Quotes From Julia Cameron

Julia B. Cameron is an American teacher, author, artist, poet, playwright, novelist, filmmaker, composer, and journalist. She is most famous for her book The Artist’s Way: A Spiritual Path to Higher Creativity.She also has written many other non-fiction works, short stories, and essays, as well as novels, plays, musicals, and screenplays.

I ‘found’ The Artist’s Way at the start of 2013 and it has been a life changing experience for me. Writing my ‘morning pages‘ became an exercise in healing and discovering my creativity and silencing my inner critic. Regretfully, I’ve not been writing those pages of late and this post is a reminder of sorts for me.

Quotes From Julia Cameron

On Creativity and being artists

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.

What we really want to do is what we are really meant to do. When we do what we are meant to do, money comes to us, doors open for us, we feel useful, and the work we do feels like play to us.

On Writing

Writing is a spiritual practice in that people that have no spiritual path can undertake it and, as they write, they begin to wake up to a larger connection. After a while, people tend to find that there is some muse that they are connecting to.

Writing is like breathing, it’s possible to learn to do it well, but the point is to do it no matter what.

Writing makes us conscious. Once we are conscious, it is difficult to act out in unconscious ways.

Writing Morning Pages, we begin to see that each day is made up of myriad “choice points” and that we have a great deal of freedom to choose exactly how we will live…Like a tough-love friend, Morning Pages nudge us in the direction of needed change.

When we put the pen to paper, we articulate things in our life that we may have felt vague about. Before you write about something, somebody says, ‘How do you feel?’ and you say, ‘Oh, I feel okay.’ Then you write about it, and you discover you don’t feel okay.

On nourishing yourself

As artists, we must learn to be self-nourishing. We must become alert enough to consciously replenish our creative resources as we draw on them – to restock the trout pond, so to speak.

Growth is an erratic forward movement: two steps forward, one step back. Remember that and be very gentle with yourself.

Finally, I’d like to share this piece of wisdom from Julia that means a lot to me.

Wherever you are is always the right place. There is never a need to fix anything, to hitch up the bootstraps of the soul and start at some higher place. Start right where you are.

 

 

Have you read any of Julia Cameron’s works? Have you tried your hand at The Morning Pages?

Click on the picture below to go the Amazon link for The Artist’s Way: