“Web startups are made out of two things: people and code. The people make the code, and the code makes the people rich. Code is like a poem; it has to follow certain structural requirements, and yet out of that structure can come art. But code is art that does something. It is the assembly of something brand new from nothing but an idea.”
—Mat Honan, from “How Yahoo Killed Flickr and Lost the Internet”
“If a poet is anybody,he is somebody to whom things made matter very little—somebody who is obsessed by Making. Like all obsessions,the Making obsession has disadvantages;for instance,my only interest in making money would be to make it. Fortunately,however,I should prefer to make almost anything else,including locomotives and roses. It is with roses and locomotives(and not to mention acrobats Spring electricity Coney Island the 4th of July the eyes of mice and Niagara Falls)that my ‘poems’ are competing.
“Ineluctable preoccupation with The Verb gives a poet one priceless advantage: whereas nonmakers must content themselves with the merely undeniable fact that two times two is our,he rejoices in a purely irresistible truth(to be found,in abbreviated costume,upon the title page of the present volume).”
—e e cummings in the forward to is 5 (1926).
The Truth About Creativity: Jonah Lehrer talks about why brainstorming doesn't work and why artists need to cultivate grit
Jonah Lehrer: There are all sorts of romantic misconceptions about creativity. We’ve long believed, for instance, that the imagination is hindered by constraints and constructive criticism. But the scientific evidence clearly suggests that the opposite is true. We think of creativity as being an innate trait — you either have it or you don’t — when studies have consistently shown that even seemingly minor factors, such as the color of paint on the wall, can dramatically increase creative output. And then there’s the myth of effort. Because creativity has long been associated with the muses, we’ve assumed that creativity should feel easy and effortless, that if we’re truly inventive then the gods will take care of us. But nothing could be further from the truth. Instead, creativity is like any other human talent – it takes an enormous amount of effort to develop. And then, even after we’ve learned to effectively wield the imagination, we still have to invest the time and energy needed to fine-tune our creations. If it feels easy, then you’re doing it wrong.
“It’s the human friction that makes the sparks.”
“The most regretful people on earth are those who felt the call to creative work, who felt their own creative power restive and uprising, and gave to it neither power nor time.”
—Mary Oliver
(via hateshiploveship)
Source: apoetreflects
The secret of change is to focus all of your energy, not on fighting the old, but on building the new.
Source: psychotherapy
“True, the desire to read is an insatiable desire and you must read. Nevertheless, you must also think. Intellectual isolation loses value in an existence of books. I think I sent you some time ago a quotation from Henry James about living in a world of creation. A world of creation is one of the areas, and only one, of the world of thought and there is no passion like the passion of thinking which grows stronger as one grows older, even though one never thinks anything of anything particular interest to anyone else. Spend an hour or two a day even if in the beginning you are staggered by the confusion and the aimlessness of your thoughts.”
From Letters of Wallace Stevens, ed. Holly Stevens. New York: Knopf, 1966; rpt. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996. p 513
“The difference between science and the arts is not that they are different sides of the same coin even, or even different parts of the same continuum, but rather, they are manifestations of the same thing. The arts and sciences are avatars of human creativity.”
(via dullscythe)
Source: jtotheizzoe
Epilogue
Those blessed structures, plot and rhyme—
why are they no help to me now
I want to make
something imagined, not recalled?
I hear the noise of my own voice:
The painter’s vision is not a lens,
it trembles to caress the light.
But sometimes everything I write
with the threadbare art of my eye
seems a snapshot,
lurid, rapid, garish, grouped,
heightened from life,
yet paralyzed by fact.
All’s misalliance.
Yet why not say what happened?
Pray for the grace of accuracy
Vermeer gave to the sun’s illumination
stealing like the tide across a map
to his girl solid with yearning.
We are poor passing facts,
warned by that to give
each figure in the photograph
his living name.
Robert Lowell, 1977
Her eyes, unmake an instant of the world…
“Never trust the artist. Trust the tale. The proper function of a critic is to save the tale from the artist who created it.”
D. H. Lawrence, Studies in Classic American Literature (1923)
