Rick Rubin Quotes

Sharing art is the price of making it. Exposing your vulnerability is the fee.

You work not as an evangelist, expecting miracles, but as a scientist, testing and adjusting and testing again. Experimenting and building on the results. Faith is rewarded, perhaps even more than talent or ability. After all, how can we offer the art what it needs without blind trust? We are required to believe in something that doesn’t exist in order to allow it to come into being.

Think to yourself: I’m just here to create.

The bee is simply being.

Similarly, the total output of human creativity, in all its kaleidoscopic breadth, pieces together the fabric forming our culture. The underlying intention of our work is the aspect allowing it to fit neatly into this fabric. Rarely if ever do we know the grand intention, yet if we surrender to the creative impulse, our singular piece of the puzzle takes its proper shape.

Intention is all there is. The work is just a reminder.

Art is a reverberation of an impermanent life.

Art is choosing to do something skillfully, caring about the details, bringing all of yourself to make the finest work you can. It is beyond ego, vanity, self-glorification, and need for approval.

If you see tremendous beauty or tremendous pain where other people see little or nothing at all, you’re confronted with big feelings all the time. These emotions can be confusing and overwhelming. When those around you don’t see what you see and feel what you feel, this can lead to a sense of isolation and a general feeling of not belonging, of otherness.

Beware of the assumption that the way you work is the best way simply because it’s the way you’ve done it before.

In Japanese pottery, there’s an artful form of repair called kintsugi. When a piece of ceramic pottery breaks, rather than trying to restore it to its original condition, the artisan accentuates the fault by using gold to fill the crack. This beautifully draws attention to where the work was broken, creating a golden vein. Instead of the flaw diminishing the work, it becomes a focal point, an area of both physical and aesthetic strength. The scar also tells the story of the piece, chronicling its past experience.

The artist actively works to experience life slowly, and then to re-experience the same thing anew. To read slowly, and to read and read again.

I wasn’t expecting that plot twist. I wonder what’s going to happen to our hero next.

Our definition of self-awareness as artists relates directly to the way we tune in to our inner experience, not the way we are externally perceived. The more we identify with our self as it exists through the eyes of others, the more disconnected we become and the less energy we have to draw from.

The act of creation is an attempt to enter a mysterious realm. Longing to transcend.

Whatever you choose, decide on a framework that breaks your normal rhythm and see where it leads. Just by the nature of the limitations you set, the work will be different from what you’ve done before. It is of little importance whether it’s better. The purpose is self-discovery.