Creativity can last well into old age, as long as creators stay open to new ideas
Submitted by Steve on November 23, 2013
From Tara Bahrampour, writing for The Washington Post:
Doris Lessing, the freewheeling Nobel Prize-winning writer on racism, colonialism, feminism and communism who died Sunday at age 94, was prolific for most of her life. But five years ago, she said the writing had dried up. “Don’t imagine you’ll have it forever,” she said, according to one obituary. “Use it while you’ve got it because it’ll go; it’s sliding away like water down a plug hole.”
Does creativity have an expiration date? The question arises each time an artistic luminary retires: In the past year, authors Philip Roth and Alice Munro announced that they would stop writing after decades of prodigious output; he was 79, she was 81, and their declarations piqued fears in older artists that they, too, might run out of ideas or energy.