Quotes About Artistry

Writers do not live one life, they live two. There is the living and then there is the writing.

Writers do not live one life, they live two. There is the living and then there is the writing. There is the second tasting, the delayed reaction.

It is only when the maker of things is a maker of things by vocation, and not merely holding down a job, that the price of things is approximate to their real value.

Art is a collaboration between God and the artist, and the less the artist does, the better.

An art book is a museum without walls.

RIDDLE: Q: Why haven't women made great works of art? A: Because they are great works of art.

Whether one wishes to fly before it has become possible, or cast a bell without having learned how to do it, or paint an icon - all these acts demand that, for the price of his creation, man should die, dissolve himself in his work, give himself entirely. That is the meaning of the prologue - the man flew, and for that he sacrificed his life.

And I love Jane Austen's use of language too--the way she takes her time to develop a phrase and gives it room to grow, so that these clever, complex statements form slowly and then bloom in my mind. Beethoven does the same thing with his cadence and phrasing and structure. It's a fact: Jane Austen is musical. And so's Yeats. And Wordsworth. All the great writers are musical.

His was the other road to freedom, that of dedication to his craft.

Within the overall structure of a project there is always room for individuality and craftsmanship.

You sketch out an overall shape, paint the underlying environment, then fill in the details. You constantly step back with a critical eye to view what you've done. Every now and then you'll throw a canvas away and start again.

As a student I thought there was a formula of some kind that I would get hold of somewhere, and thereby become and artist. There is a formula, but it has not been in books. It is really plain old courage, standing on one's own feet, and forever seeking enlightenment; courage to develop your way, but learning from the other fellow; experimentation with your own ideas, observing for yourself, a rigid discipline of doing over that which you can improve.

No one could rival Author Less for his ability to exit a room while remaining inside it. He sat, and his mind immediately left me behind...I was too much in law of his self-sufficiency, of his freedom. To disappear within himself for ten or fifteen minutes while I drew him, when I could barely sit still to hold the pencil.

Don't think about making art, just get it done. Let everyone else decide if it's good or bad, whether they love it or hate it. While they are deciding, make even more art.

Don't think about making art. Just get it done. Let everyone else decide if it's good or bad, whether they love it or hate it. While they're deciding, make even more art.

Art is the reason I get up in the morning, but the definition ends there. It doesn't seem fair that I'm living for something I can't even define.

The creative impulse, the thing that gets deep inside me, goes from brain to the fingertips. When you're writing by hand, even when you're not consciously thinking about it, you're constructing sentences in the best way possible. And I still get the thrill of the clean pad of notepaper and the pencil all sharpened.

I felt like a pianist who'd been forced to play on a few white keys in the middle, finally allowed to run his hands all up and down the keyboard.

Remember—Adam was only God's rough draft, but Eve was his masterpiece.

Read over your compositions, and wherever you meet with a passage which you think is particularly fine, strike it out.

To see him act is like reading Shakespeare by flashes of lightning.

Creative people have more ideas and interests than any one person can do in a lifetime, and we accumulate the paraphernalia to prove it. (p. 54.)

One can use standard principles and textbooks in educating people for law, medicine, architecture, chemistry or almost any other profession—but not for the theater. For, in most professions, every practitioner uses the same tools and techniques, while the actor's chief instrument is himself. And since no two persons are alike, no universal rule is applicable to any two actors in exactly the same way.

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