Jump off. You are a protected individual. Do not fear.
Henry MillerRead
An artist is always alone - if he is an artist. No, what the artist needs is loneliness.
Interpretation
Artists often find solitude essential for their creative process.
In this quote, Henry Miller emphasizes the inherent solitude that accompanies the artistic journey. He suggests that while being alone may seem lonely to some, it is in these moment of isolation that artists find the clarity, depth, and inspiration needed to create their art, implying that loneliness is not merely a state of being, but an integral part of the creative experience.
In practice
This quote can be used during an art seminar to discuss the creative process.
Jump off. You are a protected individual. Do not fear.
I saw through to the last sign and symbol, but I could not read her face. I could see only the eyes shining through, huge, fleshy-like luminous beasts, as though I were swimming behind them in the electric effluvia of her incandescent vision.
The essential thing is to WANT to sing. This then is a song. I am singing.
Great God! What have I turned into? What right have you people to clutter up my life, steal my time, probe my soul, suckle my thoughts, have me for your companion, confidant, and information bureau? What do you take me for? Am I an entertainer on salary, required every evening to play an intellectual farce under your stupid noses? Am I a slave, bought and paid for, to crawl on my belly in front of you idlers and lay at your feet all that I do and all that I know?
We are swimming on the face of time and all else has drowned, is drowning, or will drown.
To sing you must first open your mouth. You must have a pair of lungs, and a little knowledge of music. It is not necessary to have an accordion, or a guitar. The essential thing is to want to sing. This then is a song. I am singing.
Storytelling reveals meaning without committing the error of defining it.
The most important part of fashion photography, for me, is not the models; it's not the clothes. It's that you are responsible for defining what a woman today is. That, I think, is my job.
Too few journalists become screenwriters. I say to all the would-be screenwriters: Become journalists. And Iβll say to working journalists: Do not stay journalists. Become screenwriters.
Prose is something that is persistent in staying in one place long enough to not only zero in on the dramatic effect of something that might have happened, or something that might have been seen, but also in watching how it played out and thinking about the cause and the effect.
The blues is an art of ambiguity, an assertion of the irrepressibly human over all circumstance whether created by others or by one's own human failings. They are the only consistent art in the United States which constantly remind us of our limitations while encouraging us to see how far we can actually go. When understood in their more profound implication, they are a corrective, an attempt to draw a line upon man's own limitless assertion.
Some degree of withdrawal serves to nurture man's creative powers. The artist and the scientist bring out of the dark void, like the mysterious universe itself, the unique, the strange, the unexpected. Numerous observers have testified upon the loneliness of the process.
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