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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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Stephen Nachmanovitch
Age: 73
Born: 1950
Born: November 2
Author
Jazz Musician
Writing
Painting
Kind
Playing
Eros
Love
Looking
Swept
Reading
Composing
Fall
Submit
Away
Require
Happens
Transformation
Self
Listening

More quotes by Stephen Nachmanovitch

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Creative work is play. It is free speculation using materials of ones chosen form.
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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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An improviser does not operate from a formless vacuum, but from three billion years of organic evolution
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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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Commitment to a set of rules frees your play to attain a profundity and vigor otherwise impossible.
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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 provide both irritation and inspiration for each other- the grist for each other's pearl making.
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We can depend on the world being a perpetual surprise in perpetual motion.
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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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To do anything artistically you have to acquire technique, but create through your technique and not with it.
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There are only people doing their imperfect best at doing their imperfect jobs
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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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Any action can be practiced as an art, as a craft, or as drudgery.
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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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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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The beauty of playing together is meeting in the One.
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Memory and intention and intuition are fused. The iron is always hot.
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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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If we split practice from the real thing, neither one of them will be very real.
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