Rick Rubin Quotes

However you frame yourself as an artist, the frame is too small.

If someone chooses to share feedback, listen to understand the person, not the work. People will tell you more about themselves than about the art when giving feedback. We each see a unique world. Ocassionally, a comment will strike home. It will resonate with something we feel, either in our awareness or just behind it, and we may discover room for improvement.

Perfection is finally obtained not when there is no longer anything to add, but when there’s no longer anything to take away. — Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Wind, Sand and Stars

Analysis is a secondary function. The awareness happens first as a pure connection with the object of your attention. If something strikes me as interesting or beautiful, first I live that experience. Only afterward might I attempt to understand it.

Consider establishing a consistent framework around your creative process. It is often the case that the more set in your personal regimen, the more freedom you have within that structure to express yourself. Discipline and freedom seem like opposites. In reality, they are partners.

Yet an album is only a diary entry of a moment of time, a snapshot reflection of who the artist is for that period. And no one diary entry is our life story.

Art doesn’t get made on the clock. But it can get finished on the clock.

There doesn’t need to be a purpose guiding what we choose to make.

remaining too long in this phase, many pitfalls may arise. One is disconnection. If an artist is creating a beautiful work, and keeps endlessly crafting it beyond the need, sometimes they suddenly want to start all over. This can be because they have changed or the times have changed.

through this brutal edit we change our relationship to it. We come to understand its underlying structure and realize what truly matters, to disconnect from the attachment of making it and see it for what it is.

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.

If you’re established in a craft or field, temporary rules may be useful to break a pattern. They can challenge you to become better, to innovate, and to bring out a new side of yourself or your work.

When we don’t yet know where we’re going, we don’t wait. We move forward in the dark. If nothing

At the same time, there’s no need to fear learning too much theory. It won’t undermine the pure expression of your voice. If you don’t let it. Having the knowledge won’t hurt the work. How you use the knowledge may. You have new tools. You don’t have to use them.

Patience is required for taking in information in the most faithful way possible