Creative work is often driven by pain. It may be that if you don't have something in the back of your head driving you nuts, you may not do anything. It's not a good arrangement. If I were God, I wouldn't have done it that way., Nov. 20, 2009]

Cormac McCarthy
About This Quote

It can be quite frustrating to see your creative work stagnate for months or even years at a time. When this happens, it can be tempting to give up. You wonder if you are being lazy or not concentrating enough. It may even seem as though you have nothing good to say, or that no one is interested in what you have to say.

But this is not the case. The truth is that your creative work is often driven by pain. Pain of the sort that comes from the fight of having nothing new to say, or of being stuck in a rut with no sign of it coming out.

Pain of the sort that comes from being unable to think through all of your ideas and combine them into something new.

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