control.

This event also taught me that these people—the ones who stand at the gates of our dreams—are not automatons. They are just people. They are just like us. They are whimsical and quirky. They’re a little different every day, just as you and I are a little different every day. There is no neat template that can ever predict what will capture any one

I saw this incident as a rare and glittering piece of evidence that all my most outlandish beliefs about creativity might actually be true—that ideas are alive, that ideas do seek the most available human collaborator, that ideas do have a conscious will, that ideas do move from soul to soul, that ideas will always try to seek the swiftest and most

Because when it all comes together, it’s amazing. When it all comes together, the only thing you can do is bow down in gratitude, as if you have been granted an audience with the divine. Because you have.

I want to make something perfectly clear here: I do not deny the reality of suffering—not yours, not mine, not humanity’s in general. It is simply that I refuse to fetishize it.

To me, multiple discovery just looks like inspiration hedging its bets, fiddling with the dials, working two channels at the same time.

The Romans had a specific term for that helpful house elf. They called it your genius—your guardian deity, the conduit of your inspiration.