Stephen Nachmanovitch Quotes

The most potent muse of all is our own inner child.

— Stephen Nachmanovitch

“There are no prescriptive solutions, no grand designs for grand problems. Life's solutions lie in the minute particulars involving more and more individual people daring to create their own life and art, daring to listen to the voice within their deepest, original nature, and deeper still, the voice within the earth.”

— Stephen Nachmanovitch

“In improvisation, there is only one time. This is what computer people call real time. The time of inspiration, the time of technically structuring and realizing ... the time of playing it, and the time of communicating with the audience, are all one.”

— Stephen Nachmanovitch

“If a creative person has a sense of humor, a sense of style and a certain amount of stubbornness, he finds a way to do what he needs to in spite of the obstacles.”

— Stephen Nachmanovitch

“Paradoxically, the more you are yourself, the more universal your message. As you develop and individuate more deeply, you break through into deeper layers of the collective consciousness and the collective unconsciousness.”

— Stephen Nachmanovitch

“In the art of teaching, we recognize that ideas and insights need to cook over a period of time.
Sometimes the student who is least articulate about expressing the ideas is in fact the one who is absorbing
and processing them most deeply. This applies as well to our own private learning of our art form; the
areas in which we feel most stuck and most incompetent may be our richest gold mine of developing
material. The use of silence in teaching then becomes very powerful.”

— Stephen Nachmanovitch

Fidgeting and boredom are the symptoms of fear of emptiness, which we try to fill up with whatever we can lay our hands on.

— Stephen Nachmanovitch

“Creative work is play. It is free speculation using materials of ones chosen form.”

— Stephen Nachmanovitch

It can sometimes be a hearbreaking struggle for us to arrive at a place where we are no longer afraid of the child inside us. We often fear that people won't take us seriously, or that they won't think us qualified enough. For the sake of being accepted, we can forget our source and put on one of the rigid masks of professionalism or conformity that society is continually offering us. The childlike part of us is the part that, like the Fool, simply does and says, without needing to qualify himself or strut his credentials.

— Stephen Nachmanovitch

“The noun of self becomes a verb. This flashpoint of creation in the present moment is where work and play merge.”

— Stephen Nachmanovitch

“Every moment of life is unique-a kiss, a sunset, a dance, a joke. None will ever recur in quite the same way. Each happens only once in the history of the universe.”

— Stephen Nachmanovitch

“To create, we need both technique and freedom of technique”

— Stephen Nachmanovitch

Artwork is not thought up in consciousness and then, as a separate phase, executed by the hand. The hand surprises us creates and solves problems on its own. Often, enigmas that baffle our brains are dealt with easily, unconsciously, by the hand.

— Stephen Nachmanovitch

I no longer sought skill, flexibility, strength, endurance, muscle tone, and quick responsiveness as means of imposing my will on the instrument, but rather of keeping an open and unrestricted pathway for the creative impulse to play its music straight from the preconscious depths beneath and beyond me.

— Stephen Nachmanovitch

“Practice is an ever-fresh, challenging flow of work and play in which we continually test and demolish our own delusions; therefore, it is sometimes painful.”

— Stephen Nachmanovitch

“Creative living, or the life of a creator, seems like a leap into the unknown only because "normal life" is rigid and traumatized.”

— Stephen Nachmanovitch

“Brahms once remarked that the mark of an artist is how much he throws away. Nature, the great creator, is always throwing things away. A frog lays several million eggs at a sitting. Only a few dozen of these become tadpoles, and only a few of those become frogs. We can let imagination and practice be as profligate as nature.”

— Stephen Nachmanovitch

“If we split practice from the real thing, neither one of them will be very real.”

— Stephen Nachmanovitch

“Commitment to a set of rules frees your play to attain a profundity and vigor otherwise impossible.”

— Stephen Nachmanovitch

“The power of mistakes enables us to reframe creative blocks and turn them around ... The troublesome parts of our work, the parts that are most baffling and frustrating, are in fact the growing edges. We see these opportunities the instant we drop our preconceptions and our self-importance.”

— Stephen Nachmanovitch

“Any action can be practiced as an art, as a craft, or as drudgery.”

— Stephen Nachmanovitch

“Play enables us to rearrange our capacities and our very identity so that they can be used in unforeseen ways”

— Stephen Nachmanovitch

“Many musicians are fabulously skilled at playing the black dots on the printed page, but mystified by how the dots got there in the first place and apprehensive of playing without dots. Music theory does not help here; it teaches rules of the grammar, but not what to say. When people ask me how to improvise, only a little of what I can say is about music. The real story is about spontaneous expression, and it is therefore a spiritual and a psychological story rather than a story about the technique of one art form or another.”

