Quotes About Artistry

I've got to know that I'm singing something with truth to it. My songs are different than anybody else's songs. Other artists can get by on their voices and their style, but my songs speak volumes, and all I have to to is lay them down correctly, lyrically, and they'll do what they need to do.

If I wanted to be a painter, I might think about trying to be like Van Gogh, or if I was an actor, act like Laurence Olivier. If I was an architect, there's Frank Gehry. But you can't just copy somebody. If you like someone's work, the important thing is to be exposed to everything that person has been exposed to.

The world don't need any more songs... As a matter of fact, if nobody wrote any songs from this day on, the world ain't gonna suffer for it... There's enough songs for people to listen to, if they want to listen to songs. For every man, woman and child on earth, they could be sent, probably, each of them, a hundred songs, and never be repeated... Unless someone's gonna come along with a pure heart and has something to say. That's a different story.

I'm listening to Neil Young, I gotta turn up the sound. Someone's always yellin', 'Turn him down'. -- Highlands from Time Out of Mind (1997)

It's one of those songs that makes a good record but it's too much work to make it believable in live performance.

Life isn't about finding yourself, or finding anything. Life is about creating yourself. And creating things.

I think I'm gonna get me new Bob Dylan next week, get me a new Bob Dylan and use him. Here's the new Bob Dylan, see how long he lasts.

Then there's the trap of easy rhymes.

he never did like to talk about it all that much 'It's my work,' he'd say, 'and I do it for pay

You don't become an 'artist' unless you've got something missing somewhere. Blaise Pascal called it a God-shaped hole. Everyone's got one but some are blacker and wider than others. It's a feeling of being abandoned,cut adrift in space and time-sometimes following the loss of a loved one. You can never completely fill that hole-you can try with songs,family,faith and by living a full life...but when things are silent, you can still hear the hissing of what's missing.

No duermas artista, no duermas, no te entregues al sueño.

Yazar?, esin perilerinin boyunduruÄŸu alt?nda yazan ateÅŸli bir dahi hayvan olarak görmenin tehlikeli olduÄŸunu düÅŸünüyorum ben.

I must be lean & write & make worlds beside this to live in.

Oh what a poet I will flay myself into.

She used every emotional experience as if it were a scrap of material that could be pieced together to make a wonderful dress; she wasted nothing of what she felt, and when in control of those tumultuous feelings she was able to focus and direct her incredible poetic energy to great effect.

Every day, writing. No matter how bad. Something will come.

I suppose if you can write sestinas which bam crash through lines and rules after having raped them to the purpose, then you can be satanic and smile like a cretin beelzebub.

But will do 5 pages a day until plodding I catch up. Use words as poet uses words. That is it! Gulley Jimson is an artist with words, too – – – or, rather Joyce Cary is. But I must be a word-artist. The

O, only left to myself, what a poet I will flay myself into.

It is sad to be able only to mouth other poets. I want someone to mouth me.

It is quite conversational sounding in spite of the elaborate 7-line pentameter stanzas rhyming ababcbc and is more ambitious than anything I've ever done, although I feel to be doing it like a patchwork quilt, without anything more than the general idea it should come out a rectangular shape, but not seeing how the logical varicolored pieces should fit.

The progress of an artist is a continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality.

No poet, no artist of any art has his complete meaning alone. His significance, his appreciation is the appreciation of his relation to the dead poets and artists.

Having top-of-the-line tools is imperative, but being the top-notch carpenter who masterfully uses those tools is even more critical.