“I often think that I don’t have a single new idea in my head. But the big mistake is to just wait for inspiration to happen. It won’t come looking for you. You have to start doing something: you have to build a trap to catch it. I like to do that by starting the very mundane process of tidying my studio. It may seem like it has nothing to do with the creative job in hand but I think tidying up is a form of daydreaming, and what you’re really doing is tidying your mind. It’s a kind of mental preparation. It’s a way of getting your mind in place to notice something. And that’s what being creative is really: it’s noticing when something interesting is starting to happen.”
—Brian Eno

Via @_nitch

Don’t think.
—Ray Bradbury

Why not do it now?
— Tyler Cowen

I don’t think of it as art — I just make things I like bigger, assuming that if I like them some other people might too.
— Corita Kent

Keiran Fourtet doing what he does best, and the moon while waiting for an Uber home.

Tomorrow

The one thing all fools have in common is that they are always getting ready to start.
—Seneca.

“The sure sign of an amateur is that he has a million plans and they all start tomorrow.”
Steven Pressfield, from Turning Pro

“ANYTHING GOES. NO RULES. NO RESTRICTIONS. NO LIMITS”

— William Klein

I feel like commercials exist in the world with us and we have no say in whether we see them or don’t see them. And therefore they should serve the function of art. … they inhabit the world I live in and I want the world that I live in, quite selfishly, to be beautiful and to teach me something and to have artistic merit.
— Joe Connor

From part one of this excellent interview with Joe on Setnotes.

Rye Nature Reserve, December 2024

Writing a blog is nothing like writing for publication. There is no preexisting audience you have to please. The audience is created as a reflection of your curiosity. A blog post is a very long and complex search query to find fascinating people and make them route interesting stuff to your inbox.
— Henrik Karlsson

“Your job as a writer is to imagine yourself into the lives of people who are not you . . . and, that way, provide a gateway for readers to also imagine themselves into the lives of others so that we can build up a community of shared understanding.”
—Caryl Phillips

I think this is what good documentary and portrait photography is doing too. You have to meet the subject as they are, without preconception or categorisation, so that your picture becomes a door into their world. The focus is on what makes them individual, rather than using them to illustrate a universal.

H/t Russell Davies

Beautiful work by Keita Morimoto 森本啓太 , via Alan Jacobs.

“Photography is the only language that can be understood anywhere in the world.” —Bruno Barbey

Zen Didion

INTERVIEWER: There’s a certain aesthetic to the way you live. You once talked about using good silver every day.

DIDION: Well, every day is all there is.

Photography, for me, is a spontaneous impulse, the result of a constant awareness, which captures both a moment and eternity. Drawing, by contrast, expands on what our consciousness has taken from the moment. Photography is an action, drawing is a meditation.
—Henri Cartier Bresson