Art Quotes - Page 11

Industry in art is a necessity - not a virtue - and any evidence of the same, in the production, is a blemish, not a quality; a proof, not of achievement, but of absolutely insufficient work, for work alone will efface the footsteps of work.

A man's work reveals him. In social intercourse he gives you the surface that he wishes the world to accept, but in his book or his picture the real man delivers himself defenceless. No affectation of peculiarity can conceal a commonplace mind. No one can produce the most casual work without disclosing the innermost secrets of his soul.

Art is long and life is short.

An artist must be passionately in love with her art. Obsessed or possessed ― go mad for what you believe in.

There was no point in doing art if you were going to be second-rate.

Blessed are the weird people:
poets, misfits, writers
mystics, painters, troubadours
for they teach us to see the world through different eyes.

An as-yet-unpublished poet in Boulder, Colorado, once said to me that anything worth doing was worth doing badly. I may seem, in the foregoing sketchy pages, to have followed her advice rather too well.

We didn't come to the world just to entertain, we came to play remarkable roles, and our reward is to see you doing more than us.

What they, in their innocence, cannot comprehend is that a properly constituted, healthy, decent man never writes, acts, or composes.

Creating anything that never existed before is not sanity.

Threshold is where the madness ends and the magic begins.

You dive deeper, you strip away the cleverness and the words become more important than your ego and that's when you know it's real, when it's good.

But real life is not art.

You can be a good painter if you study Cézanne's vision. Whoever dares to copy Van Gogh falls inevitably into the hell of imitators. For this painter didn't care about masterpieces, or even good paintings... but about what is beyond all painting, all art.

My words, my writing, my actions - these have never been for myself alone, either directly or indirectly. There is no such thing as an artist who creates art only for himself. That is masturbation.

Looking back upon my work today, I think the best I have done grew out of things deeply felt, the worst from a pride in mere talent.

An author knows his landscape best; he can stand around, smell the wind, get a feel for his place.

A poet is a nightingale who sits in darkness and sings to cheer its own solitude with sweet sounds; his auditors are as men entranced by the melody of an unseen musician, who feel that they are moved and softened, yet know not whence or why.

Artists strive for perfection. But what they often fail to see is that the beauty, the humanity, lies within the flaws.

Artistry is the dance of color & form, whether visual, musical, or sparked in the imagination by the written word.