Amber Garrett

“Living life as an artist is a practice.
You are either engaging in the practice
or you’re not.

It makes no sense to say you’re not good at it.
It’s like saying, “I’m not good at being a monk.”
You are either living as a monk or you’re not.

We tend to think of the artist’s work as the output.

The real work of the artist
is a way of being in the world.”
― Rick Rubin, The Creative Act: A Way of Being

“In terms of priority, inspiration comes first. You come next. The audience comes last.”
― Rick Rubin, The Creative Act: A Way of Being

“All art is a work in progress. It’s helpful to see the piece we’re working on as an experiment. One in which we can’t predict the outcome. Whatever the result, we will receive useful information that will benefit the next experiment. If you start from the position that there is no right or wrong, no good or bad, and creativity is just free play with no rules, it’s easier to submerge yourself joyfully in the process of making things. We’re not playing to win, we’re playing to play. And ultimately, playing is fun. Perfectionism gets in the way of fun. A more skillful goal might be to find comfort in the process. To make and put out successive works with ease.”
― Rick Rubin, The Creative Act: A Way of Being

“We are born into a world of strangers. We spend our lives turning them into beloveds and ghosts: the ones we need, the ones we ache for, the ones we lose, the ones we brush up against and never really know, who stay with us anyway. These are letters written to those ones—the ones we glimpsed from buses and bathroom stalls, from the corners of our eyes; the ones we tripped, the ones who caught us, the ones we kissed without knowing their names, the ones who bewildered us, who made us feel alive”
― Colleen Kinder, Letter to a Stranger: Essays to the Ones Who Haunt Us