Quotes About Inspiration

I don't see why escapist literature shouldn't also be a work of art.

It is not the being paid money in advance that jars the sensitive artist: it is the having to work.

People can't believe how hard I work.... I love it. I think it just runs through my veins. My great-grandfather was a bellboy and had a dream to do a hotel chain, so I think I get it from him.

If there are moments in my work when people find joy and humour, that's a real success for me.

Of course, all my work is photographed and I also take quite a lot of photographs of work in production.

Obviously, I don't make an entire edition all at once, so the studio often goes back to produce editions, but that's a bit different. I guess I'm always thinking about the next work.

The key is to work with people who are passionate about storytelling and who have a similar sensibility of the type and nature of the stories that you want to tell.

You can't work on that scale without trust. I learned that from working with Robert Mapplethorpe.

I always wanted to be an artist, writer and poet since I was seven, and one has to live long enough to evolve as an artist and do one's finest work.

I think it's really great that people share their work [on Myspace] and no one is paying for it. I think that's a very healthy thing and it's not a corporate thing.

With the death of Robert Mapplethorpe, I had lost my main collaborator in taking photographs. So I didn't know who to work with.

I don't feel that censorship keeps me from doing the work, though. I'm my bigger censor.

What a model of an artist was for me was an artist who worked. Picasso was the ultimate model, because the work ethic he had.

All the truly great stand-ups say, "I go onstage, and I work on jokes. The inspiration will happen while I'm doing my work." To me, in the end, the surest thing is work.

I think I was almost 12, so I knew who George C. Scott was, but if I could work with George C. Scott now, I'd be so pumped.

Oulipo ends where the work begins.

Sometimes I'll hear a phrase or a word and write it down in my little black notebook (a writer's best mate), then come back to it and work a plot around it.

I start with voice, maybe a sentence. That sentence might embody an image, and I go from there. One sentence to the next. Sound drives the work these days - sound before description.

Part of what I do comes from the fact that I don't know any jokes to tell. And when I do they're really flat and don't work.

I work without commercial considerations.

I always work from outline and almost always write out of sequence. It just works for me.

A poet's work consists less in seeking words for his ideas than in seeking ideas for his words and predominant rhythms.

When I'm dead I wanna leave a body of work, like authors or great painters do.

In my old age, my mind gets more open, and I listen to so many different types of music and I guess that all reflects in my work.