What can we learn from artists about living a creative life?


Lin Manuel Miranda: One of my favorite books is My Name Is Asher Lev by Chaim Potok. It’s about a young boy and his maturation into an artist. His mom always wanted him to paint pretty pictures, paint beautiful pictures. She asked, Did you paint something beautiful? And one of the great lines in the book is, No, I don’t paint pretty pictures; they’re good but they’re not pretty. It’s about honesty. Real artists show us the world in a way we recognize as our own. It’s not necessarily what we always want to hear, but it might be what we need to hear. Artists can do that in a way nothing else really can.