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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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To do anything artistically you have to acquire technique, but create through your technique and not with it.
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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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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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Memory and intention and intuition are fused. The iron is always hot.
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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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The most potent muse of all is our own inner child.
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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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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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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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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 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.
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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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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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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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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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There are only people doing their imperfect best at doing their imperfect jobs
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Creative work is play. It is free speculation using materials of ones chosen form.
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