girl so ambitious

I did not know how I would make a living when I began making art. I felt like I was in a fog, groping around, and trying things. Doing this caused the fog to dissipate until it was clear how I would make a living.

Do not wait around to be chosen.

Ultimately what you are looking for is a business model — a configuration of the knobs — that is profitable enough to support one employee, you.

"Business" is simply a lens through which one can look at something. It is not the only lens. You can look at art through an aesthetic lens (how does it look?), a technical lens (how is it made?), an emotional lens (how does it make you feel?), an interpretive lens (what does it mean?), and a political lens (what does it say about our world?).

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But most of the time, there is no one to help you. You must think about your art practice as a business.

In Eros the Bittersweet, Anne Carson describes eros as “To be running breathlessly, but not yet arrived, is itself delightful, a suspended moment of living hope.”

A classic pattern: you try hard to write like someone else, but then you mess up and write in some stupid other way, and that ends up being what people relate to. I wish I had messed up sooner.