People who do a job that claims to be creative have to be alone to recharge their batteries. You can’t live 24 hours a day in the spotlight and remain creative. For people like me, solitude is a victory.
Interpretation
Creativity often requires solitude for rejuvenation and inspiration.
In this quote, Karl Lagerfeld emphasizes the necessity of solitude for individuals in creative fields. He suggests that constant exposure or being in the spotlight can drain creativity, and to truly unleash one's creative potential, one must take time alone to recharge and reflect. This solitude is presented not as a loneliness but as a form of victory, highlighting its importance for the creative process.
In practice
During a talk on artistic processes, one might quote Lagerfeld to highlight the importance of solitude for inspiration.
I believe in sketching because there is something very sensitive in sketching, you know, in sketches that you don't have out of a computer that looks the same like everybody even if, later on, the dresses are OK, but I like to sketch, and I like to see trails made after my sketches that look the same. It is you know, what I like.
I'm open to everything. When you start to criticize the times you live in, your time is over.
If I could be reincarnated as a fashion accessory, it would be a shopping bag.
Chic is a kind of mayonnaise, either it tastes, or it doesn't.
Why should I stop working? If I do, I'll die and it'll all be finished. 'm lucky to work in the most perfect of conditions. I can do what I want in all kinds of areas. The expenses are not expenses. I would be stupid to stop that. Work is making a living out of being bored.
Elegance has nothing to do with fashion.
While there is no quick fix for instant, pain-free creativity, creative recovery (or discovery) is a teachable, trackable spiritual process. Each of us is complex and highly individual, yet there are common recognizable denominators to the creative recovery process.
One very important aspect of motivation is the willingness to stop and to look at things that no one else has bothered to look at. This simple process of focusing on things that are normally taken for granted is a powerful source of creativity.
There’s a temptation in our networked age to think that ideas can be developed by email and iChat. That’s crazy. Creativity comes from spontaneous meetings, from random discussions. You run into someone, you ask what they’re doing, you say ‘wow,’ and soon you’re cooking up all sorts of ideas.
I discovered that my imagination came alive when I moved away from the immediate world around me.
Highly creative people have a gift for connecting supposedly unrelated elements and ideas. They cross borders without regard for customs posts or No Trespassing signs. They throw suspension bridges across great distances. These elegant and unexpected combinations flow together beautifully in the twilight zone, where metaphor and resemblance rules in place of logic and classification.
You don't have to work for Google, or any of the other firms encouraging staff to pursue personal projects on company time, to use slowness to unlock your creativity. Anyone can do it. Start by clearing space in your schedule for rest, daydreaming and serendipity. Take breaks away from your desk, especially when you get stuck on a problem.
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