Elizabeth Gilbert Quotes

I believe that what we want to write wants to be written. I believe that as I have an impulse to create, the something I want to create has an impulse to want to be born. My job, then, is to show up on the page and let that something move through me, in a sense, what wants to be written is none of my business.

All authentic art is conceived at a sacred moment and nourished in a blessed hour; an inner impulse creates it, often without the artist being aware of it.

We do not make art. We have unnamable motors and dangerous impulses that occupy our thoughts.

The creative act lasts but a brief moment, a lightning instant of give-and-take, just long enough for you to level the camera and to trap the fleeting prey in your little box.

The creative act amazes me. Whether it's poetry, whether it's music, it's an amazing process, and it has something to do with bringing forth the old out into the world to create and to bring forth that which will rejuvenate.

There really is a certain magic that happens when you're in the studio. And it's important in life to feel that magic: to feel that there is something greater moving all this along.

When a man undertakes to create something, he establishes a new heaven, as it were, and from it the work that he desires to create flows into him... For such is the immensity of man that he is greater than heaven and earth.

I think it's bad to talk about one's present work, for it spoils something at the root of the creative act. It discharges the tension.

Do not think that I have stopped painting, for at any moment, I am liable to paint a good picture.

All this angst, all this stuff we all feel, is just tied to making art. It's so ancient.

When you are doing a piece you are with it. You don't want to wait until next week, when experience will have given you something else.

In the end, you write the book that grabs you by the throat and demands to be written.

Sometimes I think creativity is magic; it's not a matter of finding an idea, but allowing the idea to find you.

I think everybody has a painter inside of them somewhere.

It's wonderful that nothing you write is ever going to be as beautiful as what's in your head, because that gap is where the art can enter and begin to stretch its limbs.

Great art can only be created out of love.

The best in art and life comes from a center - something urgent and powerful, an idea or emotion that insists on its being. From that insistence, a shape emerges and creates its structure out of passion. If you begin with a structure, you have to make up the passion, and that's very hard to do.

I don't think there's really any difference between art - or writing, or music - and magic. And I particularly draw the link between magic and writing. I think that they are profoundly connected.

Ideas are the old-age of art. Artists have to keep young; they must not think too much - thought is death, while art is life. Such was Emile's viewpoint.

I have no imagination; I just steal from life and change the color. Then it's a comic book.

It's inspiring just to work on something and just kind of keep the creative juices flowing.

Art is the funnel, as it were, through which spirit is poured into life.

Genius, that power which constitutes a poet; that quality without which judgment is cold, and knowledge is inert; that energy which collects, combines, amplifies and animates.

Art gives man a reminder that he is not just a consumer but a creator as well. It awakens in him the urge to struggle and perform great deeds; it fills him with the craving to pass on the Promethean fire to generations to come.

Truth and reality in art begin at the point where the artist ceases to understand what he is doing and capable of doing - yet feels in himself a force that becomes steadily stronger... and more concentrated.