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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.

Stephen Nachmanovitch

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Stephen Nachmanovitch
Age: 74
Born: 1950
Born: November 2
Author
Jazz Musician
Therefore
Continually
Challenges
Challenging
Practice
Delusion
Ever
Fresh
Play
Test
Sometimes
Tests
Work
Painful
Demolish
Flow
Delusions

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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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Commitment to a set of rules frees your play to attain a profundity and vigor otherwise impossible.
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Any action can be practiced as an art, as a craft, or as drudgery.
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Working within the limits of the medium forces us to change our own limits. Improvisation is not breaking with forms and limitations just to be 'free,' but using them as the very means of transcending ourselves.
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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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Paradoxically, the more you are yourself, the more universal your message. As you develop and individuate more deeply, you break through into deeper layers of the collective consciousness and the collective unconsciousness.
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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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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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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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Improvisation is intuition in action, a way to discover the muse and learn to respond to her call.
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With too little judgement, we get trash. With too much judgement, we get blockage.
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There are only people doing their imperfect best at doing their imperfect jobs
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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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In improvisation, there is only one time. This is what computer people call real time. The time of inspiration, the time of technically structuring and realizing... the time of playing it, and the time of communicating with the audience, are all one.
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The beauty of playing together is meeting in the One.
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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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The most potent muse of all is our own inner child.
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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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