Quotes About Artistry

Few sensible authors are happy discussing the creative process -- it is, after all, black magic, and may lose its power if we look that particular gift horse too closely in the mouth.

It is not enough to fill your juries, your advisory panels, with creative artists. You must put us in positions of policy control.

The thing that makes a creative person is to be creative and that is all there is to it.

I, artist in words, dedicate, then, to you, artist whose ideas speak in marble, this well-loved work of my matured manhood. I love it not the less because it has been little understood and superficially judged by the common herd: it was not meant for them. I love it not the more because it has found enthusiastic favorers amongst the Few. My affection for my work is rooted in the solemn and pure delight which it gave me to conceive and to perform.

And I once heard Mr. William Hunt, who is one of the first artists, say to a class of teachers, "I shall not try to adapt myself to your various lines of teaching. I will tell you the best things I know, and you may make the adaptations.

Asking a seamstress to mend is like asking Michelangelo to paint your garage.

I cannot count my day complete 'Til needle, thread and fabric meet.

So much fabric, so little time! Or, sew much fabric, sew little time!

Quilt 'til you wilt.

I'd rather be stitchin' than in the kitchen!

Play the music, not the instrument.

I'm itching to be stitching!

Quilters never grow old, they just go to pieces.

Quilters never cut corners.

Sewing fills my days, not to mention the living room, bedroom, and closets.

hackneyed phrases…. The purpose with which these phrases are introduced is for the most part that of giving a fillip to a passage that might be humdrum without them… but their true use when they come into the writer's mind is as danger signals; he should take warning that when they suggest themselves it is because what he is writing is bad stuff, or it would not need such help; let him see to the substance of his cake instead of decorating with sugarplums.

Quilters know all the angles.

She walks like a ballerina in dance slippers, her feet as articulate as hands, a little vessel of grace moving out into the fog.

And doesn't a writer do the same thing? Isn't she knitting together scraps of dreams? She hunts down the most vivid details and links them in sequences that will let a reader see, smell, and hear a world that seems complete in itself; she builds a stage set and painstakingly hides all the struts and wires and nail holes, then stands back and hopes whoever might come to see it will believe.

Turn a page, walk the lines of sentences: the singer steps out, and conjures a world of color and noise in the space inside your head.

As she [Anna] sweeps the workroom floor, as she lugs another roll of fabric or another bucket of charcoal, as she sits in the workroom beside Maria, fingers numb, breath pluming over the silk, she practices her letters on the thousand blank pages of her mind. Each sign signifies a sound, and to link sounds is to form words, and to link words is to construct worlds.

Violins, horns, drums, speeches—a mouth against a microphone in some faraway yet simultaneous evening—the sorcery of it holds him rapt.

Literary festivals all over the country turn writers into performers and open doors into their private lives that, I often think, would be better left closed. In my view, it's more satisfying to learn about authors from the work they produce rather than the other way round.