Tammy Letherer 
Maintaining independence as a creative soul isn’t easy. There are often doubts to conquer, and a constant barrage of comparisons, distractions, and missteps can have the bravest hearts running for cover. The good news is that we’re never alone. We get to follow the light of writers, artists, and visionaries who have come before us.
Here, ten of them share ways to celebrate the creative process and keep it flowing freely:
- “Don’t think. Thinking is the enemy of creativity. It’s self-conscious, and anything self-conscious is lousy. You can’t try to do things. You simply must do things.” Ray Bradbury
- “So you see, imagination needs moodling – long, inefficient, happy idling, dawdling and puttering.” Brenda Ueland
- “The monotony and solitude of a quiet life stimulate the creative mind.” Albert Einstein
- “You can’t wait for inspiration, you have to go after it with a club.” Jack London
- “Originality is nothing but judicious imitation.” Voltaire
- “Creativity is just connecting things. When you ask creative people how they did something, they feel a little guilty because they didn’t really do it, the just saw something. It seemed obvious to them after a while.” Steve Jobs
- “To be creative means to be in love with life. You can be creative only if you love life enough that you want to enhance its beauty, you want to bring a little more music to it, a little more poetry to it, a little more dance to it.” Osho
- “Don’t be satisfied with stories, how things have gone with others. Unfold your own myth.” Rumi
- “And by the way, everything in life is writable about if you have the outgoing guts to do it, and the imagination to improvise. The worse enemy to creativity is self-doubt.” Sylvia Plath
- “If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up people to collect wood and don’t assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea.”Antoine De Saint-Exupery
