Quotes About Artistry

perfectionism will ruin your writing, blocking inventiveness and playfulness and life force

On writer's block: The word block suggests that you are constipated or stuck, when the truth is that you're empty.

This is what separates artists from ordinary people: the belief, deep in our hearts, that if we build our castles well enough, somehow the ocean won't wash them away. I think this is a wonderful kind of person to be.

While others who have something to say or who want to be effectual, like musicians or baseball players or politicians, have to get out there in front of people, writers, who tend to be shy, get to stay home and still be public. There are many obvious advantages to this. You don't have to dress up, for instance, and you can't hear them boo you right away.

One of the things that happens when you give yourself permission to sart writing is that you start thinking like a writer

Miles Davis saying, "Don't play what's there, play what's not there.

Ever since I was a little kid, I've thought that there was something noble and mysterious about writing, about the people who could do it well, who could create a world as if they were little gods or sorcerers. All my life I've felt that there was something magical about people who could get into other people's minds and skin, who could take people like me out of ourselves and then take us back to ourselves. And you know what? I still do.

Writing is about filling up, filling up when you are empty, letting images and ideas and smells run down like water - just as writing is also about dealing with the emptiness.

A gitar for Menolly? So we can judge the range of sounds she can make?

If I haven't put that on a T-shirt, I'm going to. Actually, I really don't want to write anything that can't be put on a T-shirt. Actually I'd like to write only on T-shirts. Actually, I'd like to write whole novels on T-shirts. So you guys could say, 'I'm wearing chapter 8 of Lestat's new book, that's my favorite; oh I see you're wearing chapter 6-

Don't bend; don't water it down; don't try to make it logical; don't edit your own soul according to the fashion. Rather, follow your most intense obsessions mercilessly. Only if you do that can you hope to make the reader feel every particle of what you, the writer, have known and feel compelled to share.---Forward to Kafka's Short stories

I've lived all these years among those who create nothing and change nothing,' I said. 'Actors and musicians-they're saints to me.

Actors and actresses make magic,' I said. 'They make things happen on the stage; they invent; they create.

It's all about aesthetics, morality and aesthetics are completely similar.

and what struck my heart almost as much as the song itself was the way that he seemed with his whole body to lean into the music, to press his soul like an ear to the instrument.

An artist, stealing paints from a store, for example, imagines himself to have made an inevitable but immoral decision, and then he sees himself as fallen from grace; what follows is despair and petty irresponsibility, as if morality were a great glass world which can be utterly shattered by one act.

He might have been made by God to he painted by Andrea del Santo, so delicately perfect did be seen.

You were always his inspiration. He imitated you.

What did it show of me? A long oval face, with features that were too delicate-a nose too narrow, eyes round with round eyebrows and a full cupid's bow mouth that made me look as if I were a twelve-year-old girl. No huge eyes, no high cheekbones, no rugged jaw. Just very pretty, yes, too pretty, which is why I'd scowled for most of the photographs taken for the portrait; but the artist hadn't saved that scowl into the face.

You know in this day and age a rock musician can wear a frock coat if he wishes, and so I indulge myself.

These creatures had no names for me. They might have come from any verse in Ovid, or from the writing of Lucretius, or indeed from the blind poet, Homer. It was no matter to me. I lost myself in depicting uplifted arms and graceful throats, in painting oval faces and garments blowing gently in the breeze.

Sybelle is obsessed with one thing, and that is playing the piano. For the first time she laid her hands on the keys she has wanted nothing else.

Not made by human hands, you see, but by the power invested in me, which passed through me and I had only to take up the brush and there the Virgin and the Saints were mine to discover.

Did you ever think how conceited those Oriental rug weavers are, to believe they have to try and make a mistake so as not to compete with God? Like they would have done it perfectly otherwise, if they hadn't forced themselves to mess it up?