Elizabeth Gilbert Quotes

To a writer, madness is a final distillation of self, a final editing down. It's the drowning out of false voices.

There is a great quote from a female writer. She said, 'If you don't break out in a sweat of fear when you write, you are not writing well enough. I tend to agree. I think my best pictures come when I push myself.

You have to be willing to be afraid if you're going to be an artist.

It's a very hard thing for all of us to accept ourselves at all the different stages - the horrible side, the wonderful side, the adorable side - and who you are as a grownup. And then to bring what you learned as a child to that grownup: that is the magic of creativity.

I was taught that to create anything you had to believe in failure, simply because you had to be prepared to go through an idea without any fear. Failure, you learned, as I did in art school, to be a wonderful thing. It allowed you to get up in the morning and take the pillow off your head.

It is almost impossible to reconcile self expression with the creative act.

Being a perfectionist is really difficult. You're never really happy with what you're doing, no matter how good it is. When you can just release that pressure and be in someone else's work and still have the respect of those creators to bounce off the page and give your ideas that they can take or leave? I really enjoy that.

Art is the easiest thing in my life, and that's ironic. It doesn't mean I've worked little on it, but it's the only thing I never had to... I have no fear. I could take risks.

There's a huge part of me that's thinking about perfection. I have to fight that urge, to try to live in the moment, reach for something that I might be hearing, and not second-guess myself.

The thing about creativity is, people are going to laugh at it. Get over it.

It's very easy I think when you're a creative person to wait for the right thing and to start getting self-conscious about how you are going to express what you do and what's special about you. I would say in general, a lot of times the answer is that you just dive into something and you find your own voice through that process.

Many of us believe that 'real artists' do not experience self-doubt. In truth, artists are people who have learned to live with doubt and do the work anyway.

Shameless actually good since it gives a kind of freedom. We consider the old, functionless shame destructive. Today, if you have a strong sense of shame you also have a strong desire to overcome it. And that's when you can write.

An artist should be taking risks. That's the whole idea of being an artist.

Stop this agony of wishing Play it out Don't think, don't hesitate Curving back within yourself Just create... Just create

Every first draft is perfect, because all a first draft has to do is exist.

Fear goes hand-in-hand with artistic creation, and no amount of success will make the fear go away entirely.

Starting is hard so I really need to give myself permission to do a bad job. I always give myself leave to write total nonsense for as long as I need to release the pressure, because it's really hard to start if you feel like that first sentence you write has to actually mean something.

Fear is a killer, when it comes to the creative process.

Our job as creators is to further define any medium.

Perfectionism is the voice of the oppressor, the enemy of the people. It will keep you cramped and insane your whole life, and it is the main obstacle between you and a shitty first draft. I think perfectionism is based on the obsessive belief that if you run carefully enough, hitting each stepping-stone just right, you won't have to die. The truth is that you will die anyway and that a lot of people who aren't even looking at their feet are going to do a whole lot better than you, and have a lot more fun while they're doing it.

If man understood that "what I create has nothing to do with what anybody else is creating" then he wouldn't be so afraid of what others are doing.

Writing is really wonderful art. A lot of this is discovery. A lot of things are lying around waiting to be discovered and that's our job as writers is to just notice them and bring them to life.

When we are writing, or painting, or composing, we are, during the time of creativity, freed from normal restrictions, and are opened to a wider world, where colors are brighter, sounds clearer, and people more wondrously complex than we normally realize.

There is something else to be said about this immediate, spontaneous way of working, and that is this: in such moments, one is playing at the game of creation.