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The world of psychology and the world of normal life tends to look down on obsession. It's not good for you, and certainly not good for your relationships. It's not good for a lot of things, but it's the only way to make a work of art.

Michael Ventura

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Michael Ventura
Age: 54
Film Director
Journalist
Novelist
Writer
the United States of America
Make
Relationships
Good
Certainly
Things
Normal
Life
Art
World
Look
Looks
Tends
Work
Obsession
Way
Psychology

More quotes by Michael Ventura

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If I had the money and the drinking capacity, I'd probably live at a roulette table and let my life go to hell.
Michael Ventura
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I try to write into the heart of experience. Then, through the experience of the writing, that heart reveals itself to me. To write it down for others, as a door to go through it they choose, is the price of the experience, the price of the ticket. This is the demand that God, if you like, puts on you for being an artist.
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Our choices are truncated in evil's presence.
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Stop tolerating in your leaders what you would not tolerate in your friends.
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I never get my creativity flowing. I'm a pro, this is how I earn my living. If it don't flow, I don't eat.
Michael Ventura
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Creativity is the vulnerability to spiritual and physical sensation, and to experience, combined with and acting upon a certain level of skill, combined with the compulsion or longing or need or desire to give.
Michael Ventura
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When the people clamor to be shielded from reality, when they praise their government for keeping things from them, when they choose to conduct their lives within the limits of whatever fantasy the government supplies, then they are no longer consenting to be governed, they are begging to be ruled.
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My spirit life is also the medium in which I live. It's not something that comes and goes. Without one the other wouldn't exist.
Michael Ventura
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We have to be realistic about the brutal demands a money culture puts on the psyche, and there is a great cost to this in terms of creativity. Look at the state of people at 65. How many of them become creative after having to survive in the money culture?
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There are writers I know and respect who are very good about what's outside, and not too hot about what's inside.
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It may be that it is not given to us to know when we are angels. We may only be given to know when others are. This may be one of the reasons we need each other so.
Michael Ventura
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Most of us aren't very graceful about not having our needs met, when and how we want them met.
Michael Ventura
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Creativity is an innate function in a human being, as we see in tribal peoples, who spent their considerable leisure time making religious artifacts and sacred art. That is what I would call a direct culture, in that everybody in it is directly in touch with all the elements, both of the culture and of the environment.
Michael Ventura
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An artist without obsession isn't worth a damn!
Michael Ventura
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That's what America's all about, man, if it's about anything. You can choose your own name.
Michael Ventura
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The people you have to lie to, own you. The things you have to lie about, own you.
Michael Ventura
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To be physically astute and psychologically tended, yet morally insulated and conceptually blind--is to be crazy, not healthy.
Michael Ventura
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My employer uses twenty-six years of my life for every year I get to keep. And what do I get in return for the enormous thing I am giving? What do I get in return for my life?
Michael Ventura
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An artist doesn't depend upon inspiration or have to have it. An artist doesn't depend on mood, certainly not if you're earning your living with it. One of the definitions of a professional is you can do some writing if you have to, even in the most extreme situations.
Michael Ventura
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All paths cause pain, so to chose the safe over the audacious will not give you less pain, only less beauty.
Michael Ventura