You must not fear, hold back, count or be a miser with your thoughts and feelings. It is also true that creation comes from an overflow, so you have to learn to intake, to imbibe, to nourish yourself and not be afraid of fullness. The fullness is like a tidal wave which then carries you, sweeps you into experience and into writing. Permit yourself to flow and overflow, allow for the rise in temperature, all the expansions and intensifications. Something is always born of excess: great art was born of great terrors, great loneliness, great inhibitions, instabilities, and it always balances them. If it seems to you that I move in a world of certitudes, you, par contre, must benefit from the great privilege of youth, which is that you move in a world of mysteries. But both must be ruled by faith.
From the Diary of Anais Nin, Vol. 3
Nice one! One of my co-workers stated he always does things in excess. When he said that, I felt a small flash of recognition since there are areas in my life where I tend to be "excessive." He doesn't create art, at least none that he's told me about, but this proclivity of his makes me wonder if there isn't some kind of art lurking around there. Until he said that I hadn't thought about how this idea of overflow could fuel art.
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