Creativity depends on community and solitude
Janna Malamud Smith:
We look with awe upon groups of great thinkers or artists who came together in the past — the transcendentalists in mid-nineteenth-century Concord, the cubist painters in early twentieth-century Paris, the friendship between Coleridge and Wordsworth, to name only a few of these many pairings and groups. We realize that people seek out each other to find sympathetic spirits. But that’s only half the story. The other half is that even when we are not geniuses, our own thinking and creativity are often better catalyzed and stimulated in discourse, not in isolation. We need to work alone; we need to have privacy — sometimes a lot of it — and closing the door and returning to our pens and paper or keyboards or brushes and easels can be bliss; but we also need to be stirred up, stimulated and challenged by others, especially others who share our interests and with whom we feel some modicum of mental respect.
An Absorbing Errand: How Artists and Craftsmen Make Their Way to Mastery, pp. 118f.
