Quotes About Artistry

It's not my brain that's writing the book, it's these hands of mine.

When the work takes over, then the artist is enabled to get out of the way, not to interfere. When the work takes over, then the artist listens.

Das Werk lobt den Meister. (German: The work proves the craftsman.)

In the final exam in the Chaucer course we were asked why he used certain verbal devices, certain adjectives, why he had certain characters behave in certain ways. And I wrote, 'I don't think Chaucer had any idea why he did any of these things. That isn't the way people write.' I believe this as strongly now as I did then. Most of what is best in writing isn't done deliberately.

You are given the form, but you must write the sonnet for yourself.

Ridicule is a terrible witherer of the flower of the imagination. It binds us where we should be free.

What we are is going to be visible in our art, no matter how secular (on the surface) the subject may be.

We live by revelation, as Christians, as artists, which means that we must be careful never to get set into rigid molds. The minute we begin to think we know all the answers, we forget the questions, and we become smug like the Pharisee who listed all his considerable virtues and thanked God that he was not like other men.

Donna. Miniatures

No complete son of a bitch ever wrote a good sentence.

Words belong to the person who wrote them

Works were expected to be microscopically accurate, properly 'finished' and formally framed, with proper perspective and all the familiar artistic conventions

There's a bunch of songs that I call B-sides on the record that you could argue could maybe have some potential commercial success with another artist, but for me, they just felt really whack.

Edit your life frequently and ruthlessly. It's your masterpiece after all.

Like poetry, fashion does not state anything. It merely suggests

The ultimate currency is called ''Creativity''.

I write not for the sake of glory. Not for the sake of fame. Not of the sake of success. But for the sake of my soul.

Clay in the hands of a good potter suffers so many good turns, but in the end, we see its real and true shape and form!

You are the artist, and your days the canvas. Will you create an original masterpiece, or live a paint-by-numbers kind of life?

A vast deal of human sympathy runs along the electric line of needlework, stretching from the throne to the wicker chair of the humble seamstress.

A major writer combines these three - storyteller, teacher, enchanter - but it is the enchanter in him that predominates and makes him a major writer.

My greatest teacher was not a vocal coach, not the work of other singers, but the way Tommy Dorsey breathed and phrased on the trombone.

Far from wishing to awaken the artist in the pupil prematurely, the teacher considers it his first task to make him a skilled artisan with sovereign control of his craft.

Not just part of us becomes a teacher. It engages the whole self - the woman or man, wife or husband, mother or father, the lover, scholar or artist in you as well as the teacher earning money.