I think it's important to earn your fan base and not just try to immediately advance to the top. If you ride to the top quickly, you're liable to fall as quickly. Take your time. It's a long journey ahead of you as an artist. There's nowhere that you're supposed to be other than right now living inside of your art.
Interpretation
Success in art comes from patience and dedication rather than seeking quick fame.
This quote emphasizes the importance of taking the time to develop one's craft as an artist, rather than rushing to achieve fame or success. Jason Mraz suggests that a hasty ascent to the top of one's career can lead to a rapid decline, and stresses the value of being present and immersed in the creative process instead of focusing solely on the end result.
In practice
During a motivational speech at an art school, one could use this quote to inspire students to focus on their artistic growth.
There's a certain feeling of giving, a certain feeling of generosity in love songs. When you sing a song of love, you're actually giving something to yourself, too. You're singing and casting these affirmations of love out into the universe.
You can't live the rest of your life carrying a pain because your parents couldn't get along. I choose to spend my life crafting a joy.
It's from being melancholy and having my human down experiences that I learn, that I overcome, that I transform - and these realizations I put into song. That's what I choose to put in my backpack and carry with me around the world.
Another year is fast approaching. Go be that starving artist you’re afraid to be. Open up that journal and get poetic finally. Volunteer. Suck it up and travel. You were not born here to work and pay taxes. You were put here to be part of a vast organism to explore and create. Stop putting it off. The world has much more to offer than what’s on 15 televisions at TGI Fridays. Take pictures. Scare people. Shake up the scene. Be the change you want to see in the world.
The glory of a good tale is that it is limitless and fluid; a good tale belongs to each reader in its own particular way.
Art is the gift of God, and must be used unto His glory. That in art is highest which aims at this.
Every great or even every very good writer makes the world over according to his own specifications.
Yes sir. You can be more careless, you can put more trash in [a novel] and be excused for it. In a short story that's next to the poem, almost every word has got to be almost exactly right. In the novel you can be careless but in the short story you can't. I mean by that the good short stories like Chekhov wrote. That's why I rate that second - it's because it demands a nearer absolute exactitude. You have less room to be slovenly and careless. There's less room in it for trash.
All novelists should live in two different worlds: a real one and an unreal one.
Detroit, my 'great' subject, made me the person I am, consequently the writer I am - for better or worse.
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