Alan Watts

In the western world it is second nature for us to assume that all creative action requires the incentive of inadequacy and discontent. It seems obvious that if we felt fulfilled at each instant and no longer regarded time as a path of pursuit, we should sit down in the sun, pull large Mexican hats over our eyes, and put bottles of tequila at our elbows. Even if this were true it might not be so great a disaster as we imagine, for there is no doubt that our extreme busyness is as much nervous fidgets as industry, and that a certain amount of ordinary laziness would lend our culture the pleasant mellowness it singularly lacks. However, it does not seem to occer to us that action goaded by a sense of inadequacy will be creative onlly in a limited sense. It will express the emptiness from which it springs rather than fullness, hunger rather than strength.