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Write the crummy first draft. Anne Lamott, 63
As democracy is perfected, the office of president represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. On some
great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart's desire at last and the White House will be adorned by a downright
moron.
The only dumb idea is, quite literally, the one that is unspoken.
A bone to the dog is not charity. Charity is the bone shared with the dog
when you are just as hungry as the dog. When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is
possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is
impossible, he is very probably wrong.
Blink, don't think.
Amateurs arise--make a noise.
Our species is the only creative species, and it has only one instrument,
the individual mind and spirit of man. If we dont believe in freedom of expression for people we despise, we
dont believe in it at all. War is a lion on whose back you fall, never to get off. One of the reasons why so few of us act, instead of reacting, is that we
are continually stifling our deepest impulses. I found God in myself and I loved her. I loved her fiercely. Man is certainly stark mad. He cannot make a worm, and yet he will be making
gods by dozens. |
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I quote others only to better express my own self.
I cannot put the whole of life into writing: it seems to me so subsidiary to living.
In the beginning the universe was created. This has made a lot of people
very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move. People want to know why I do this, why I write such gross stuff. I like to tell them that I have the heart of a small boy--and I keep it in a jar on my desk. Logic is in the eye of the logician. When on person suffers from a delusion, it is called insanity. When
many people suffer from a delusion, it is called religion. Chaos is the law of nature; order is the dream of man. Seriousness is the only refuge of the shallow. If you do not express your own original ideas, if you do not listen to
your own being, you will have betrayed yourself. In the end I think of music as saving grace for
all humanity. Sometimes a scream is better than a thesis. For new-fangled ideas he held only the aversion of deep-rooted
prejudice.
Every exit is an entry somewhere else. There is no human problem which could not be solved if people would simply do as I advise. Im quite sure if the Internet had been around during the Roman Empire, Cleopatra and the gladiators would have received many thousand times more hits than Ovid or Catullus. |
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In the creative state a man is taken out of himself. He lets down as it were a bucket into his subconscious, and draws up something which is normally beyond his reach. He mixes this thing with his normal experiences and out of the mixture he makes a work of art. There is nothing that fails like success. The cover of this book are too far apart. The life of the creative man is lead, directed and controlled by boredom. Avoiding boredom is one of our most important purposes. You can fool too many of the people too much of the time. The rage for wanting to conclude is one of the most deadly and most
fruitless manias to befall humanity. Each religion and each philosophy has
pretended to have God to itself, to measure the infinite, and to know the
recipe for happiness. What arrogance and what nonsense! I see, to the
contrary, that the greatest geniuses and the greatest works have never
concluded. I refuse to answer that question as I don't know the answer. Only the shallow know themselves. The mob was of two minds. Nothing will change the fact that I cannot produce the least thing
without a absolute solitude. I don't think necessity is the mother of invention. Invention, in my
opinion, arises directly from idleness, possibly also from laziness to
save oneself trouble. After silence, that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible
is music. The best ideas are common property. |
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So you see, imagination needs moodling--long, inefficient, happy idling, dawdling and puttering. Always listen to experts. They'll tell you what can't be done
and why. Then do it. A great civilization is not conquered from without until it has
destroyed itself from within. Criticism is prejudice made plausible. Your intention creates your thoughts. Thoughts become your words. Words
become your actions. Actions become your habits. Habits become your
character. Your character becomes your destiny. If you do not tell the truth about yourself you cannot tell it about
other people. A common mistake that people make when trying to design something
completely foolproof is to underestimate the ingenuity of complete fools. A work of art that contains theories is like an object on which the price tag
has been left. I am a writer who came from a sheltered
life. A sheltered life can be daring as well. For all serious daring starts from within. What one knows is, in youth, of little moment; they know enough who
know how to learn. A great part of art consists in
imitation. For the whole conduct of life is
based on this: that what we admire in others we want to do ourselves. Creativity consists largely
of rearranging what we know in order to find out what we do not know. The great unmentionable evil at the center of our culture is
monotheism. Tradition should be a guide, not a jailer. |
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To live in the world of creation--to get into it and stay in it--to frequent it and haunt it....to think intently and fruitfully,
to woo combinations and inspirations into being
by a depth and continuity of attention and meditation--this is the only thing. Pantheism is sexed-up atheism. Deism is watered down theism. It is in the knowledge of the genuine conditions of our lives
