Two books and Nietzsche
from Human, All Too Human, 1878
“Artists have a vested interest in our believing in the flash of revelation, the so-called inspiration… shining down from the heavens as a ray of grace. In reality, the imagination of the good artist or thinker produces continually good, mediocre, or bad things, but his judgement, trained and sharpened to a fine point, rejects, selects, connects… All great artists and thinkers are great workers, indefatigable not only in inventing, but also in rejecting, sifting, transforming, ordering. ”
Quoted in Jonah Lehrer’s Imagine, 2012
“The Artist’s sense of truth. Regarding truths, the artist has a weaker morality than the thinker. He definitely does not want to be deprived of the splendid and profound interpretations of life, and he resists sober simple methods and results. Apparently he fights for the higher dignity and significance of man; in truth, he does not want to give us the most fantastical, mythical, uncertain, extreme, the sense of the symbolic, the overestimation of the person, the faith in some miraculous element in the genius. Thus he considers the continued existence of his kind of creation more important than scientific devotion to the truth in every form, however plain. ”
Quoted in Jonathan Lethem’s The Ecstasy of Influence, 2011