I think it's important to earn your fan base and not just try to immediately advance to the top. If you ride to the top quickly, you're liable to fall as quickly. Take your time. It's a long journey ahead of you as an artist. There's nowhere that you're supposed to be other than right now living inside of your art.
Interpretation
Success in art comes from patience and dedication rather than seeking quick fame.
This quote emphasizes the importance of taking the time to develop one's craft as an artist, rather than rushing to achieve fame or success. Jason Mraz suggests that a hasty ascent to the top of one's career can lead to a rapid decline, and stresses the value of being present and immersed in the creative process instead of focusing solely on the end result.
In practice
During a motivational speech at an art school, one could use this quote to inspire students to focus on their artistic growth.
There's a certain feeling of giving, a certain feeling of generosity in love songs. When you sing a song of love, you're actually giving something to yourself, too. You're singing and casting these affirmations of love out into the universe.
You can't live the rest of your life carrying a pain because your parents couldn't get along. I choose to spend my life crafting a joy.
It's from being melancholy and having my human down experiences that I learn, that I overcome, that I transform - and these realizations I put into song. That's what I choose to put in my backpack and carry with me around the world.
Another year is fast approaching. Go be that starving artist you’re afraid to be. Open up that journal and get poetic finally. Volunteer. Suck it up and travel. You were not born here to work and pay taxes. You were put here to be part of a vast organism to explore and create. Stop putting it off. The world has much more to offer than what’s on 15 televisions at TGI Fridays. Take pictures. Scare people. Shake up the scene. Be the change you want to see in the world.
It is a pity to make a mystery out of what should most easily be understood. There is nothing occult about the thought that all things maybe made well or made ill. A work of art is a well-made thing - that is all. It may be a well-made statue of a well-made chair or a well-made book. Art is not a special sauce applied to ordinary cooking; it is the cooking itself that is good. Most simply and generally, Art may be thought of as "The Well Doing of What Needs Doing."
No matter how many times you do it, you don't get used to the sadness - for me at least - of coming to the end of a film.
What I am interested in now is the landscape. Pictures without people. I wouldn't be surprised if eventually there are no people in my pictures. It is so emotional.
When I see a story, I ask: is this something I'd like to be in? Is this something I'd like to see? And if I'd like to see it, would I like to tell it?
You can write any time people will leave you alone and not interrupt you. Or rather you can if you will be ruthless enough about it. But the best writing is certainly when you are in love.
If you're sitting in your minivan, playing your computer animated films for your children in the back seat, is it the animation that's entertaining you as you drive and listen? No, it's the storytelling. That's why we put so much importance on story. No amount of great animation will save a bad story.
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