Quotes About Artistry

An artist must eat sparingly and give up a normal way of life.

But it is a cold, lifeless business when you go to the shops to buy something, which does not represent your life and talent, but a goldsmith's.

I like to watch the way a model moves in my clothes, the way she gives them life, or if they are wrong, stillborn, the way her life rejects them.

Some people go to college. For me I studied music my whole life. That was my college.

There's really nothing else I'm going to do with my life. I'd be useless if I weren't singing or acting

There is a similarity between juggling and composing on the typewriter. The trick is, when you spill something, make it look like a part of the act.

That's pretty much why I went into show business because I wanted to have a guitar and sing unaccompanied, that was like my fantasy of the perfect life.

Make something beautiful of your life.

To make your life being a writer, it's an auto-slavery ... you are both the slave and the task-master.

David Bowie: By 1985, I was something I never wanted to be: I was a well-accepted artist. I had started appealing to people who bought Phil Collins records. I suddenly didn't know my audience and, worse, I didn't care about them. I always looked OK in clothes – I was kind of a target for designers, always. They sort of made a beeline for me and tried to get me to wear their things. But I guess it was up to me to choose which ones I would wear.

Steve Strange: I ran a very tight ship in terms of my door policy. I wanted creative-minded pioneers there who looked like a walking piece of art, not some drunken, beery lads. The best move I made was turning Mick Jagger away at the door. He was wearing trainers.

Neil Tennant: The whole renaissance of British pop starts with Gary Numan and 'Are "Friends" Electric?'. He took the David Bowie thing and reduced it to a black shirt and a pair of black jeans.

Don't be too harsh to these poems until they're typed. I always think typescript lends some sort of certainty: at least, if the things are bad then, they appear to be bad with conviction.

Craft the finest arrow Forage jungles for straightest shaft Forge sharpest head of glass Pluck feathers of the wisest crow Without the simplest archer and bow Without a mark that's true Useless Craft the finest vessel Fell the jungle's strongest mast Build the world's mightiest hull A flag the crown of all seas you can sew Without the simplest oarsmen to row Without a port that's true Useless

Creative writers are always greater than the causes that they represent.

Anyone who can handle a needle convincingly can make us see a thread which is not there.

The artist, no less than the writer, needs a vocabulary before he can embark on a "copy" of reality.

The artist creates his own elite, and the elite its own artists.

That power of holding on to an image that Ruskin describes so admirably is not the power of the eidetic; it is that faculty of keeping a large number of relationships present in one's mind that distinguishes all mental achievement, be it that of the chess player, the composer, or the great artist.

I am telling you what I know—words have music and if you are a musician you will write to hear them.

Writers are not just people who sit down and write. They hazard themselves. Every time you compose a book your composition of yourself is at stake.

He had a theory that musicians are incredibly complex, and know far less than other artists what they want and what they are; that they puzzle themselves as well as their friends; that their psychology is a modern development, and has not yet been understood.

He never retorted that the artist is not a bricklayer at all, but a horseman whose business it is to catch Pegasus at once, not to practise for him by mounting tamer colts. This is hard, hot and generally ungraceful work, but it is not drudgery. For drudgery is not art, and cannot lead to it.

Never mind what lies behind Death, Mr. Bast, but be sure that the poet and the musician and the tramp will be happier in it than the man who has never learnt to say, 'I am I.