Here’s a great Mark Twain quote about finding out what your "work" is and the dangers of doing someone else’s "work."

What work I have done I have done because it has been play. If it had been work I shouldn’t have done it. Who was it who said, "Blessed is the man who has found his work"? Whoever it was he had the right idea in his mind. Mark you, he says his work–not somebody else’s work. The work that is really a man’s own work is play and not work at all. Cursed is the man who has found some other man’s work and cannot lose it. When we talk about the great workers of the world we really mean the great players of the world. The fellows who groan and sweat under the weary load of toil that they bear never can hope to do anything great. How can they when their souls are in a ferment of revolt against the employment of their hands and brains? The product of slavery, intellectual or physical, can never be great.

From After Dark by Haruki Murakami. It’s a strange little novel that consists mostly of conversations at night. The first line is from a 19-year-old girl talking to a jazz musician:

“What do you mean, ‘playing really creatively’? Can you give me a concrete example?”

“Hmm, let’s see… You send the music deep enough into your heart so that it makes your body undergo a kind of physical shift, and simultaneously the listener’s body also undergoes the same kind of physical shift. It’s giving birth to that kind of shared state. Probably.”

I just read a great article in The Guardian on the films of Salvador Dali written by JG Ballard. He has some interesting things to say about surrealism, its initial dismissal and current acceptance:

Suddenly, surrealism is everywhere, in those citadels of respectability such as the Tate, the V&A and the Hayward Gallery. Put on a surrealism show and the crowds flock, quietly absorbing these strange and irrational images. It’s as if people realise that reason and rationality no longer provide an adequate explanation for the world we live in. The lights may still be on, but a new Dark Age is drawing us towards its shadows, and we turn to the surrealists as our best guides to the underworld.

I like the idea of art as an instruction manual on how to live in the future. Great article with lots to think about.

I also thought I would also give a few Dali quotes on creativity not from this article:

When the creations of a genius collide with the mind of a layman, and produce an empty sound, there is little doubt as to which is at fault.

You have to systematically create confusion, it sets creativity free. Everything that is contradictory creates life.

One day it will have to be officially admitted that what we have christened reality is an even greater illusion than the world of dreams.

You know the worst thing is freedom. Freedom of any kind is the worst for creativity.

David Lynch commenting on how his ideas come together. I have experienced the same process with a central idea serving as a magnet for all the other ideas:

Sometimes if I listen to music, the ideas really flow. It’s like the music changes into something else, and I see the scenes unfolding. Or I might just be sitting quietly in a chair and bing! – an idea will hit me. At other times, I might be walking down the street when I see something that’s meaningful and inspires another scene. On anything that you start, fragments of ideas run together and hook themselves up like a train. Those first fragments become a magnet for everything else you need. You may remember something from the past that’s perfect, or you may discover a brand new thing. Eventually, you get little sequences going. Before you think of anything, the whole landscape is open. But once you start falling in love with certain ideas, the road you’re on becomes very narrow. If you concentrate, ideas will come to that narrow road and finish it.