“I don't need to make more stuff. I've made a lot of stuff! I'm financially okay. I'm not gonna make stuff just for the sake of making stuff. I want to make stuff ’cause I'm inspired. Right now I don't really feel inspired.”— Aziz Ansari, gq.com
“Can you imagine if someone called us a few years ago and said, ‘All right, you're going to have this much money when you're this age. What are you gonna do with it?’ You would say all sorts of fantastical things, right? No one would say, Oh, I would figure out how to make more money and keep working…”— Aziz Ansari, gq.com
“My least favorite received idea about writing is that one must find one's voice, as if it's there inside you, ready to be turned on like a player piano. Like character, its very existence depends on interaction with the world.”— Sarah Manguso, amazon.com
“To give and create with no intent of receiving a reward is the purest form of ALOHA.”— Sheldon Simeon, instagram.com
“We could have easily become absorbed by the tragedy, lost in it and paralyzed by it, but what came back to us was the instinct to dance. I began as a dancer, and in those days of pain and shock I went back to where I started. Creating dance is the thing I know best. It is how I recognize myself.”— Twyla Tharp, amazon.com
“I know writers who say they take little pleasure in writing but they love having written. I'm not like that. I'm more like the athlete who enjoys practicing as much as playing the actual game.”— Twyla Tharp, amazon.com
“Give me a writer who thinks he has all the time in the world and I'll show you a writer who never delivers.”— Twyla Tharp, amazon.com
“In order to be habitually creative, you have to know how to prepare to be creative.”— Twyla Tharp, amazon.com
“Art is not about minimizing risk and delivering work that is guaranteed to please.”— Twyla Tharp, amazon.com
“I'm often asked, 'Where do you get your ideas?' This happens to anyone who is willing to stand in front of an audience and talk about his or her work. The short answer is: everywhere. It's like asking 'Where do you find the air you breathe?' Ideas are all around you.”— Twyla Tharp, amazon.com
“The first steps of a creative act are like groping in the dark: random and chaotic, feverish and fearful, a lot of busy-ness with no apparent or definable end in sight.”— Twyla Tharp, amazon.com
“I point to the volcanic rock that forms the base of the forest floor, and say that if the trees can grow on such a hard, unforgiving surface, then a new life can be built on the foundation of any hardship.”— Sarah Lotz, amazon.com
“We gain energy from brainstorming, theorizing, debating and imagining new possibilities for the future. If this can be done aloud, in the company of likeminded people, we gain maximum energy. If no such people are available, we’ll simply brainstorm, theorize and imagine new possibilities on.”— Heidi Priebe, amazon.com
“It is six A.M., and I am working. I am absentminded, reckless, heedless of social obligations, etc. It is as it must be. The tire goes flat, the tooth falls out, there will be a hundred meals without mustard. The poem gets written. I have wrestled with the angel and I am stained with light and I hav…”— Mary Oliver, amazon.com
“Of this there can be no question — creative work requires a loyalty as complete as the loyalty of water to the force of gravity. A person trudging through the wilderness of creation who does not know this — who does not swallow this — is lost. He who does not crave that roofless place eternity shoul…”— Mary Oliver, amazon.com
“Creative work needs solitude. It needs concentration, without interruptions. It needs the whole sky to fly in.”— Mary Oliver, amazon.com