Monday Muse: Advice from Creative Types

I've gathered and posted below some inspirational comments and advice that are "ever-green":

✭ Graphic Novelist and Cartoonist Jessica Abel ~ "Passion for a practice or a subject comes from your investment of time and energy. . . The idea that you need to wait for inspiration is a crock. . . The kind of inspiration that motivates you and makes your work great comes from maintaining a regular creative practice. . . Do the work. . . Do it now, and do it as deeply as you're capable of. . . ." ("Don't find your passion. Grow It.", May 26, 2016)

✭ U.S. Poet Laureate Juan Felipe Herrera ~ "You must give your life to this new you. . . Make room for the new you. People are waiting for you. . . It is your turn. . . Imagine what you can do. . . ." ("The World is Waiting for the New You", June 14, 2015, University of California/Riverside)

Herrera this year gave the commencement speech at Oregon State University/Corvallis.

✭ Filmmaker Steven Spielberg ~ "Listen to that voice that tells you what you could do. Nothing will define your character more than that. . . ." ("Steven Spielberg Commencement Speech, Harvard University, May 2016 (Transcript and Video)", Entrepreneur, May 26, 2016)

✭ Composer, Lyricist, and Actor Lin-Manuel Miranda ~ "Every story you choose to tell, by necessity, omits others from the large narrative. . . This act of choosing — the stories we tell versus the stories we leave out — will reverberate across the rest of your life. . . ." and ". . . since the beginning of the great, unfinished symphony that is our American experiment, time and time again, immigrants get the job done." ("Penn's 2016 Commencement Ceremony, Commencement Speaker Lin-Manuel Miranda", May 16, 2016, University of Pennsylvania; also see "Commencement 2016") 

✭ Author, Professor, and Public Leader Anne-Marie Slaughter ~  "Care is as important as career. . . Career is investing in yourself. . . Care is investing in others. It is learning. . . what to do and what not to do to enable others to grow and flourish." ("Anne-Marie Slaughter | 2016 Spring Commencement Address | University of North Carolina/Chapel Hill", May 10, 2016)

✭ Conservationist Jane Goodall ~ "We may have different colored skin, we may be from different cultures, we may eat different things and wear different clothes, but wherever you go in the world: If you cry, your tears are the same. If you're happy, you laugh, and the laughter around the world is the same." ("2016 College of Arts and Sciences Commencement, University of Redlands, April 23, 2016)

✭ Writer Neil Gaiman ~ "If you're going to make good art, it's likely that you're going to go to the place where things are dark, and use that to shine light into your life and, if you're doing it right, into other people's lives as well." (Gaiman's "Make Good Art" commencement speech at University of the Arts (Philadelphia, 2012) may be viewed here: "Neil Gaiman on Making Art, Mistakes, and His 'View from the Cheap Seat", Los Angeles Times, June 24, 2016)