Quote

The noun of self becomes a verb. This flashpoint of creation in the present moment is where work and play merge.

Stephen Nachmanovitch

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Stephen Nachmanovitch
Age: 74
Born: 1950
Born: November 2
Author
Jazz Musician
Play
Nouns
Self
Verbs
Work
Creativity
Creation
Becomes
Present
Noun
Moment
Merge
Moments
Verb

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Improvisation is intuition in action, a way to discover the muse and learn to respond to her call.
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There is not ultimate breakthrough what we find in the development of a creative life is an open-ended series of provisional breakthroughs. In this journey there is no endpoint, because it is the journey into the soul.
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Brahms once remarked that the mark of an artist is how much he throws away. Nature, the great creator, is always throwing things away. A frog lays several million eggs at a sitting. Only a few dozen of these become tadpoles, and only a few of those become frogs. We can let imagination and practice be as profligate as nature.
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When we are totally faithful to our own individuality, we are actually following a very intricate design. This kind of freedom is the opposite of just anything.
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Practice is an ever-fresh, challenging flow of work and play in which we continually test and demolish our own delusions therefore, it is sometimes painful.
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Creative work is play. It is free speculation using materials of ones chosen form.
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Memory and intention and intuition are fused. The iron is always hot.
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With too little judgement, we get trash. With too much judgement, we get blockage.
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If the art is created with the whole person, then the work will come out whole. Education must teach, reach, and vibrate the whole person rather than merely transfer knowledge.
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We provide both irritation and inspiration for each other- the grist for each other's pearl making.
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An improviser does not operate from a formless vacuum, but from three billion years of organic evolution
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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.
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If we are transparent, with nothing to hide, the gap between language and being disappears. Then the Muse can speak.
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Commitment to a set of rules frees your play to attain a profundity and vigor otherwise impossible.
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As an improvising musician, I am not in the music business, I am not in the creativity business I am in the surrender business.
Stephen Nachmanovitch
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We can depend on the world being a perpetual surprise in perpetual motion.
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Any action can be practiced as an art, as a craft, or as drudgery.
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Writing, playing, composing, painting, reading, listening, looking-all require that we submit to being swept away by Eros, to a transformation of self of the kind that happens when we fall in love.
Stephen Nachmanovitch
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To do anything artistically you have to acquire technique, but create through your technique and not with it.
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There are no prescriptive solutions, no grand designs for grand problems. Life's solutions lie in the minute particulars involving more and more individual people daring to create their own life and art, daring to listen to the voice within their deepest, original nature, and deeper still, the voice within the earth.
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