Quartz 4

If you want to write

3 min read

If you want to write

The Book in 3 Sentences

This book is a meditation on the creative process and authentic artistic expression. It emphasizes that all creative work has inherent value and that true creativity comes from a place of genuine love and absorption in one’s craft, rather than from external validation or forced effort.

Impressions

I particularly appreciated how the author uses Van Gogh as an example to illustrate that great art comes from love and authenticity rather than calculation.

I did not find the book extremely though provoking in any way, which makes it a lot more difficult for me to really recommend it.

My Top Quotes

  • I want to assure you with all earnestness that no writing is a waste of time—no creative work where the feelings, the imagination, the intelligence must work. With every sentence you write, you have learned something.

  • If you read the letters of the painter van Gogh you will see what his creative impulse was. It was just this: he loved something—the sky, say. He loved human beings. He wanted to show human beings how beautiful the sky was. So he painted it for them. And that was all there was to it.

  • Inspiration comes very slowly and quietly. Say that you want to write. Well, not much will come to you the first day. Perhaps nothing at all. You will sit before your typewriter or paper and look out of the window and begin to brush your hair absentmindedly for an hour or two.

  • Willing is doing something you know already, something you have been told by somebody else; there is no new imaginative understanding in it.

  • I DO NOT MEAN TO INVEIGH AGAINST ACTION. Action is glorious, and we have to act. “Unacted desires breed pestilence,” said Blake.

  • And this is the point: if they kept writing new things freely and generously and with careless truth, then they would know how to fix up the pearl and make it good, in two seconds, with no work at all.

  • In other words, it is when you are really living in the present—working, thinking, lost, absorbed in something you care about very much, that you are living spiritually. And so

  • In other words, it is when you are really living in the present—working, thinking, lost, absorbed in something you care about very much, that you are living spiritually.

  • The really funny man doesn’t think about the audience at all. If it doesn’t laugh, he has had his own fun and doesn’t care. If the audience laughs it just frees him even more and fills him (Inspiration) with further and more absurd, unpremeditated antics.

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