Stephen Nachmanovitch Quotes
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The Western Idea of practice is to acquire a skill. It is very much related to your work ethic, which enjoins us to endure struggle or boredom now in return for future rewards. The Eastern idea of practice, on the other hand, is to create the person, or rather to actualize or reveal the complete person who is already there.... Not only is practice necessary to art, it is art.
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It can sometimes be a hearbreaking struggle for us to arrive at a place where we are no longer afraid of the child inside us. We often fear that people won't take us seriously, or that they won't think us qualified enough. For the sake of being accepted, we can forget our source and put on one of the rigid masks of professionalism or conformity that society is continually offering us. The childlike part of us is the part that, like the Fool, simply does and says, without needing to qualify himself or strut his credentials.
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If form is mechanically applied, it may indeed result in work that is conventional, if not pedantic or stupid. But form used well can become the very vehicle of freedom, of discovering the creative surprises that liberate mind-at-play.
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Technique itself springs from play, because we can acquire technique only by the practice of practice, by persistently experimenting and playing with our tools and testing their limits and resistances.
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The noun of self becomes a verb. This flashpoint of creation in the present moment is where work and play merge.
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The easiest way to do art is to dispense with success and failure altogether and just get on with it.
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An improviser does not operate from a formless vacuum, but from three billion years of organic evolution
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Improvisation is intuition in action, a way to discover the muse and learn to respond to her call.
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The most potent muse of all is our own inner child.
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Play enables us to rearrange our capacities and our very identity so that they can be used in unforeseen ways
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Play, creativity, art, spontaneity, all these experiences are their own rewards and are blocked when we perform for reward or punishment, profit or loss.
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If the art is created with the whole person, then the work will come out whole. Education must teach, reach, and vibrate the whole person rather than merely transfer knowledge.
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If we split practice from the real thing, neither one of them will be very real.
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Play, intrinsically rewarding, doesn't cost anything; as soon as you put a price on it, it becomes, to some extent, not play.
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Looking at the creative process is like looking into a crystal: no matter which facet we gaze into, we see all the others reflected.
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With too little judgement, we get trash. With too much judgement, we get blockage.
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Creativity exists more in the searching than in the finding.
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In the art of teaching, we recognize that ideas and insights need to cook over a period of time. Sometimes the student who is least articulate about expressing the ideas is in fact the one who is absorbing and processing them most deeply. This applies as well to our own private learning of our art form; the areas in which we feel most stuck and most incompetent may be our richest gold mine of developing material. The use of silence in teaching then becomes very powerful.
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Commitment to a set of rules frees your play to attain a profundity and vigor otherwise impossible.
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Whispered words can be devastatingly effective.
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If I "try" to play, I fail; if I force the play, I crush it; if I race, I trip. Any time I stiffen or brace myself against some error or problem, the very act of bracing would cause the problem to occur. The only road to strength is vulnerability.
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Every conversation is a form of Jazz. The activity of instantaneous creation is as ordinary to us as breathing.
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To create, we need both technique and freedom of technique
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There are only people doing their imperfect best at doing their imperfect jobs
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We provide both irritation and inspiration for each other- the grist for each other's pearl making.
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Creativity can replace conformity as the primary mode of social being. . . . We can cling to that which is passing, or has already passed, or we can remain accessible to-even surrender to-the creative process, without insisting that we know in advance the ultimate outcome for us, our institutions, or our planet. To accept this challenge is to cherish freedom, to embrace life, and to find meaning.
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The conception, composition, practice, and performance of a piece of music can blossom in a single moment.
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This is the evolutionary value of play- play makes us flexible. By reinterpreting reality and begetting novelty, we keep from becoming rigid. Play enables us to rearrange our capacities and our very identity so that they can be used in unforeseen ways.
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There is not ultimate breakthrough; what we find in the development of a creative life is an open-ended series of provisional breakthroughs. In this journey there is no endpoint, because it is the journey into the soul.
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If we are transparent, with nothing to hide, the gap between language and being disappears. Then the Muse can speak.
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