Quotes About Artistry

What is the use of writing plays, what is the use of writing anything, if there is not a will which finally moulds chaos itself into a race of gods.

I'm not trying to reinvent the wheel. I'm just writing songs that I like, and that's where I've always come from.

Writing a song is so personal. You have to have trust in someone you're working with; otherwise, you're not gonna come out with something that's really you.

It's what the Pixies always said about music - they were writing songs and just trying not to be boring. That was their main motivation and it worked for them. I remember reading that and thinking that was the way to do it.

Writing fiction, I really just sit there and it just comes.

People love talking about writers as storytellers, but I hate being called that: it suggests I got it from my grandmother or something, when my writing really comes out of silence. If a storyteller came up to me, I'd run away.

I didn't feel the need for anonymous affection, for people in the dark applauding. To me, it would be like writing a novel and then getting up every night and reading your novel. Everything I did is on the record and, if you want to hear it, just listen to the record.

There's an effort to reclaim the unmentionable, the unsayable, the unspeakable, all those things come into being a composer, into writing music, into searching for notes and pieces of musical information that don't exist.

I kept writing not because I felt I was so good, but because I felt they were so bad, including Shakespeare, all those. The stilted formalism, like chewing cardboard.

Writing songs is like capturing birds without killing them. Sometimes you end up with nothing but a mouthful of feathers.

For me, writing a song, I sit down and the process doesn't really involve me thinking about the demographic of people I'm trying to hit or who I want to be able to relate to the song or what genre of music it falls under.

Writing by myself in my bedroom is definitely where I feel most creative.

Writing for other artists helped me figure out that magic you have to capture to make everyone connect with a song.

When I'm writing, I like to seal everything off and face the wall, not to look outside the window. The only way out is through the sentences.

Writing is sort of putting a puzzle together halfway. Then, performing it has always been the completion of it. Once that happens, I'm feeling verbally communal with other people. It's out there and I feel so much better about it.

Writing a novel is an act of self-annihilation as much as self-discovery. You can kill whole appetites and flood whole depths while plumbing them, but if you are serious about it you also get to put something into the world that wasn't quite there before.

She assumes that skill will guide her fingertips, that shapely lines will uncoil out of the pencil the moment she starts. Surely talent is a thing curled deep inside, just waiting to be exercised, and at the slightest invitation it will stretch, shake itself, make itself known? Talent, it seems, is not so insistent.

What good is it being a painter if you can't paint yourself?

It doesn't pose or represent the world. It becomes.

Pouring out ideas is better for creativity than doling them out by the teaspoon.

Without poets, without artists... everything would fall apart into chaos. There would be no more seasons, no more civilizations, no more thought, no more humanity, no more life even; and impotent darkness would reign forever. Poets and artists together determine the features of their age, and the future meekly conforms to their edit.

those works that don't touch the heart, it seems to me, miss the true aim of Art.

What is best in music is not to be found in the notes.

You must write for yourself, above all. That is your only hope of creating something beautiful.