Quotes About Artistry

You know that part of your writing that you question, —that's weird and doesn't fit neatly into a genre or mold?Write more of that. Please.

She's a tale spinner," he said. "She spins 'em right outta the air. Tells 'em whole so's you'd think yer readin' a book.

The French idea of playing an instrument well is to be able to SING well upon it.

They think the way to be a poet is to wear funny clothes and write sideways on the page.

Oh, Frank. Can you really think artists and writers are the only people entitled to lives of their own?

My muse is an ungrateful harlot who's abandoned me to actually come up with my own plots.

What, you don't think I'm capable of poetry after sex?

Two hours of writing fiction leaves this writer completely drained. For those two hours he has been in a different place with totally different people.

you should be able to make a scene come alive in the reader's mind. Not everybody has this ability. It is a gift, and you either have it or you don't.

Great artists know that it isn't just about what you add; sometimes the most important work is knowing what to take away. Removing clutter, excess, all the superfluous elements—and finding out in the process what's been in there the whole time.

Munrow hated hearing pre-Romantic music sung with operatic vibrato, for example, and pioneered the use of vocalists whose voices didn't wobble.

A great artist can look at an old woman, portray her exactly as she is ... and force the viewer to see the pretty girl she used to be ... more than that, he can make anyone with the sensitivity of an armadillo see that this lovely young girl is still alive

It's up to the artist to use language that can be understood, not hide it in some private code. Most of these jokers don't even want to use language you and I know or can learn . . . they would rather sneer at us and be smug, because we 'fail' to see what they are driving at. If indeed they are driving at anything--obscurity is usually the refuge of incompetence.

I have suggested in other books that Einstein's physical relativity is just a special case of a more general neurological relativity: the observer, with or without instruments, always remains co-creator of the observation. To quote Nietzsche again: We are all greater artists than we realize.

Nobody knows why Achilles wept, but we all know that he must have wept; just as we know that Lear must have prayed for the poor hungry wretches that night on the moor. A Homer or a Shakespeare creates such scenes without knowing why they must be just as they are; and we weep over them without knowing how we are sure that they are true.

We have manufactured all "material things" out of an ever-changing deluge of photons and electrons in an abysmal void. As Nietzsche first declared, "We are all greater artists than we realize." (Or, as the Zen roshi Hui Neng said, "From the beginning, there has never been a 'thing.'")

And I'm not confused about the lack of, or the need for, imagination in low or high places. We could do better we must do better. There are far worse things to drop on people than crayolas.

It takes great talent and skill to conceal one's talent and skill. LA ROCHEFOUCAULD, 1613–1680 Halliwell

Creative Endeavors are by their nature uncertain.

Albert Einstein was an avid violinist. He believed that working with his hands in this way and playing music helped his thinking process as well. In

As the great physicist Max Planck put it, scientists "must have a vivid intuitive imagination, for new ideas are not generated by deduction, but by an artistically creative imagination.

AESTHETICS OF OPERA Don't sing an aria To someone who can't Sing one back.

Conventional lives are the perfect refuge if you are a terrible artist.

This is your genius: your own profound desire to write. Your love of words and language, your attempt to get to what poet Donald Hall called "the unsayable said." If