Quotes About Artistry

I can play … I mean, as an effort of will I can sit down and learn a piece at the piano and reproduce it, so that those who hear will not necessarily move away with their hands clutched to their mouths, vomit leaking through fingers, blood dripping from ears.

as with almost all human practices, there are those who have the mysterious ability to raise the everyday and ordinary to the level of art.

Almost there! Those are not words any writer pines to hear. Much more preferable is "masterpiece" or "timeless brilliance" or "it shall live forever.

Art is limitation; the essence of every picture is the frame.

But writers INVITE ghosts, maybe; along with actors and artists, they are the only totally accepted mediums of our society. They make worlds that never were, populate them with people who never existed, and then invite us to join them in their fantasies. And we do it, don't we? Yes. We PAY to do it.

A writer is a man who has taught his mind to misbehave.

How to Draw a Picture (XII) Know when you're finished, and when you are, put your pencil or your paintbrush down. All the rest is only life.

A good novelist realizes he is a secretary, not God.

Things conceived by minds and made by hands can never be quite the same, even if they try their best to be identical, because they're never the same from day to day or even moment to moment.

When creative people do their best work, they're hardly ever in charge, they're just sort of rolling along with their eyes shut yelling wheee.

He didn't need a psychiatrist to point out that writing had its autoerotic side — you beat a typewriter instead of your meat, but both acts depended largely on quick wits, fast hands and a heartfelt commitment to the art of the farfetched.

If stone-sober people can fuck like they're out of their minds -- can actually be out of their minds while caught in that throe -- why shouldn't writers be able to go bonkers and still stay sane?

Keeping up the fiction. You have to keep it up, sometimes, no matter how you feel.

If a book is not alive in the writer's mind, it is as dead as year-old horse-shit

Remember, my talented friend, there are Michelangelos begging everywhere in the streets of Rome...

Think of those fingers as abilities. A creative person may write, paint, sculpt, or think up math formulae; he or she might dance or sing or play a musical instrument. Those are the fingers, but creativity is the hand that gives them life. & just as all hands are basically the same - form follows function - all creative people are the same once you get down to the place where the fingers join.

All the same, you don't do it for money, or you're a monkey. You don't think of the bottom line, or you're a monkey. You don't think of it in terms of hourly wage, yearly wage, even lifetime wage, or you're a monkey. In the end you don't even do it for love, although it would be nice to think so. You do it because to not do it is suicide.

Tomorrow is a blank canvas and you are the artist.

Shut the F--- up and create your f---ing art.

What are we artists for? We are for showing you what you've wandered for to find the home of your spirit...

Changing imagination into fiction is what I love to do.

You Are Your Own Michelangello Always".

I think acting is revealing to people what it means to be human.

Beauty is what you make of it. It is undefined and limitless.