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The mind of a thoroughly well-informed man is a dreadful thing. It is like a bazaar encumbered with rich but cumbersome and never to be used articles.

Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest (1895)
19h ago

Its power, like that of Bach's series of variations, accumulates slowly, moment by moment. By the end, as the original theme returns, you are left with the feeling of having experienced a great arc, a fully realized idea explored in all its possibilities and permutations.

1d ago

Life is best understood and practiced as an art, the way that art is understood and practiced. We rely on inspiration, feeling for materials, knowledge of how to put things together well, patience, physical strength and awareness that we are part of a process which we don't know much about yet but which we live within and are sustained by.

3d ago

The mind of man is capable of anything—because everything is in it, all the past, all the future, all the possibilities of existence.

4d ago

Often I think that however much I draw or paint, or however well, I am not an artist as art is generally understood. The abstract is meaningless to me save as a fragment of the whole, which is life itself… It is the ultimate which concerns me, and all physical, all material things are but an expression of it… We are part and parcel of the big plan of things. We are simply instruments recording in different measure our particular portion of the infinite.

5d ago

The task, then, is not so much to see what no one has yet seen, but to think what nobody has yet thought about that which everybody sees.

5d ago

China is a deeply repressive nation, with universal surveillance, fine-grained media and speech control, and ubiquitous censorship. That's the kind of society where only anodyne, cautious artistry can flourish, except in tiny subcultural pockets too small for the government to worry about.

1w ago

The poet only asks to get his head into the world, but the world always strikes back and prevents him from seeing anything.

1w ago

The natural object is always the adequate symbol. I naturally dress my thoughts in pictures.

1w ago

Life is wasted when we make it more terrifying, precisely because it is so easy to do so. It is an easy task, because people who are intellectually lazy are convinced that this miserable terror is "the truth", that this terror is knowledge of the "extra-mental" world. This is an easy way out, resulting in a banal explanation of the world as terrifying.

1w ago

I'm filled with gratitude to have had this experience and to get to play this amount of music with my children, and friends who I've known since they were little kids, too. It's been an incredible thrill and a great thing for my family and me to get to spend that amount of time together.

2w ago

An exploration is a traversal of the unknown, of landscapes you didn't even know existed, with all the courage and vulnerability and openness to experience that demands; its payoff is discovery — of unimagined wonders, of yourself in the face of the unimagined.

2w ago

Why it's necessary to create work that might feel embarrassing The simple mindset shift that stops stalling and gets you to just start How to reframe scorn as a positive signal The thought process that can help you move out of a state of rumination How to treat failed ideas as seeds for future breakthroughs

3w ago

The last time I invited readers to talk about their work, I got a thousand comments in just the first 24 hours. I spent days sampling some of the projects, and was impressed by the quality—we have a very talented group of readers here.

3w ago

The poet only asks to get his head into the world, but the world always strikes a poet down. It may be very hard in the world to live with the poet; but imagine how hard it must be to live with the poet in oneself and to be bound by him in chains.

3w ago

as an artist, as a lover, as a person who lived with extraordinary vulnerability, extraordinary courage, and the precocious awareness that the conversation between the two is the measure of a life.

3w ago

Fiction to expand one's creativity and empathy. To experience emotions and other perspectives that would otherwise be unknown.

3w ago

That inaugural Big Ears—scattered across a clutch of theaters and strange little rooms in a sliver of the then-sleepy city—was a continual revelation for 25-year-old me, instantly expanding my sense of what was possible.

3w ago

There are lyrics in it that distill something a lot of people spend their entire lives writing songs to try and say, like: I see what I see I don't see what I can't

3w ago

Most of them are hidden from view in the stagnant mainstream culture of our time, where tired formulas and AI slop prevail. These are the real deal, and give me reason for optimism about the future of our music culture.

4w ago

The only way to discover the limits of the possible is to go beyond them into the impossible.

4w ago

Singing that felt a little bit like communicating with a much younger version of me who was concerned with being able to get better, being legitimate, and wanting to not feel shame about making mistakes. I feel like that song was written to me today, and I felt like I could answer back to that person, "Yeah, you were right to want this and want to try harder."

1mo ago

I love how it views creativity as something spiritual that works best when it just flows. That is something I need to remind myself of at times because it's so easy to fall into the trappings of constraining your imagination to fit within the mandates that buyers want or the expectations that audiences have rather than the freedom of where a thought takes you.

1mo ago

I realized those sounds were actually more interesting to me than some super pure note I could play really well had I been practicing a lot. These were things I'd never pay attention to or something I shouldn't even be playing when I was studying classical music. It's such a different mindset of approaching music. Instead of 'I've got to get it right,' it's more like, 'What can happen?'

1mo ago
longreads.com
The Docteur Is In

His legacy lives chiefly in the sound of his instrument and its place in the music he pioneered, both of which seemed to allow a nation brutalized by colonial domination to access a richer and more joyous emotional life.

1mo ago

Being in familiar surroundings with adequate control over my time and space is a necessary condition for immersing myself fully in reading, writing, and taking pictures—activities that nourish me and give me space for creativity.

1mo ago

The poets make all the words, and therefore language is the indelible record of mankind's being.

1mo ago

The mind, once stretched by a new idea, never returns to its original dimensions.

1mo ago

It is the tension between creativity and skepticism that has produced the stunnings achievements of science. The divorce of the two produces politicians without ideas and scientists without conscience.

1mo ago

One cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not dined well.

1mo ago

I want to feel what it feels like to make that song go. I think that's taught me to recognize when a song of my own feels right.

1mo ago

We are all agreed that your theory is crazy. The question that divides us is whether it is crazy enough to have a chance of being correct.

1mo ago

Since then, when I hear a song that I really love, if I have the aptitude to try and learn it, I usually do. And it's because of the same impulse. I want to feel what it feels like to make that song go.

1mo ago

I want to feel what it feels like to make that song go. I think that's taught me to recognize when a song of my own feels right. The same excitement I feel about someone else's song, the desire to be moved, is intact when I'm trying to write my own.

1mo ago

It is the tension between creativity and skepticism that has produced the stunning and unexpected findings of science.

2mo ago

This is the new secret strategy in the arts, and it's built on the simplest thing you can imagine—namely, existing as a human being.

2mo ago

Underscored — save the words that stop you in your tracks.

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