Tag Archives: creativity
10 Quotes on Creativity: Kafka, Rilke, Doctor Who and more
1. First of all, don’t worry about the money. Love the process. You don’t know when it’s gonna happen. Louis C.K. started hitting in his 40s; he’d been doing it for 20 years. And don’t settle. I don’t want to ever hear, “It’s good enough.” Then it’s not good enough. Don’t ever underestimate your audience. They can tell when it isn’t true. Also: Ignore your competition. A Mafia guy in Vegas gave me this advice: “Run your own race, put on your blinders.” Don’t worry about how others are doing. Something better will come.” – Joan Rivers
2. In short, this has been my strategy, though I’m worse at ‘pruning’ than I should be. Consume widely, create with focus, and you’ll see that the novel connections and solutions will follow naturally. You will have the broad base of material and information that allows for new, interesting applications paired with the practiced skill of a technician in your execution. -Erich Campbell, Create with Focus
3. The only thing that makes one an artist is making art. And that requires the precise opposite of hanging out; a deeply lonely and unglamorous task of tolerating oneself long enough to push something out. ―David Rakoff, Half Empty
4. Don’t bend; don’t water it down; don’t try to make it logical; don’t edit your own soul according to the fashion. Rather, follow your most intense obsessions mercilessly. -Franz Kafka
5. Inspiration is for amateurs–the rest of us just show up and get to work. – Chuck Close (painter)
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Illustration Love: Airships, Bookstores, and Lakes
We do not need magic to transform our world. We carry all of the power we need inside ourselves already.”
― J.K. Rowling
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Caffeinated Links: How to Sustain Creativity and Inspiration, Greatest Action Setpieces in Film History, and What Is Love
Erich Campbell on consuming broadly in order to create with focus – “In my opinion, creativity and problem-solving are cultivated, not granted like a wish; they grow, and like any growing thing they must be fed and cared for, given the proper environment. Once grown, the resultant creativity must be trained and exercised, pruned and the selected offshoots allowed to flower. Taken step by step, I think all people are capable of incredible creativity.” RT
Good read on how Singaporeans have developed a misplaced sense of entitlement in the wake of the city-state’s massive economic success- “The level of materialism – what you wear, where you live, what you drive, what you wear on your wrist – has become a key determinant of the value of human life. This is absolute nonsense.
But it’s the unintended consequence of the fantastic economic success which we have enjoyed. In our headlong rush for more money, a lot of values seem to have been lost.” RT
Incredible video essay mashup of some of the greatest action scenes in film history. Scenes from classics of the past ten years and more including Batman Begins, North By Northwest, Scarface and more. RT Indiewire
Ta-nehisi Coates on the resurrection of the Peter Parker/Mary Jane marriage in the upcoming Marvel comics. “I say this because I knew, from a very early age, that there was love in my house, imperfect love, love that was built, decided upon, as opposed to magicked into existence.That was how Peter loved Mary Jane. They were not destined to be. She was not his Lois Lane. His Lois Lane—Gwen Stacy—was murdered for the crime of getting too close to him, and the guilt of this always weighed on him. Whatever. While the world was fooled, Mary Jane Watson knew Peter Parker was Spider-Man.” RT Atlantic
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New Web Series Alert: “The Misselthwaite Archives” Based on The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett
I. Am SO excited for this. Frances Hodgson Burnett’s 1911 book is one of the most beloved children’s books in the world, and one of my personal favorite books, so utterly magical. The first episode of this dodges the mistakes I’ve seen a lot of webseries make as far as labored explication and overly-long dialogue; it jumps refreshingly straight into the story with an outspoken, sarcastic Mary, yet also lets viewers engage with her immediately by referencing her tragic past. I expect to love this.
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The 100 Bellamy Clarke Fanfiction – Reunion
A few weeks back I wrote my first (and so far only) fanfiction. What is it that inspired intense enough passion in this girl to lead me to finally turn to fanfiction after years of writing other formats?
The CW’s The 100. Which has turned out to be so much better than it has any right to be,a dark, gritty, romantic survivalist tale of four young people who blossom into leaders, fighters, and fierce defenders of the remnants of the human race left on earth. I highly recommend it if you haven’t tried it yet (the first two episodes are okay but not great and then it hooks from there) – even critics who initially ignored it are slowly picking it up and becoming fans, including NPR Pop Culture Hour‘s Joanna Robinson. The show it reminds me of most is Lost, though it’s (obviously) not nearly as brilliant.
Reunion
Clarke saw him across the clearing and something inside her seemed to come suddenly to rest. He was covered in dirt and blood but the same driving force of will, the same steadiness, that had made her trust him before against all her better judgement, still hung on him, as he stood steady as a rock, taller than anyone else, his dark, broody eyes searching the scattered crowd.
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Quotidian: Madeleine L’Engle
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Quotidian: Virginia Woolf
“Lock up your libraries if you like; but there is no gate, no lock, no bolt that you can set upon the freedom of my mind.”
-Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own
Coffee and Irony 