Kent Nerburn Quotes

Making your life is ultimately an extraordinarily creative endeavor.

I am my own experiment. I am my own work of art.

I think what my 42 years of life has given me is just how important it is to live your own life.

With every experience, you alone are painting your own canvas, thought by thought, choice by choice.

Whoever undertakes to create soon finds himself engaged in creating himself. Self-transformation and the transformation of others have constituted the radical interest of our century, whether in painting, psychiatry, or political action.

We are living in a world where the individual must learn to command the raw materials of expression. He must not be dependent all the time on the ready-made, the finished product. It's the transferring, the changing of the raw into what is the expression of your own self – the whole joy and satisfaction and frustration of life is built into this.

Remember this always: The living of your own life writes the book of your most sacred truth, and offers evidence of it.

...start thinking of yourself as an artist and your life as a work-in-progress. Works-in-progress are never perfect. But changes can be made...Art evolves. So does life. Art is never stagnant. Neither is life. The beautiful, authentic life you are creating for yourself is your art. It's the highest art.

The deepest secret is that life is not a process of discovery, but a process of creation. You are not discovering yourself, but creating yourself anew. Seek therefore, not to find out Who You Are, but seek to determine Who You Want to Be.

This desire to fashion, to shape, a self and a life has all but gone from a contemporary culture whose emphasis, paradoxically enough, is so much on self.

The life you're leading is the sexiest part of you.

One of the most important reasons for living is to do something - live outside of yourself and put together an idea, an idea that you want to explore and then complete... Awaken your creative sensitivities!

The individual - man as a man, man as a brain, if you like - interests me more than what he makes because I've noticed that most artists only repeat themselves.

My life is my argument.

Choosing is a creative process, one through which we construct our environment, our lives, ourselves.

With every project you do, you bring out a part of yourself, and it seems to be quite a good way of expanding a person.

Don't go through life, grow through life.

I didn't start to work until I realized what it was I had to offer. I stopped imitating performers I admired and started just being myself.

All that I am is me. So I'm not really a poet or a writer or an actor or an activist; I'm me, and these are things that I do.

My daughter's 19. I'm not asking her to develop as an artist. I'm just asking her to develop as a full person, human being.

It is very important to know who you are. To make decisions. To show who you are.

Life is the most versatile thing under the sun; and in the pursuit of life and character the author who works in a groove works in blinkers.

In every role, a part of me gets to come out.

Once you get everything out of your head about what everybody else is going to think, will radio play it - and I hope they do, I really do - once you shed all of that and just be who you are, that's who I am. That's taken a lot of growing up. I've come into myself musically and as a woman, and I hope to keep growing. If you don't grow, you die.

The delicate balance of mentoring someone is not creating them in your own image, but giving them the opportunity to create themselves.