Creative advice

“dull not to”

“You aren't a static thing. You change a lot over time. For me it's been really important to say 'show up for the person you are that day'.”

Why, how, and when weird wins - and what you can practically do as an agency, brand or just human to win weird too.

“A short-link TikTok video whose specific content couldn't be resolved — click through to view.”

“I attempt to think as little as possible."”

“Private realities, the magic of imagination, and the specialness of certain friendships.”

“When every gap in understanding gets filled instantly, we lose the conditions that make human curiosity possible.”

“Taste is knowledge.”

“engineered for convenience, compulsion and stimulation, not for nourishment.”

“I remember telling my grandmother about our isolation, and she said, “Have regular parties at your house.” She told me what to do, and we did it, and she was right. God, I owe a lot to my grandmother.”

“Everything about the book is mortifying, and it totally set me free.”

“So maybe my wish for you is not that Harvard becomes the last thing people know about you, but instead that Harvard becomes the least important thing people know about you.”

“If you want that perfect brush stroke or that exquisite shot, then you have to squeeze your neurons until they scream.”

“We put faith in the algorithm the same way we put faith in divinity.”

“I made it. I watched the edit, I made sure it was great. But the data is not my job. The data trap, in my opinion, can suppress creativity.”

“If you treat AI as a tool, you ask: how do I get the right answer? If you treat it as a medium, you ask: what happens if I push this?”

“Can it not perhaps give you more joy remaining a hobby?”

“The slowness was not a tax on the real work; the slowness was the real work. It was how the work got good.”

“I did not choose to be a Creator. I got fired and had to pivot. It was a bit of an accident, if I’m honest. But now, it’s all I do. It is my job.”

“I really think when something is made by friends or lovers or people who consider each other a good hang, it shows up in the fabric of the final product.”

“Figuring out who you are is an incredibly inefficient, high-friction process.”

“A better question for any creative person is: what activities do you want to pursue? What kinds of understanding will that create?”

“The biggest thing people are missing about taste across the board is that it is relative, contextual, and social.”

“If the only thing you really give a shit about is the thing that you're doing and being able to do it in a way that meets your own standards, weirdly, I guess that's the key to success.”

“That is anti-dystopian action at its core: doing what makes the world more human, even when you cannot prove it matters in the grand scheme.”

“To cling to the primacy of the word is to reject completely the modern methodology of persuasion.”

“You need downtime, slow time, and vast nothingness to get yourself back to being creative.”

“This is how many people work: they start with a mess, work terribly hard while adding to the mess, then lose oversight and get frustrated. The harder they work, the worse it gets.”

“That pattern would follow me through my creative life until I found a way to write or make art that allowed me to bypass my inner critic.”

“We're in crisis, i wonder what we could do? Definitely not something new, let's try the old thing harder!”

“The LLMs are pushing the essays away from anything that a human would have ever written”

“Visual artist Daniel Arsham discusses how the possibility of endless failure drives creative practice and artistic growth”

“There are two kinds of writers. The ones who admit they read all the reviews and the ones who don’t admit that they read all the reviews.”

“You are not the subject. They are. So let them lead.”

“I wanna make beautiful things even if nobody cares”

“I think that extra labor is more of a gift; it’s the extra essence behind it.”

“Seek the unchanging or what should not change.”

“I realised that there is a sort of unwritten code you learn as you get older, which enables you to assess whether a conversation is a good idea or not.”

“Everything is possible again, and the world isn’t yet done.”

“I think my problem - perhaps yours too - isn’t just unfinished projects. It’s unfinished thinking.”

“My advice: do something very, very small that you haven’t done before, something you have no expectations around, no sense of being good or bad at. Do it just to do it.”

“Objects do reveal what we believe in ... but they reveal systems and power also.”

“Late capitalism needs us to be shallow interest-tourists.”