James Baldwin on the Creative Process and the Artist’s Responsibility to Society
For many artists, art plays a unique and crucial role in working out “what … we might want when we’re not under surveillance,” as Adam Phillips has said of psychoanalysis.
Maggie Nelson • On Freedom: Four Songs of Care and Constraint
The act of making art exposes a society to itself. Art brings things to light. It illuminates us. It sheds light on our lingering darkness. It casts a beam into the heart of our own darkness and says, “See?”
Julia Cameron • The Artist's Way: A Spiritual Path to Higher Creativity
The Ego hates artists because they are the pathfinders and bearers of the future, because each one dares, in James Joyce's phrase, to "forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race." Such evolution is life-threatening to the Ego. It reacts accordingly. It summons its cunning, marshals its troops. The Ego produces Resistance and
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