The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron
Date read: 9/5/23. Recommendation: 9/10.
The definitive guide to discovering and developing your creative self. Cameron takes a true self-help approach with journaling invitations, activities, and exercises that help guide readers to tap back into their creative souls. And the invitations are actually helpful—this is coming from someone who ignores 90% of prompts in books. But these held real value. The new-age, recovery-style 12-step program likely alienates some readers, but if you’re willing to look past that there’s a lot to love about this book. And the message of channeling ourselves into more meaningful work is one we can never hear too many times.
Check out my notes below or Amazon for details and reviews.
My Notes:
Questioning previously held beliefs:
“Nothing dies harder than bad idea. And few ideas are worse than the ones we have about art.” Julia Cameron
“As you learn to recognize, nurture, and protect your inner artist, you will be able to move beyond pain and creative construction.” Julia Cameron
Creativity:
“What we play is life.” Louis Armstrong
“If you want to work on your art, work on your life.” Chekhov
“The function of the creative artist consists of making laws, not in following laws already made.” Ferruccio Busoni
Relaxed concentration:
“A mind too active is no mind at all.” Theodore Roosevelt
“I will tell you what I have learned myself. For me, a long five or six mile walk helps. And one must go alone and every day.” Brenda Ueland
It takes time:
“Nobody sees a flower—really—it is so small it takes time—we haven’t time—and to see takes time, like to have a friend takes time.” Georgia O’Keeffe
“The cost of a thing is the amount of what I call life which is required to be exchanged for it, immediately or in the long run.” Henry David Thoreau
“We learn by going / Where we have to go.” Theodore Roethke
Focus on your story:
“You need to claim the events of your life to make yourself yours.” Anne-Wilson Schaef
“What lies behind us and what lies before us are tiny matters, compared to what lies within us.” Ralph Waldo Emerson
“It always comes back to the same necessity: go deep enough and there is a bedrock of truth, however hard.” May Sarton
“To know what you prefer instead of humbly saying Amen to what the world tells you you ought to prefer, is to have kept your soul alive.” Robert Louis Stevenson
“No trumpets sound when the important decisions of our life are made. Destiny is made known silently.” Agnes De Mille
“Be really whole
And all things will come to you.” Lao-Tzu
Risks:
“The universe will reward you for taking risks on its behalf.” Shakti Gawain
“Chance is always powerful. Let your hook always be cast; in the pool where you least expect it, there will be a fish.” Ovid
“Whatever you think you can do or believe you can do, begin it. Action has magic, grace, and power in it.” Goethe
“Often people attempt to live their lives backwards: they try to have more things, or more money, in order to do more of what they want so that they will be happier. The way it actually works is the reverse. You must first be who you really are, then, do what you need to do, in order to have what you want.” Margaret Young
“There is the risk you cannot afford to take, and there is the risk you cannot afford not to take.” Peter Drucker
“Man can learn nothing except by going from the known to the unknown.” Claude Bernard
“One does not discover new lands without consenting to lose sight of the shore for a very long time.” André Gide