Quotes About Artistry

But through watching his children create so freely, Waits had an epiphany: It wasn't actually that big a deal. He told me, "I realized that, as a songwriter, the only thing I really do is make jewelry for the inside of other people's minds." Music is nothing more than decoration for the imagination. That's all it is. That realization, Waits said, seemed to open things up for him. Songwriting became less painful after that.

Intracranial jewelry-making! What a cool job! That's basically what we all do--all of us who spend our days making and doing interesting things for no particularly rational reason.

It is well worth seeing City of Girls, if only to enjoy Edna Parker Watson's costumes—which are delectable, from stem to stern.

Why? she asked urgently. Why me? Because, he murmured, you draw me. Because you are kind but not soft. Because you cradle a desperate secret to your bosom, like a viper in your arms, and don't let go of it even as it gnaws on your very flesh. I want to pry that viper from your arms. To take that pain within myself and make it mine.

She did not want to be Bilong's mother, or her grandmother. She had done with these roles, with being a good child, a good wife, a good mother. She had put seventy-odd years into it; she had worked hard at it; now she wanted to be that Ofelia who painted and carved and sang in an old cracked voice with strange creatures and their stranger music. The

Most people, using everything they have in real life, cannot take hold of you the way a talented writer can without even being there. Talent is the ability to mesmerize people when you are nowhere near. Talent is the ability to make something that is more stunning than human presence.

I can knit. I knit all year, day in, day out. It is my passion, and I rarely knit the same thing twice the same way.

enough to excite the artist in any man.

I do but sing because I must,And pipe but as the linnets sing.

The trouble with most photographers, and for that matter also with painters, and other people, is, that they are always trying to do something which is outside of themselves. In consequence they produce nothing that means anything to those who have the gift or intuition for truth: all else is really not worth a tinker's damn.

The artist does not see things as they are, but as he is.

Could Hamlet have been written by a committee, or the Mona Lisa painted by a club?... Creative ideas do not spring from groups. They spring from individuals. The divine spark leaps from the finger of God to the finger of Adam.

Invention has ever imagination and poetry at its heart.

You never know if you're a writer. You can't trust it. If you woke up and said, 'I'm a writer ' it would be gone. You wouldn't see anything for miles - even the dust would be running away.

I'm good at the real and the true and the beautiful and can do With some skill and With or without flattery the Place where all 3 meet ...

They should invent some way to tape-record your dreams. I've written songs in my dreams that were Beatles songs. Then I'd wake up and they'd be gone.

Helped are those who create anything at all, for they shall relive the thrill of their own conception.

I'm making a statement about conformity." For or against?" That's for the viewer to decide. I'm an artist, not a preacher." Agnes Phiffer & Osbert Monk in The Grub-and-Stakers Spin a Yarn

As a song-writer, I write from the heart, soul and mind, not from lies.

Being in the studio is a really romantic time.

it's not what artists touch that counts most. It's what they don't touch.

Democracy! Bah! When I hear that I reach for my feather boa!

The kitchen is a laboratory, and everything that happens there has to do with science. It's biology, chemistry, physics. Yes, there's history. Yes, there's artistry. Yes, to all of that. But what happened there, what actually happens to the food is all science.

Choreography is mentally draining, but there's a pleasure in getting into the studio with the dancers and the music.