We write from aspiration and antagonism, as well as from experience. We paint those qualities which we do not posses.
Interpretation
Artists often express their desires and conflicts through their work, highlighting what they lack.
Ralph Waldo Emerson suggests that the act of creating, whether writing or painting, is often fueled by a mixture of hopes for what we strive to achieve and the struggles we face. Artists depict not just their experiences but also the qualities they aspire to possess and the ideals they challenge, reflecting a deeper layer of human emotion and ambition.
In practice
In a discussion about the creative process during a workshop.
It is plain that there is no separate essence called courage, no cup or cell in the brain, no vessel in the heart containing drops or atoms that make or give this virtue; but it is the right or healthy state of every man, when he is free to do that which is constitutional to him to do.
Few people have any next, they live from hand to mouth without a plan, and are always at the end of their line.
Men cease to interest us when we find their limitations
Tis the good reader that makes the good book; a good head cannot read amiss: in every book he finds passages which seem confidences or asides hidden from all else and unmistakeably meant for his ear.
The world belongs to the energetic.
Hast thou named all the birds without a gun?
Beauty . . . cannot be interpreted. It is not an empirically verifiable fact; it is not a quantity.
I teach my sighs to lengthen into songs.
You don't know how much artists go through to make it look so easy. It's all in the practice.
A writer is a person who cares what words mean, what they say, how they say it. Writers know words are their way towards truth and freedom, and so they use them with care, with thought, with fear, with delight. By using words well they strengthen their souls. Story-tellers and poets spend their lives learning that skill and art of using words well. And their words make the souls of their readers stronger, brighter, deeper.
Writing has... been to me like a bath from which I have risen feeling cleaner, healthier, and freer.
Actors in any capacity, artists of any stripe, are inspired by their curiosity, by their desire to explore all quarters of life, in light and in dark, and reflect what they find in their work. Artists instinctively want to reflect humanity, their own and each other's, in all its intermittent virtue and vitality, frailty and fallibility.
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