Quotes About Artistic

It's possible, in a poem or a short story, to write about commonplace things and objects using commonplace but precise language, and to endow those things-- a chair, a window curtain, a fork, a stone, a woman's earring-- with immense, even startling power. It is possible to write a line of seemingly innocuous dialogue and have it send a chill along the reader's spine-- the source of artistic delight, as Nabokov would have it. That's the kind of writing that most interests me.

It's akin to style, what I'm talking about, but it isn't style alone. It is the writer's particular and unmistakable signature on everything he writes. It is his world and no other. This is one of the things that distinguishes one writer from another. Not talent. There's plenty of that around. But a writer who has some special way of looking at things and who gives artistic expression to that way of looking: that writer may be around for a time.

La chose dont je parle ici a une parenté avec le style, mais ne se ramène pas au seul style. C'est la griffe particulière et reconnaissable entre toutes qu'un écrivain appose à tout ce qu'il écrit. Ce n'est pas le talent. Le talent, ça court les rues. Mais un écrivain qui a une façon spéciale de voir les choses et qui donne une forme artistique à cette manière de voir est un écrivain qui a des chances de durer.

He looked up rather sadly. "So would I. So would we all. But show business has always been like that—any kind of show business. If these people didn't live intense and rather disordered lives, if their emotions didn't ride them too hard—well, they wouldn't be able to catch those emotions in flight and imprint them on a few feet of celluloid or project them across the footlights.

All Woolf's work as I know it constitutes a sort of Ovidian metamorphosis where the freedom sought is the freedom to continue becoming, exploring, wandering, going beyond. She is an escape artist. In

I am the definition of a powerful woman. I love with my whole body, heart, and soul. I say whatever the fuck is on my mind. I make huge mistakes proudly. I rage with as much passion as I grieve. I live my poetry, my art.

The only excuse a man has for writing is that he express himself, that he reveal to others the kind of world reflected in the mirror of his soul; his only excuse is that he be original.

Well, some day i'm going to get in with that wild artistic group. It's the only thing that makes this town different. The 'wild artistic group,' as you put it, has an average age of fifty-seven, and most of us have heart disease and bladder trouble...

If we have plain old ordinary fear then we are within reach of a solution. Fear has been with humankind for millennia and we do know what to do about it--pray about it, talk about it, feel the fear, and do it anyway. Artistic fear, on the other hand, sounds somehow nastier and more virulent, like it just might not yield to ordinary solutions--and yet it does, the moment we become humble enough to try ordinary solutions.

Timid young artists, adding parental fears to their own, often give up their sunny dreams of artistic careers, settling into the twilight world of could-have-beens and regrets.

No matter how slow the film, Spirit always stands still long enough for the photographer It has chosen. MINOR WHITE

If we are interested in a writing life - as opposed to a writing career - then we are in it for the process and not the product - for the body of work and not for the quick hit of one well-realised piece.

We knew each other in Taos, New Mexico, where a deep source of our creativity sprung. I know her now also in Santa Fe, walking her dog through the chamisa.

The painting has a life of its own. I try to let it come through.

To be truly human, we all have the right to make art. We all have the right to write.

The morning pages will teach you to stop judging and just let yourself write. So what if you're tired, crabby, distracted, stressed? Your artist is a child and it needs to be fed. Morning pages feed your artist child. So write your morning pages.

How much control are we willing to surrender for the sake of allowing creativity to move through us rather than our trying to flog it forward for agendas of our own?

If only we could give ourselves permission to write "badly," so many of us would write very well indeed.

For me, writing is like a good pair of pajamas -- comfortable. In our culture, writing is more often costumed up in a military outfit. We want our sentences to march in neat little rows, like well-behaved boarding-school children.

Each painting has its own way of evolving. . . . When the painting is finished, the subject reveals itself. WILLIAM BAZIOTES

Aiming for that, I learned to write setting judgment aside and save a polish for later. I called this new, freer writing "laying track." For the first time I gave myself emotional permission to do rough drafts and for those rough drafts to be, well, rough.

Judging your early artistic efforts is artist abuse. This happens in any number of ways: beginning work is measured against the masterworks of other artists; beginning work is exposed to premature criticism, shown to overly critical friends.

Art ... illuminates us. It sheds light on our lingering darkness. It casts a beam into the heart of our own darkness and says, See?

Any success postulated on a permanent artistic plateau dooms us, and it to failure.