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The professionalism of technique and flash of dexterity are more comfortable to be around than raw creative power, hence our society generally rewards virtuoso performers more highly than it rewards original creators.

Stephen Nachmanovitch

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Stephen Nachmanovitch
Age: 74
Born: 1950
Born: November 2
Author
Jazz Musician
Comfortable
Flash
Creative
Highly
Society
Originals
Virtuoso
Around
Original
Dexterity
Power
Technique
Professionalism
Rewards
Creators
Generally
Hence
Creator
Performers

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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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Improvisation is intuition in action, a way to discover the muse and learn to respond to her call.
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There are only people doing their imperfect best at doing their imperfect jobs
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With too little judgement, we get trash. With too much judgement, we get blockage.
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Creative work is play. It is free speculation using materials of ones chosen form.
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The most potent muse of all is our own inner child.
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The power of mistakes enables us to reframe creative blocks and turn them around...The troublesome parts of our work, the parts that are most baffling and frustrating, are in fact the growing edges. We see these opportunities the instant we drop our preconceptions and our self-importance.
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We can depend on the world being a perpetual surprise in perpetual motion.
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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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The noun of self becomes a verb. This flashpoint of creation in the present moment is where work and play merge.
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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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To do anything artistically you have to acquire technique, but create through your technique and not with it.
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Memory and intention and intuition are fused. The iron is always hot.
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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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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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Any action can be practiced as an art, as a craft, or as drudgery.
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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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If we split practice from the real thing, neither one of them will be very real.
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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.
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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.
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