"I am not bored at the moment, though it might be better if I were. Boredom might mean I was lagging and loafing my way slowly toward a fresh jag of creative work, creative excitement."
–– Steven Heighton (1961-2022), Canadian novelist, poet, short-story writer
Source: Steven Heighton. Work Book. Toronto, Ontario: ECW Press, 2011, p. 11.
via: Commonplace Book 2022, 2023, p.113.
""My work is really slow and repetitive. ... You have to go through almost excruciating boredom to be spontaneous and creative, to get to a place where the work really flows." For eight hours a day he combines experience and improvisation, As he described the process to an interviewer in 2004, "It is mysterious in a mundane way.""
–– Lance Letscher (b. 1962), American collage artist and Charles Dee Mitchell
Source: Lance Letscher Collage. Introduction by Charles Dee Mitchell. Austin, Texas: University of Texas Press, 2009, p. 6.
via: Day In & Day Out Notebook, 2019, p. 36.
"The phone gives us a lot but it takes away three key elements of discovery: loneliness, uncertainty and boredom. Those have always been where creative ideas come from."
–– Lynda Barry (b. 1956), American cartoonist, author, educator
Source: Austin Kleon tumblr, June 13, 2016.
via: Striped notebook, 2016, p. 30.
"[Ideas] come from day dreaming, from drifting, that moment when you're just sitting there ... The trouble with these days is that it's really hard to get bored. I have 2.4 million people on Twitter who will entertain me at any moment ... it's really hard to get bored. I'm much better at putting my phone away, going for boring walks, actually trying to find the space to get bored in. That's what I've started saying to people who say 'I want to be a writer.' I say 'great, get bored.'"
–– Neil Gaiman (b. 1960), British author and screenwriter
via: Sketchbook 29, 2016, p. 135.
"The cure for boredom is curiosity. There is no cure for curiosity."
–– Dorothy Parker (1893-1967), American writer, critic and satirist
via: Sketchbook 27, 2015, p. 138.
"Boredom is just the reverse side of fascination: both depend on being outside rather than inside a situation, and one leads to the other."
–– Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860), German Philosopher
"The greatest poverty is boredom. The greatest hell is not having a goal."
–– Ann Davies
via Sketchbook 5, 2008, p. 58
"Delight lies somewhere between boredom and confusion."
–– Ernst Hans Josef Gombrich (1909-2001), Austrian-born British art historian
via Sketchbook 5, 2008, p. 8
