Part 4 in a Series
See also Part 1 and Part 2 & 3
CREATORS WELCOME ALONENESS, LONELINESS
- “Aloneness…is not merely the effect of the circumstances in the life of creators: it is often also part of their personality–for the creator is frequently apart and withdrawn even in the presence of others, and makes a deliberate attempt to seek solitude… Research shows that people are likely to come up with better ideas when they work alone.” (R. Ochse)
- “Nothing will change the fact that I cannot produce the least thing without absolute loneliness. Once again I had the experience that I can work only in absolute solitude, and that not only conversation, but even the very presence in my house of loved and esteemed persons at once diverts my poetic nature.” (Goethe)
- “What one bestows on private life—in conversations, however refined it may be…is the product of a quite superficial self, not of the innermost self which one can only recover by putting aside the world and the self that frequents the world.” (V.S Naipaul)
- “Everything that matters in our intellectual and moral life begins with an individual confronting his own mind and conscience in a room by himself.” (Arthur Schlesinger)
- “The most remarkable piece of research apparatus is the human brain. Some people want to buy every price of equipment known to science. They believe that with a beautiful building filled with modern equipment they have a first rate research institute. That is superstition. The greatest discoveries have been made by men working alone.” (Bernado Houssay)
- “Originality is a form of solitude.” (Waldo Frank)
- “Society is harmful to any achievement of the heart.” (Lord Byron)
- “Conversation enriches the mind, but solitude is the school of genius.” (Edward Gibbon)
- “Isolation and complete loneliness are my only consolation and my salvation.” (Richard Wagner)
INTERRUPTIONS, OBSTRUCTIONS, AND TROUBLE ARE A SCOURGE TO CREATORS
- “interruption …is one of the major enemies of creative thinking.” (R. Ochse)–“interruption or the feeling that there may be an interruption at any time.” (Walter Bradford Cannon)
- “Dreadful indeed are such interruptions. Sometimes they break the thread of inspiration for a considerable time, so that I have to seek it again, often in vain.” (Tchaikovsky)
- “Everything I have had to do has been interfered with or cast aside. I have never in my life had so many insuperable obstacles crowded into the way of my pursuits.” (Charles Dickens)
- “I avoided writers very carefully because they can perpetuate trouble as no one else can.” (F. Scott Fitzgerald)
CREATORS ARE COMPLICATED
- “It is at bottom fairly true that a painter as a man is too much absorbed by what his eyes see, and is not sufficiently master of the rest of his life.” (Vincent van Gogh)
- “Creative people are those who are more willing to redefine the ways in which they look at problems, to take risks, to seek to overcome daunting obstacles, and to tolerate ambiguity even when its existence becomes psychologically painful.” (Scott Barry Kaufman and James Kaufman)
- “The creative artist seems to be almost the only kind of man that you could never meet on neutral ground. You can only meet him as an artist. He sees nothing objectively because his own ego is always in the foreground.” (Raymond Chandler)
- “What distinguishes a great artist from a weak one is first their sensibility and tenderness; second their imagination, and third their industry.” (John Ruskin)
- “The challenge of screen writing is to say much in little and then take half of the little out and still preserve an effect of leisure and natural movement.” (Raymond Chandler) and Chandler: “If my books had been any worse, I should not have been invited to Hollywood, and if they had been any better, I should not have gone.” (He was nominate twice for the best screen play Academy Awards.)
