Quotes About Artistry

Each song has its own way that it likes to be done, but it can be more than one way. If you tap into it, you can feel it.

You are the masterpiece of your own life. You are the Michelangelo of your own life. The David you are sculpturing is you (Dr. Joe Vitale)

You are the artist. Your emotions are your own creation.

I think, writing-wise, I am probably more of a quilter than a weaver because I just get a little scrap here and a little scrap there and sew them together.

Nn omns qu habent citharam sunt citharoed.

It's not Jane Austen, it's not Henry James. But this writer, or writers, well, they're pretty damn good too.

Rinzler was struck by the fact that for all its onstage spontaneity, Monroe's music wasn't intuitive. He had consciously created it and could relate exactly where he had gotten each sound, like a painter who knows exactly what colors he has used from his palette.35 Rinzler began to see that this enigmatic man did little that he had not very deliberately decided upon.

The most striking hallmarks of so-called traditional bluegrass were fully defined during the Jimmy Martin years, long after Flatt and Scruggs had left the Blue Grass Boys. If Bill Monroe started bluegrass, Earl Scruggs certainly made it as popular as it is today. But it is crucial to recognize that Monroe was the prime creative organizer and artistic guiding force behind bluegrass.

never wrote a tune in my life," he said.137 "What do you mean by that?" asked Robins, surprised. "Those tunes are all in the air," Monroe replied. "I just happened to be the first one to pick them out.

She was an artist. She held opposites in her mind.

Ever since the Renaissance, the Italian engineering mind has always had a special capacity for viewing a project with a fresh and practical artistry. The Italian talent for stripping down to bare essentials the elements of compromise, which is the heart of all creative design, has never been surpassed; and it was desperately needed to break clear from the archaic form of warship architecture that had lingered on for a quarter of a century.

God help me, he thought. God help all us poor wretches who could create and find we must lose our hearts for it because we cannot afford to spend our time at it. ("Mad House")

Playing the violin or writing a poem are special ways of paying attention. They are acts at once small and great. Although only one person can commit them, they require orderly marshallings of countless and diverse forces, something like the great landing of armies in Normandy, but incalculably bigger and more complicated.

We'd gotten him wrong. He wasn't a dunce. He was an artist. According to these pages, he'd seen us all a good deal clearer than we'd ever seen him.

Reckless archaism. Arpeggiating under the influence. Presto in an andante zone.

A writer has to see things twice. First the thing itself, then its potential for a story. What he sees this second time is, in a sense, who he is. It's his artistic personality. What he doesn't see twice is just as revealing.

Issac Stern rule: the better your technique, the more impossible your standards.

But still he keeps working with a will; that's the craftsman in him.

Bruheem kol dumuyay eloha! Blessed are all God's self-portraits.

You cannot be a great writer in a shop where words are sold in tens and twenties.

Making music was its own sort of divinity.

A truly great artist has many talents.

Drag queen is a gender like no other, and with practice I'd learned to rise to it.

And moreover, to succeed, the artist must possess the courageous soul . . . the brave soul. The soul that dares and defies.