that we must draw our strength to live and our reasons for living. It has been said that the highest praise of
God
consists in the denial of Him by the atheist,
who finds creation so perfect that he can dispense with a creator. Anyone who is capable of getting themselves made President should on no
account be allowed to do the job. If we are going to teach 'creation science' as an alternative to
evolution, then we should also teach the stork theory as an alternative to
biological reproduction. What ever you can do, or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has genius, power, and magic in it. It is better to put off using words as long as possible and get one's meaning
clear as one can through pictures or sensations. There is no more salient or neglected field of study than the
relationship between power and violence. |
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Nothing is more real than nothing. I will act as if what I do will make a difference. It is not only in finished undertakings that we ought to honor useful labour. Where the light is brightest the shadows are deepest. I'm a writer. I have a responsibility to no one. It is a very sad thing that nowadays there is so little useless
information. The ships hung in the sky in much the same way that bricks don't. There is no such thing as a long piece of work, except one that you
dare not start.
Our current obsession with creativity is the result of our continued striving for
immortality in an era when most people no longer believe in an after-life. |
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The whole difference between construction and creation is exactly this: that a
thing constructed can only be loved after it is constructed; but a thing created is loved
before it exists. Belief is not the beginning of knowledge it is the end. To speak of these things and
to try to understand their nature and, having understood it,
to try to slowly and humbly and constantly to express, to press out again,
from the gross earth or what it brings forth,
from sound and shape and colour which are the prison gates of our soul,
an image of the beauty we have come to
understand--that is art. Books are good enough in their own way, but they are a mighty bloodless
substitute for life. If you have anything to say, anything you feel nobody has ever said before, you
have got to feel it so desperately that you will find some way to say it that nobody has
found before.... Nothing has really happened until it's been described.
The hand is more important than the eye... The hand is the cutting edge of the mind. |
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I'm not young enough to know everything.
Creative talent arises not from what you ate but from your hunger to create. To live, to err, to fall, to triumph, to create life out of life. Everything has been thought of before, but the
problem is to think of it again. Everything important has been said before by somebody who did not
discover it. Visibility and invisibility, everything runs on votes. And every vote is
a piece of non-violence. You lose it if you talk about it. Originality
is simply a pair of fresh eyes. Imagination grows by exercise and contrary to common belief is more powerful in the mature than in the young. We don't see things as they are. We see things as we are. |
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Whenever you find you are on the side of the majority, it is time to
pause and reflect. We may observe, that, in all ages of the world, priests have been enemies
to liberty. We have to understand that the world can only be grasped by
action, not by contemplation. The most common of all follies is to believe passionately in the
palpably not true. It is the chief occupation of mankind. The artist, like the God
of the creation, remains within or behind or beyond or above his handiwork, invisible,
refined out of existence, indifferent, paring his fingernails. A great many people think they are thinking when they are merely rearranging
their prejudices. Look twice before you leap.
Only dull people are brilliant at breakfast. Any sufficiently advanced technology
is indistinguishable from magic. I was a freethinker before I knew how to think. |
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Throughout the centuries there were men who took first steps down new
roads armed with Imagination, not invention, is the supreme master of art as of life. How can I tell what I think until I see
what I say? Creativity: a type of learning process where the teacher and pupil
are located in the same individual. The only way of discovering the limits of the possible
is to venture a little way past them into the impossible. Life is something that happens when you can't get
to sleep. Liberty of thinking, and of expressing our thoughts, is always fatal to
priestly power, and to those pious frauds, on which it is commonly
founded. |
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I can write better than anybody who can write faster, and I can write faster than anybody who can write better. You see things; and you say "Why?" But I dream things that never were;
and I say "Why not?" When I play with my cat, who knows whether she isn't amusing herself
with me more than I am with her? To the Middle Ages we owe the two worst human inventions: romantic love
and gunpowder. There is always an easy solution to every human
problemneat, plausible and wrong. Distrust any enterprise that requires new clothes. The mind is not a vessel to be filled, but a fire
to be kindled. To travel hopefully is a better thing than to arrive,
and the true success is to labour. |
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The most powerful drive in the ascent of man is his pleasure in his own skill.
