Nine Gates: Entering the Mind of Poetry, Essays

Jane Hirshfield

“The creative self [asks] the surrender of ordinary conceptions of identity and will for a broader kind of intimacy and allegiance.”

Poet Jane Hirshfield on how threshold spaces liberate creativity:

Kenneth Grahame, 1859-1932

Peter Green

“Nature’s particular gift to the walker… is to set the mind jogging, to make it garrulous, exalted, a little mad maybe — certainly creative and suprasensitive.”

Walking as creative fuel — a splendid 1913 celebration of how solitary walks enliven “the country of the mind”:

Beethoven: Anguish and Triumph

Jan Swafford

“Genius has to be founded on major talent, but it adds a freshness and wildness of imagination, a raging ambition, an unusual gift for learning and growing, a depth and breadth of thought and spirit…”

Fascinating read on Beethoven and the crucial difference between genius and talent:

Beethoven Letters Journals and Conversations

“The true artist is not proud… Though he may be admired by others, he is sad not to have reached that point to which his better genius only appears as a distant, guiding sun.”

Beethoven’s advice on being an artist – his touching letter to a little girl who sent him fan mail:

Paul Gauguin Letters to His Wife and Friends

Paul Gauguin

“One day, you will feel a joy in having resisted the temptation to hate, and there is truly intoxicating poetry in the goodness of him who has suffered.”

The great artist Paul Gauguin’s advice on overcoming rejection, breaking free of public opinion, and staying true to your creative vision:

The Origins of Knowledge and Imagination

Jacob Bronowski

“The creative personality is always one that looks on the world as fit for change and on himself as an instrument for change.”

Jacob Bronowski on the heroism of being a contrarian and the essential character trait of the creative person:

Nobel Lectures: From the Literature Laureates, 1986 to 2006

“Whatever inspiration is, it’s born from a continuous ‘I don’t know.’”

Nobel-winning Polish poet Wisława Szymborska on how our certitudes keep us small and the generative power of not-knowing:

The Creative Architect: Inside the Great Midcentury Personality Study

Pierluigi Serraino

“The creative person has the courage to experience opposites of his nature and to attempt some reconciliation of them in an individuated expression of himself.”

Inside history’s most influential personality study of what makes a creative person:

Upstream: Selected Essays

Mary Oliver

“The most regretful people on earth are those who felt the call to creative work, who felt their own creative power restive and uprising, and gave to it neither power nor time.”

Mary Oliver on time, concentration, the artist’s task, and the central commitment of the creative life:

Nine Gates: Entering the Mind of Poetry, Essays

Jane Hirshfield

“In the wholeheartedness of concentration, world and self begin to cohere. With that state comes an enlarging: of what may be known, what may be felt, what may be done.”

Beautiful read on the “effortless effort” of creative work:

The World as Will and Representation, Vol. 2

Arthur Schopenhauer

“Genius is the power of leaving one’s own interests, wishes, and aims entirely out of sight… so as to remain pure knowing subject, clear vision of the world.”

Schopenhauer on talent vs. genius and what makes a genuine genius:

Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman

James Gleick

Knowledge was rarer then. A secondhand magazine was an occasion… Each book Richard possessed burned itself into his memory… Knowledge was scarce and therefore dear.

Wonderful read on the source of Richard Feynman’s genius and how the precious scarcity of knowledge imbued one of humanity’s most beloved minds with “the pleasure of finding things out":

A Certain World: A Commonplace Book

W.H. Auden

“We must believe before we can doubt, and doubt before we can deny.”

W.H. Auden on writing, belief, doubt, false vs. true enchantment, and the most important principle of making art:

Enigmas of Chance: An Autobiography

Mark Kac

“Creative people live in two worlds. One is the ordinary world which they share with others and in which they are not in any special way set apart from their fellow men. The other is private and it is in this world that the creative acts take place.”

Probability theory pioneer Mark Kac on the two types of geniuses:

Journal of a Novel: The East of Eden Letters

John Steinbeck

“A good writer always works at the impossible.”

John Steinbeck on writing, the crucible of creativity, and the mobilizing power of the impossible: