Daily Inspiration Quote by Eric Bogosian

Bogosian is describing creativity the way a street-smart magician describes a trick: not as inspiration, but as misdirection. The “mental fake-out” isn’t cute self-help language; it’s a working actor’s admission that the mind resists novelty unless you outmaneuver it. By “make believe I’m making a new show,” he’s staging a small con on his own habits - a deliberate reset button that lets him approach the same craft problem as if it were new terrain.

The subtext is that originality is often less a lightning bolt than a procedural hack. Bogosian’s performance persona has always thrived on friction: characters who hustle, implode, posture, confess. Here, the hustler is the artist himself, manipulating attention to shake off the gravitational pull of half-finished material. “Forget the material I was working on” isn’t literal amnesia; it’s a strategic loosening of attachment. You stop protecting what you already wrote, stop defending the old premises, stop circling the same riffs because they’re familiar and therefore safe.

Context matters: Bogosian comes out of a downtown, solo-performance tradition where the “show” is a living organism, rewritten in rehearsal, adjusted by audience breath and silence. In that world, treating a project as fixed is a kind of death. His method turns reinvention into a practice, not a personality trait: if the brain won’t hand you freshness, you manufacture the conditions where fresh material can happen - by changing the frame, and letting your own memory become the thing you artfully sabotage.