In this talk ‘Eat, Pray, Love’ author, Elizabeth Gilbert, contemplates the impossible things that are expected from artists, authors and geniuses — she shares the interesting idea that, instead of the rare person being a genius, all of us have a genius. It’s amusing, inspiring, insightful, personal and moving talk. “Gilbert is irreverent, hilarious, zestful, courageous, intelligent, and […]
Julia Cameron on Art Being an Act of the Soul
Anais Nin on Art, the Marvelous and Escaping Ordinary Life
“Ordinary life does not interest me. I seek only the high moments. I am in accord with the surrealists, searching for the marvellous. I want to be a writer who reminds others that these moments exist; I want to prove that there is infinite space, infinite meaning, infinite dimension. But I am not always in […]
Sarah Waters on being disciplined
“Treat writing as a job. Be disciplined. Lots of writers get a bit OCD-ish about this. Graham Greene famously wrote 500 words a day. Jean Plaidy managed 5,000 before lunch, then spent the afternoon answering fan mail. My minimum is 1,000 words a day – which is sometimes easy to achieve, and is sometimes, frankly, like […]
Rainer Maria Rilke on Self-Doubt
“And your doubt can become a good quality if you train it. It must become knowing, it must become criticism. Ask it, whenever it wants to spoil something for you, why something is ugly, demand proofs from it, test it, and you will find it perhaps bewildered and embarrased, perhaps also protesting. But don’t give […]
Eve Ensler on Cherishing Solitude
Alan Watts on How to Be a Writer
“Advice? I don’t have advice. Stop aspiring and start writing. If you’re writing, you’re a writer. Write like you’re a goddamn death row inmate and the governor is out of the country and there’s no chance for a pardon. Write like you’re clinging to the edge of a cliff, white knuckles, on your last breath, […]
Poetry | So You Want to Be a Writer ~ Charles Bukowski
Joyce Carol Oates on the Transcendent Nature of Writing
One must be pitiless about this matter of “mood.” In a sense, the writing willcreate the mood. If art is, as I believe it to be, a genuinely transcendental function—a means by which we rise out of limited, parochial states of mind—then it should not matter very much what states of mind or emotion we are […]