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You need to be blank, and even a little bit bored, for your brain to feed you ideas. The poet Wendell Berry wrote that in solitude, “one’s inner voices become audible.” Figure out your clearest, most productive time of day to work, and guard this time carefully.

Always carry a pen, a paper notebook, and something good to read. A lot of life consists of the dead time in between events. Don’t fill these interstitial moments with pornography and cat videos. Fill them with things that feed your work and your soul.
— Pamela Druckerman

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"I spent many years pursuing excellence...that is what classical music is all about. Now it's dedicated to freedom, and that's far more important." — Nina Simone

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"I spent many years pursuing excellence...that is what classical music is all about. Now it's dedicated to freedom, and that's far more important." — Nina Simone

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Nobody at any rate reads it much. Your
lay
citizenry have other forms of fun.

Still, who would wish to live in a culture of which future anthropologists would say Oddly, they had none?

— Richard Kenney

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"Unless you can transcribe the score to a symphony you’ve never heard before as you’re listening to it please don’t try and sideline rap because you can’t 'understand what they’re saying'."

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Even if we don’t know what is “right” or “wrong”, we simply must make some decision and commit to it until we come up with a better idea. That abstaining from making a decision is not an option. Nor is delaying our inquiry into the bigger questions while we obsess about intonation and hide behind technique.  — Noa Kageyama

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Even if we don’t know what is “right” or “wrong”, we simply must make some decision and commit to it until we come up with a better idea. That abstaining from making a decision is not an option. Nor is delaying our inquiry into the bigger questions while we obsess about intonation and hide behind technique.  — Noa Kageyama

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I am looking at trees
they may be one of the things I will miss
most from the earth
though many of the ones I have seen
already I cannot remember
and though I seldom embrace the ones I see
and have never been able to speak
with one
I listen to them tenderly
their names have never touched them
they have stood round my sleep
and when it was forbidden to climb them
they have carried me in their branches
— W. S. Merwin

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Takamatsu walked quickly away from the crowd. He stayed close to the sea, and I tried to catch up with him. He started searching again. He stepped onto a pile of rocks, put his hands on his knees, and stared down into the sea. Th search for love, the search — his, hers, everyone’s — is not for a needle in a haystack, nor a fish in the sea. It’s for a specific person on the earth. The world never looks as big as when someone is lost.
— Jennifer Percy

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"It was even longer before the Spirituals were recognized as a theology in song, a new interpretation of Christianity, one far closer to the original than that practiced by those who hoped the Bible would serve as a tool of pacification, not enlightenment.

At some point, white scholars must have heard the Spirituals. It is easy to imagine their reaction. Even the most hostile would have had to admit that the sometimes joyous and often plaintive melodies had a surface attraction. The scholars would have concluded, though, that the basically primitive song-chants were not capable of complex development and were certainly too simplistic to convey sophisticated musical ideas. The music, moreover, was not in classical form, likely deemed a fatal defect. Indeed, the slave songs were not even written down by those unknown persons who had composed them. Surely, these simple melodies could not be compared with the lieder of Haydn, Mozart, Schubert, or Brahms.

Whatever they were, the critics would conclude, these songs were not art. There was no potential in the music for intellectual inspiration as opposed to purely emotional satisfaction. Of course, the critics might concede, in the hands of classically trained composers and musicians, the Spirituals might serve as folk melodies from which true art might be rendered. Stephen Foster was said to have done this, and later Antonin Dvorak, and still later, George Gershwin. Many others followed. A few of them credited the genius in the slave songs, but most simply took what they wanted and called it their own without acknowledgement of the sources that, when asked, they deprecated and denied.

Need it be said that fortunes were made through the utilization and often the corruption of the slave melodies? Need it be said that those who originated this music seldom benefitted financially from their creations? There is no surprise here. A nation built on the backs of black labor would have little difficulty profiting from the product of black minds and hearts."

— Derrick Bell

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By the first of August
the invisible beetles began
to snore and the grass was
as tough as hemp and was
no color—no more than
the sand was a color and
we had worn our bare feet
bare since the twentieth
of June and there were times
we forgot to wind up your
alarm clock and some nights
we took our gin warm and neat
from old jelly glasses while
the sun blew out of sight
like a red picture hat and
one day I tied my hair back
with a ribbon and you said
that I looked almost like
a puritan lady and what
I remember best is that
the door to your room was
the door to mine.
— Anne Sexton

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I really can't tell what's beautiful anymore. I passed two young fellows on the street the other day. I know who they are, they work at the garage. They're not churchgoing, either one of them, just decent rascally young fellows who have to be joking all the time, and there they were, propped against the garage wall in the sunshine, lighting up their cigarettes. They're always so black with grease and so strong with gasoline I don't know why they don't catch fire themselves. They were passing remarks back and forth the way they do and laughing that wicked way they have. And it seemed beautiful to me. It is an amazing thing to watch people laugh, the way it sort of takes them over. Sometimes they really do struggle with it. I see that in church often enough. So I wonder what it is and where it comes from, and I wonder what it expends out of your system, so that you have to do it till you're done, like crying in a way, I suppose, except that laughter is much more easily spent.
— Marilynne Robinson, Gilead

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My sister woke me very early
that morning and told me
“Get up, you have to come see this
the ocean’s filled with stars”
Delighted by the revelation
I dressed quickly and thought
If the ocean’s filled with stars
I must take the first flight
and collect all of the fish from the sky

— Mario Melendez

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Art is not apart. It is a continuum within which all participate; we all function in art, use the skills of art, engage in the action of artists, every day. Underneath the surface distinctions that make individual lives seem very different, art is a common ground we share; the work of art is a way we all do things when we are working well. Our unheralded everyday actions of art comprise one end of the human spectrum of artistry; the other end is the creation of masterpieces in the arts that we readily label as art: newlyweds setting the table for their first Thanksgiving dinner on one extreme, and da Vinci painting The Last Supper on the other; a businesswoman shifting the sequence of the slides in her presentation on one extreme, Sam Shepard transposing the order of the scenes during rehearsals of True West on the other. The differences are obvious, easy to identify and laugh about; the similarities (which are the focus of this book) may be less evident, but they construct t
he way we experience being alive. If we can acknowledge and honor the art that we perform, if we can stay aware of and develop the skills of art we use daily, if we can borrow appropriate and useful trade secrets from artists, who are the experts and exemplars of this field, we can dramatically enrich the quality of daily life.
— Eric Booth