Forget Passion!
“I believe that curiosity is the secret. Curiosity is the truth and the way of creative living.
Curiosity is the alpha and omega, the beginning and the end. Furthermore, curiosity is available to everyone. Passion can seem intimidatingly out of reach at times–a distant tower of flame, accessible only to geniuses and to those who are specially touched by God.”
Gilbert, Elizabeth. (2015). Big Magic: Creative living beyond fear. New York, NY: Penguin Random House. P. 237.
“Your creative work is not your baby…
If anything, you are its baby.
Everything I have ever written had brought me into being. Every project has matured me in a different way.
I am who I am today precisely because of what I have made and what it has made me into.
Creativity has hand-raised me and forged me into an adult.”
Gilbert, Elizabeth. (2015). Big Magic: Creative living beyond fear. New York, NY: Penguin Random House. P. 233.
“If you’re going to live your life based on delusions
(and you are, because we all do),
then why not at least select a delusion that is helpful?
Allow me to suggest this one:
The work wants to be made, and it wants to be made through you.”
Gilbert, Elizabeth. (2015). Big Magic: Creative living beyond fear. New York, NY: Penguin Random House. P. 221.
“I believe that our creativity grows like sidewalk weeds out of the cracks between our pathologies–not from the pathologies themselves.
But so many people think it is the other way around. For this reason, you will often meet artists who deliberately cling to their suffering, their addictions, their fears, their demons.
They worry that if they ever let go of all that anguish, their very identities would vanish.”
Gilbert, Elizabeth. (2015). Big Magic: Creative living beyond fear. New York, NY: Penguin Random House. P. 211.
“For most of human history, then, the vast majority of people have made their art in stolen moments, using scraps of borrowed time–and often using pilfered or discarded materials, to boot.”
Gilbert, Elizabeth. (2015). Big Magic: Creative living beyond fear. New York, NY: Penguin Random House. P. 157.
“To yell at your creativity saying, ‘You must earn money for me!’ is sort of like yelling at a cat;
it has no idea what you’re talking about, and all you’re doing in scaring it away, because you’re making really loud noises and your face looks weird when you do that.”
Gilbert, Elizabeth. (2015). Big Magic: Creative living beyond fear. New York, NY: Penguin Random House. P. 154.
Gilbert, Elizabeth. (2015). Big Magic: Creative living beyond fear. New York, NY: Penguin Random House. P. 152.
“What’s your favorite flavor of crap sandwich?”
“What Manson means is that every single pursuit-no matter how wonderful and exciting and glamorous it may initially seem-comes with its own brand of crap sandwich, its own lousy side effects.
As Manson writes with profound wisdom: ‘Everything sucks, some of the time.’ You just have to decide what sort of suckage you’re willing to deal with.
So the question is not so much ‘What are you passionate about?’ The question is ‘What are you passionate enough about that you can endure the most disagreeable aspects of the work?'”
Gilbert, Elizabeth. (2015). Big Magic: Creative living beyond fear. New York, NY: Penguin Random House. P. 150.
“I realized that, as a song writer,
the only thing I really do is make jewelry for the inside of other people’s minds.”
Gilbert, Elizabeth. (2015). Big Magic: Creative living beyond fear. New York, NY: Penguin Random House. P. 133.
“Never delude yourself into believing that you require someone else’s blessing (or even their comprehension) in order to make your own creative work. And always remember that people’s judgments about you are
NONE OF YOUR BUSINESS!
Gilbert, Elizabeth. (2015). Big Magic: Creative living beyond fear. New York, NY: Penguin Random House. P. 121.
project warrior queen 
