“Once writing becomes an act of listening instead of an act of speech, a great deal of the ego goes out of it.”— Julia Cameron
“A career must be husbanded. Care must be taken. Everyday must bring some small bit of progress. How would an artist with any self-worth act? Act that way.”— Julia Cameron
“The “if I had time” lie is a convenient way to ignore the fact that novels require being written and that writing happens a sentence at a time. Sentences can happen in a moment. Enough stolen moments, enough stolen sentences, and a novel is born – without the luxury of time.”— Julia Cameron
“If we eliminate the word “writer”, if we just go back to writing as an act of listening and naming what we hear, some of the rules dissappear. There is an organic shape, a form-coming-into-form that is inherent in the thing we are observing, listening to, and trying to put on the page. It has rules of its own that it will reveal to us if we listen with attention. Shape does not need to be imposed. Shape is a part of what we are listening to. When we just let ourselves write, we get it “right”.”— Julia Cameron
“When you feel yourself to be in critical condition, you must treat yourself as gently as you would a sick friend.”— Julia Cameron
“It is always necessary to acknowledge creative injuries and grieve them. Otherwise, they become creative scar tissue and block your growth.”— Julia Cameron
“Procrastination is not Laziness”, I tell him. “It is fear. Call it by its right name, and forgive yourself.”— Julia Cameron
“Writing for the sake of writing, writing that draws its credibility from its very existence, is a foreign idea to most Americans. As a culture, we want cash on the barrel head. We want writing to earn dollars and sense so that it makes sense to us. We have a conviction—which is naive and misplaced—that being published has to do with being “good” while not being published has to do with being “amateur.” …“Did you write today?”“Yes.”“Then you’re a writer today.”It would be lovely if being a writer were a permanent state that we could attain to. It’s not, or if it is, the permanence comes posthumously.A page at a time, a day at a time, is the way we must live our writing lives. Credibility lies in the act of writing. That is where the dignity is. That is where the final “credit” must come from.”— Julia Cameron
“Owning something also means owning up to something. It means accepting responsibility, which means, literally, responsibility. When we write about our lives we respond to them. As we respond to them, we are rendered more fluid, more centered, more agile on our own behalf. We are rendered conscious. Each day, each life, is a series of choices, and as we use the lens of writing to view our lives, we see our choices.”— Julia Cameron
“Working with the morning pages, we begin to sort through the differences between our real feelings, which are often secret, and our official feelings, those on the record for public display.”— Julia Cameron
“I ask to be made beautiful like the trees are beautiful, each growing according to a unique plan. Lop off a limb and and the tree will accommodate it’s loss, still growing and still beautiful. It is my hope to be able to flourish in a similar fashion, taking on the shape and dimensions that is intended for me.”— Julia Cameron
“Art is not about thinking something up. It is about the opposite—getting something down.”— Julia Cameron
“Timid young artists, adding parental fears to their own, often give up their sunny dreams of artistic careers, settling into the twilight world of could-have-beens and regrets.”— Julia Cameron
“Art is an act of the soul, not the intellect. When we are dealing with people’s dreams – their visions, really – we are in the realm of the sacred. We are involved with forces and energies larger than our own. We are engaged in a sacred transaction of which we know only a little: the shadow, not the shape.”— Julia Cameron
“The need to be a great artist makes it hard to be an artist. The need to produce a great work of art makes it hard to produce any art at all.”— Julia Cameron
“Art is not about thinking something up. It is the opposite — getting something down.”— Julia Cameron
“If we have plain old ordinary fear then we are within reach of a solution. Fear has been with humankind for millennia and we do know what to do about it–pray about it, talk about it, feel the fear, and do it anyway. “Artistic” fear, on the other hand, sounds somehow nastier and more virulent, like it just might not yield to ordinary solutions–and yet it does, the moment we become humble enough to try ordinary solutions.”— Julia Cameron
“Far from making me feel different and special, my [spiritual] experiences made me feel the same, ordinary, and interconnected. If I felt more spiritual, everyone else felt more spiritual as well. (276)”— Julia Cameron
“We need to bridge our sense of loneliness and disconnection with a sense of community and continuity even if we must manufacture it from our time on the Web and our use of calling cards to connect long distance. We must “log on” somewhere, and if it is only in cyberspace, that is still far better than nowhere at all. (264)”— Julia Cameron
“Most of us are not raised to actively encounter our destiny. We may not know that we have one. As children, we are seldom told we have a place in life that is uniquely ours alone. Instead, we are encouraged to believe that our life should somehow fulfill the expectations of others, that we will (or should) find our satisfactions as they have found theirs. Rather than being taugh to ask ourselves who we are, we are schooled to ask others. We are, in effect, trained to listen to others’ versions of ourselves. We are brought up in our life as told to us by someone else! When we survey our lives, seeking to fulfill our creativity, we often see we had a dream that went glimmering because we believed, and those around us believed, that the dream was beyond our reach. Many of us would have been, or at least might have been, done, tried something, if…If we had known who we really were.”— Julia Cameron
“No matter what your age or your life path, whether making art is your career or your hobby or your dream, it is not too late or too egotistical or too selfish or too silly to work on your creativity.”— Julia Cameron