I learned that you should feel when writing, not like Lord Byron on a mountain top, but like child stringing beads in kindergarten, - happy, absorbed and quietly putting one bead on after another.
As a performer you often feel that you're the child and everyone else is a grown-up.
He who, conscious of being strong, is content to be weak, he shall be the paragon of mankind. Being the paragon of mankind, Virtue will never desert him. He returns to the state of a little child.
I just close my eyes and act like I'm a 3-year-old. I try to get as close to a childlike level as possible because we were all artists back then. So you just close your eyes and think back to when you were as young as you can remember and had the least barriers to your creativity.
I played like a child!
Adults under threat feel like children.
It's interesting when people access their inner little girl or little boy. I remember doing tons of those exercises when I was in school, where you're trying to dig into your vulnerability. There's no mask for a child, so all those feelings are real.
I think, a lot of time, when I'm making art, I'm trying to get into a state of childlike play, where I'm not self-conscious; I'm not worried about what the outcome is going to be. I'm just having fun.
Sorrow makes us all children again - destroys all differences of intellect. The wisest know nothing.
The baby looks at things all day without winking; that is because his eyes are not focused on any particular object. He goes without knowing where he is going, and stops without knowing what he is doing. He merges himself within the surroundings and moves along with it. These are the principles of mental hygiene.
When we can play with the unself-conscious concentration of a child, this is: art: prayer: love.
When we're in that kind of childish space, we're more genuine and feel more comfortable with our friends.
Having reached a point in which I was so bitter and exhausted from being a quote unquote public figure, I wanted to return to a more childlike relationship to writing.
Not by constraint or severity shall you have access to true wisdom, but by abandonment, and childlike mirth-fulness. If you would know aught, be gay before it.
In recent years there's been a lot of philosophical theorising about how important magic is, and how it takes us back to a childlike state of astonishment. I think all this is just nonsense. Magic isn't meaningful or important other than how you're performing it in that moment.
