Barbara’s easel

* an ongoing series of quotations – mostly from artists, to artists – that offers wisdom, inspiration, and advice for the sometimes lonely road we are on.

Instead of a clean narrow pathway to a goal, creators take risks, seek out new experiences, and reconcile contradictions.  Indeed this dance of contradictions is exactly what may give rise to the intense inner drive to create.  As the journalist Carolyn Gregoire and I put it in our recent book Wired to Create:  Unraveling the Mysteries of the Creative Mind, creative people have “messy minds.”

We wouldn’t have it any other way.  Without these rebellious experts, these passionate meaning-makers, these doers and dreamers, we would be bereft of some of humanity’s greatest creative accomplishments.  Creative geniuses reveal what is within human reach, what we may all be capable of achieving with the drive to make meaning and the courage to create.

Scott Barry Kaufman in “A Capacity for Genius,” Lincoln Center’s Mostly Mozart 50th Anniversary, July 22 – August 27, 2016 Playbill

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