The Creative Mind
the inner workings and challenges of life as a creative
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The Creative Mind
Larry David said in an interview that at the end of each season of Curb your Enthusiasm, he feels there are no more good ideas and questions whether there could be another season.
... See more“So at the end of the season, there’s this hole — there aren’t any ideas that he really likes — so how could he possibly do another season? He’s the only person on the
From Franz Kafka’s letters (inspo for when the going gets tough, just do something/anything):
Time is short, my strength is limited, the office is a horror, the apartment is noisy, and if a pleasant, straightforward life is not possible then one must try to wriggle through by subtle maneuvers.
“You can’t second-guess your own taste for what someone else is going to like. It won’t be good. We’re not smart enough to know what someone else will like. To make something and say, ‘well, I don’t really like it but I think this group of people will like it’, I think [that approach] is a bad way to play the game of music or art.
Do what’s personal... See more
Do what’s personal... See more
create for yourself first, via Rick Rubin
The legendary designer Paula Scher said, “I still [a little over 5 decades into her career] make things that are pretty awful. It’s part of the process. You have periods of tremendous productivity and other periods where you’re fallow. The fallow periods are really important because that’s where you’re figuring something it out. You have to work... See more
Billy Oppenheimer • SIX at 6: Swiss Cheese, in the Heights, Wylie Dufresne, STORY, Owning Your Style, and the Fallow Periods
idolizing email lists and follower counts is a form of blasphemy against your craft
The trick is having this help us, by creating a creative tension that makes us want to be better, instead of discouraging us. We must be OK with never arriving, and crave the work anyways.
-Austin Kleon
Maybe “what have you done for the world” isn’t even the right question. It assumes an acting upon, separate from-ness. What if the good stuff happens less when you act upon the world and more when you become one with it? Part of it.
Alex Dobrenko • What Does Your Stupid Art Even Do for the World?
For his first 6 years of trying to be a songwriter, Paul Simon wrote terrible songs. “They were all terrible,” his biographer Robert Hilburn said, “I found his old demos—there’s about 50 of them—and it’s unbelievable: there isn’t one good song.” Finally, in the fall of 1963, Simon made a vow: After spending those first 6 years mostly “copying what
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