# random quotes looking for a home > When you read your notebooks, you re-meet ideas. You reintroduce them to who you are now. > > — Max Porter > I always thought that an artist's was the hardest life of all. Its rigor—not always apparent to an outside observer—is that an artist has to navigate forward into the unknown guided only by an internal sense of direction, keep up a set of standards which are imposed entirely from within, meanwhile **maintaining faith that the task he has set himself to is worth struggling constantly to achieve**. > > — Lucian Freud > If you do good work for good clients, it will lead to other good work for other good clients. If you do bad work for bad clients, it will lead to other bad work for other bad clients. > > — Michael Bierut > Just looking at something and going, I like that, and then trying to break down, why do I like that? What is it about that… that I like? What do I steal? What can I repurpose or tweak to make it fit what we're trying to do? It's just homework, and the best part of this job is that your homework is watching great movies. > > — Steven Soderbergh > Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better, or at least something different. The good poet welds his theft into a whole of feeling which is unique, utterly different than that from which it is torn; the bad poet throws it into something which has no cohesion. > > — T. S. Elliot > There's no use trying to deny it: a conscious application of raw talent, far more than luck or accident, is at the core of every creative moment. … The cultivation of aptitude, far more than coincidence or inspiration, is responsible for most creative breakthroughs. > > — Shekerjian > The trick to creativity, if there is a single useful thing to say about it, is to identify your own peculiar talent and then to settle down to work with it for a good long time. Everyone has an aptitude for something. The trick is to recognize it, to honor it, to work with it. This is where creativity starts. > > — Shekerjian > Endurance counts for a lot in cultivating talent to the point of being able to do creative things with it — endurance _and_ a concentration of effort to a specific sphere of activity. > > — Shekerjian > Mastery is the best goal because the rich can't buy it, the impatient can't rush it, the privileged can't inherit it, and nobody can steal it. You can only earn it through hard work. Mastery is the ultimate status. > > — Derek Sivers > What do they do, > > the singers, tale-writers, dancers, painters, shapers, makers? > > They go there with empty hands, > > into the gap between. > > They come back with things in their hands. > > — [Ursula K. Le Guin, *Always Coming Home*, page 74](https://aworkinglibrary.com/reading/always-coming-home)