57 Quotes by Stephen Nachmanovitch

In contemporary culture, we are concerned that everything we do be useful for something. [...] we find ourselves in the land of half-baked pseudoscience like the “Mozart makes you smart” fad. The fact that Mozart’s fantastic play has value in itself is not sufficient because in order to justify financial and other kinds of support for the arts, we have to demonstrate that Mozart will raise a fetus’s IQ, which will make the fetus grow into a productive unit in the economy.

If form is mechanically applied, it may indeed result in work that is conventional, if not pedantic or stupid. But form used well can become the very vehicle of freedom, of discovering the creative surprises that liberate mind-at-play.

Every moment of life is unique-a kiss, a sunset, a dance, a joke. None will ever recur in quite the same way. Each happens only once in the history of the universe.

These interreflecting themes, the prerequisites of creation, are playfulness, love, concentration, practice, skill, using the power of limits, using the power of mistakes, risk, surrender, patience, courage, and trust. Creativity is a harmony of opposite tensions, as encapsulated in our opening idea of lila, or divine play.

Improvisation is intuition in action, a way to discover the muse and learn to respond to her call.

The most potent muse of all is our own inner child.

If your mind is empty, it is open to everything. In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities; in the expert’s mind there are few.

Fidgeting and boredom are the symptoms of fear of emptiness, which we try to fill up with whatever we can lay our hands on.

We can depend on the world being a perpetual surprise in perpetual motion.