What if the actual reward is not accomplishment but the act of creating? The finished products and trappings of creative accomplishment are often seen as the goal. But I believe that the act of making is like oxygen. When the making stops, it becomes hard to breathe.
You might also like
We arrive at truth, not by the reason alone, but by the whole man. Genius is the recovery of childhood at will—the power to live, think, and act in childhood again; so all great poets are necessarily children, in the sense that they retain the power of wonder and the capacity to see the world as if for the first time.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge — Biographia Literaria
Accepting the absurdity of everything around us is one step, a necessary experience: it should not become a dead end. It arouses a revolt that can become fruitful.
Albert Camus
A tradition is not a material entity that can survive apart from any human agency. It can live only by a people's power to grasp its structure, and to answer to the warmth of its fires.
Rebecca West