He loves to do what he does well and having done it well, he loves to do it better. One sees great things from the valley, only small
things from the peak. Mistakes are the portals of discovery. It isnt that they cant see the solution. It is that they cant see the
problem. In some cases, you have a feeling as if some little imp or devil is standing
behind you and dictating to you. Human history is in essence a history of ideas. I'm sorry, I didn't have time to compose a 15-minute talk, so I'll speak for an hour. Creative effort must always call for guessing; and even the best guessing cannot avoid error. |
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To be what we are, and to become what we
are capable of becoming, is the only end in life. There ain't no answer. There ain't going to be any answer. There never has been an answer. That's the answer. It is almost as if you were frantically constructing another world while the world that you live in dissolves beneath your feet, and that your survival depends on completing this construction at least one second before the old habitation collapses. I write because I don't know what I think
until I read what I say. It is rarely that you see an American writer who is not hopelessly sane.
When ideas fail, words come in very handy. Human beings, who are almost unique in having the ability to learn from
the experience of others, are also remarkable for their apparent
disinclination to do so. Doodling is the brooding of the mind. The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function. |
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There is no doubt that creativity is the most important human resource of all. Without creativity, there would be no progress,
and we would be forever repeating the same patterns. There are no facts only the mode of our
approach to what we call facts. It's not what you look at that matters, it's what you see. There is one thing stronger than all the armies of the world: and that is an idea whose time has come. The courage to imagine the otherwise is our greatest resource,
adding color and suspense to all our life. One of the illusions of life is that the present hour is not the
critical, decisive one. We look at the present through a rear-view mirror. We march backwards
into the future. |
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Freedom is the chief ingredient in confidence. Anecdotal thinking comes naturally; science requires training.
Judge a man by his questions rather than his answers.
Never confuse motion with action.
The lightning spark of thought generated in the solitary mind awakens is
likeness in another mind. Genius, in truth, means little more than the faculty of perceiving in
an unhabitual way. Men have become the tools of their tools. Some people have a way with words--others not have way. There's many a bestseller that could have been prevented by a good teacher. A child is a curly, dimpled lunatic. |
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We are always the same age inside. Art for art's sake makes no more sense than gin for gin's sake. Obstacles are those frightful objects we see when we take our eyes off
the goal. Life is ambiguous; there are many right answers--all depending on what
you are looking for. The enemy of conventional wisdom is not ideas but the march of events. I understood that all the material of a literary work was in my past life... One is not born a genius, one becomes a genius. The principal mark of genius ins not perfection, but originality--the
opening up of new frontiers.
The marriage between language and the human spirit is a mystery as
ineffable as the spark that fills our hearts when we fall in love." Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things you
didn't do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail
away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore.
Dream. Discover. Leap before you look. Get your facts first, and then you can distort them
as much as you please. |
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It's no coincidence that in no known language does the phrase "As
pretty as an airport" appear. Nothing can convince me that reality is nothing more than that which we call a game. In every outthrust headland, in every curving beach, in every grain of
sand there is the story of the earth. The power of creativity rises exponentially with the diversity and divergence of those users. The merit of originality is not novelty;
it is sincerity. There are no exceptions to the rule that everybody likes to be an
exception to the rule. What wit resides in the cosmos! Man himself has become our greatest hazard and our only
hope. In every work of genius we recognize our own rejected thoughts. |
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Comments, corrections, and new quotations |
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