— Stephen Nachmanovitch

“Creativity can replace conformity as the primary mode of social being ... We can cling to that which is passing, or has already passed, or we can remain accessible to-even surrender to-the creative process, without insisting that we know in advance the ultimate outcome for us, our institutions, or our planet. To accept this challenge is to cherish freedom, to embrace life, and to find meaning.”

— Stephen Nachmanovitch

“If the art is created with the whole person, then the work will come out whole. Education must teach, reach, and vibrate the whole person rather than merely transfer knowledge.”

— Stephen Nachmanovitch

“Working within the limits of the medium forces us to change our own limits. Improvisation is not breaking with forms and limitations just to be 'free,' but using them as the very means of transcending ourselves.”

— Stephen Nachmanovitch

We provide both irritation and inspiration for each other- the grist for each other's pearl making.

— Stephen Nachmanovitch

“If form is mechanically applied, it may indeed result in work that is conventional, if not pedantic or stupid. But form used well can become the very vehicle of freedom, of discovering the creative surprises that liberate mind-at-play.”

— Stephen Nachmanovitch

“Memory and intention and intuition are fused. The iron is always hot.”

— Stephen Nachmanovitch

The professionalism of technique and flash of dexterity are more comfortable to be around than raw creative power, hence our society generally rewards virtuoso performers more highly than it rewards original creators.

— Stephen Nachmanovitch

“The beauty of playing together is meeting in the One.”

— Stephen Nachmanovitch

“Play cannot be defined, because in play all definitions slither, dance, combine, break apart, and recombine.”

— Stephen Nachmanovitch

“Play, creativity, art, spontaneity, all these experiences are their own rewards and are blocked when we perform for reward or punishment, profit or loss.”

— Stephen Nachmanovitch

Writing, playing, composing, painting, reading, listening, looking-all require that we submit to being swept away by Eros, to a transformation of self of the kind that happens when we fall in love.

— Stephen Nachmanovitch

Improvisation is intuition in action, a way to discover the muse and learn to respond to her call.

— Stephen Nachmanovitch

“The easiest way to do art is to dispense with success and failure altogether and just get on with it.”

— Stephen Nachmanovitch

“With too little judgement, we get trash. With too much judgement, we get blockage.”

— Stephen Nachmanovitch

“If we operate with a belief in long sweeps of time, we build cathedrals; if we operate from fiscal quarter to fiscal quarter, we build ugly shopping malls.”

— Stephen Nachmanovitch

“Technique itself springs from play, because we can acquire technique only by the practice of practice, by persistently experimenting and playing with our tools and testing their limits and resistances.”

— Stephen Nachmanovitch

Mastery means responsibility, ability to respond in real time to the need of the moment. Intuitive or inspired living means not just passively hearing the voice, but acting on it.

— Stephen Nachmanovitch

“Creativity exists more in the searching than in the finding.”

— Stephen Nachmanovitch

“To do anything artistically you have to acquire technique, but create through your technique and not with it.”

— Stephen Nachmanovitch

“The conception, composition, practice, and performance of a piece of music can blossom in a single moment.”

— Stephen Nachmanovitch

“Looking at the creative process is like looking into a crystal: no matter which facet we gaze into, we see all the others reflected.”

— Stephen Nachmanovitch

“Every attempt we make is imperfect; yet each one of those imperfect attempts is an occasion for a delight unlike anything else on earth.”

— Stephen Nachmanovitch

Surrender means cultivating a comfortable attitude toward not knowing, being nurtured by the mystery of moments that are dependably surprising, ever fresh.

— Stephen Nachmanovitch

When we are totally faithful to our own individuality, we are actually following a very intricate design. This kind of freedom is the opposite of "just anything".

— Stephen Nachmanovitch

“An improviser does not operate from a formless vacuum, but from three billion years of organic evolution”

— Stephen Nachmanovitch

“If we are transparent, with nothing to hide, the gap between language and being disappears. Then the Muse can speak.”

— Stephen Nachmanovitch

“The Western Idea of practice is to acquire a skill. It is very much related to your work ethic, which enjoins us to endure struggle or boredom now in return for future rewards. The Eastern idea of practice, on the other hand, is to create the person, or rather to actualize or reveal the complete person who is already there ... Not only is practice necessary to art, it is art.”

— Stephen Nachmanovitch