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?
Drama assumes an order. If only so that it might have - by disrupting that order - a way of surprising.
Before I was born my mother was in great agony of spirit and in a tragic situation. She could take no food except iced oysters and champagne. If people ask me when I began to dance, I reply 'In my mother's womb, probably as a result of the oysters and Champagne.'
A recurring ideal, I find, is that of simplicity. At times there comes the desire to write with great precision and clarity, words so simple and moving that they bring tears to the eyes.
My portraits are more about me than they are about the people I photograph.
When I'm writing a song, I try to be the character.
To me, art almost always speaks more forcefully when it appears in an imperfect, accidental, and fragmentary way, somehow just signaling its presence, allowing one to feel it through the ineptitude of the interpretation. I prefer the Chopin that reaches me in the street from an open window to the Chopin served in great style from the concert stage.
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