- “To create, you must have a slightly hard heart.” (Albert Camus)
- “All art constantly aspires to the condition of music.” (Walter Pater)
- “The actor appears only to practice and to perfect himself.” (Actress Maria Casares)
- “You have to remember that nobody ever wants a new writer. You have to create your own demand.” (Doris Lessing)
- “The moment a man sets his thoughts down on paper, however secretly, he is in a sense writing for publication.” (Raymond Chandler)
CREATORS BETTER ACQUIRE CONSIDERABLE KNOWLEDGE
- “People who gain a wide range of knowledge have a relatively good chance of being creative. They will have acquired a large universe of items from which possible new combinations could be drawn.” (R. Ochse)
- “To creators knowledge isn’t everything. But it is almost everything.” (David J. Rogers)
- “Creativity: a type of learning process where the teacher and the pupil are located in the same individual.” (Arthur Koestler)
- “The literary artist is of necessity a scholar.” (Walter Pater)
- “Over the long run, superior performance depends on superior learning.” (Peter Senge)
- “The most eminent creators are consistently those who have immersed themselves utterly in their chosen field, have devoted their lives to it (and) amassed tremendous knowledge of it” (Geoff Colvin)
- “Learning is necessary to the development of creativity of the highest order, although attendance at an academic institution is not essential.” (R. Ochse)
CREATORS MUST FIND THEIR AUTHENTIC STYLE, TECHNIQUE, AND VOICE
- “In the long run, however little you talk or even think about it, the most durable thing in writing is style, and style is the most valuable investment a writer can make with his time. It plays off slowly, your agent will sneer at it, your publisher will misunderstand it, and it will take people you never heard of to convince them by slow degrees that the writer who puts his individual mark on the way he writes will always pay off.” (Raymond Chandler)
- “If you’re a creator the first thing you notice about the work of an accomplished writer, painter, actor, dancer, composer, etc., is a distinctive style, It cannot be hidden.” (David J. Rogers)
- “No matter what elevated state of inspiration you might find for yourself, you can’t write the book until you find the voice for it. As it happens there is just one voice and one voice only for a given book and you must ventriloquize until you find it.” (E.L. Doctorow)
- “Technique is the ability to do what you want to do…You must have a certain intention, and the ability to do that is the index of your technique.” (Pianist Leon Fleisher)
- “Don’t get alarmed if you dislike what you write. It takes years to find your real voice, your tone and the truth in your heart.” (Albert Camus)
- “It was at this point that I really began to write. I began from scratch, throwing everything overboard, even those I most loved. Immediately I heard my own voice. I was enchanted: the fact that it was a separate, distinct, unique voice sustained me. It didn’t matter to me if what I wrote should be considered bad. Good and bad had dropped out of my vocabulary…My life itself became a work of art. I had found a voice. I was whole again.” (Henry Miller)
- “The writer’s work consists in writing with as much effort as possible; and at the end of this labor it sometimes happens that he finds what he sought for so long inside himself.” (Albert Camus)
THE WORK OF CREATORS IS SUBJECT TO CRITICISM, SOME FAIR, SOME UNFAIR.
- “Good critical writing is measured by the perception and evaluation of the subject; bad critical writing by the necessity of maintaining the professional standing of the critic.” (Raymond Chandler)
- “Most critical writing is drivel and half of it is dishonest.” (Raymond Chandler)
CREATORS FOCUS AND WORK HARD
- “The inventor, whether artist or thinker, creates the structure of his psychic life by means of his work…It is only as the work is done that the meaning of the creative effort can appear and that the development of the artist brought about by it is attained.” (Brewster Ghiselin)
- “Creation is not a joy in the vulgar sense of the term. It is a servitude, a terrible voluntary slavery.” (Albert Camus)
- “With the piano, there’s no way of getting around hours at the piano if you practice to play correctly. It is what it does for your control of sound…The more time you spend at the piano, the more control you have.” (Pianist Andre-Michel Schub)
- “Genius is nothing but a great aptitude for patience.” (French biologist Boffer)
- ”For the artist work is the main thing and always comes first.” (Saul Bellow)
- “I have had to work hard; anyone who works just as hard will get just as far.” (Johann Sebastian Bach)
- “Everybody has the same energy potential. The average person wastes his in a dozen little ways. I bring more to bear in one thing only: my painting, and everything else is sacrificed to it…myself included.” (Pablo Picasso)
© 2017 David J. Rogers
For my interview from the international teleconference with Ben Dean about Fighting to Win, click on the following link:
http://www.mentorcoach.com/positive-psychology-coaching/interviews/interview-david-j-rogers/
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