If you don’t evolve, you die. The vultures and buzzards and all the other carrion birds will come to pick off the remains. It’s a simple rule, really, easy to learn, easy to live by. Evolve. Change. Transform. Do or die. Do, or be eaten, swallowed whole, by the adaptable ones.
Rainer Maria Rilke
How to be Patient in the Gap
To be an artist means not to compute or count; it means to ripen as the tree, which does not force its sap, but stand unshaken in the storms of spring with no fear that summer might not follow. It will come regardless. But it comes only to those who live as though eternity stretches before them, carefree, silent, and endless. I learn it daily, learn it with many pains, for which I am grateful: Patience is all!
— Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet, “The Third Letter”
Messages in Bottles
A freelance life, a life in the arts, is sometimes like putting messages in bottles on a desert island, and hoping that someone will find one of your bottle and open it and read it, and put something in a bottle that will wash its way back to you: appreciation, or a commission, or money, or love. And you have to accept that you may put out a hundred things for every bottle that winds up coming back. – Neil Gaiman, “Make Good Art”
Loneliness is not Solitude
Therefore, my dear friend, I know of no other advice than this: Go within and scale the depths of your being from which your very life springs forth…For the creative artist must be a world of his own and must find everything within himself and in nature, to which he has betrothed himself.
– “The First Letter,” Rainer Maria Rilke