Quotes About Artistry

Creativty is a god who comes around only when he pleases, and it isn't very often. But when he does come around, he sits at my desk and folds his wings and I offer him whatever he wants.

If this is so, then the distinction between scientists, poets, painters, and writers is not clear. In fact, it is possible that scientists, poets, painters, and writers are all members of the same family of people whose gift it is by nature to take those things which we call commonplace and to re-present them to us in such ways that our self-imposed limitations are expanded. Those people in whom this gift is especially pronounced, we call geniuses.

Art cannot be limited by temporal aberations

I hate talking about music, to tell you the truth.

The smart thing in the art world is to have one good idea and never have another.

One of the things you're doing when you make art, apart from entertaining yourself and other people, is trying to see what ways of working feel good, what feels right.

The lyrics are constructed as empirically as the music. I don't set out to say anything very important.

His could be the seductive face of an angel or a devil. A single stroke by the artist — or a vandal — could tilt it in favor of one or the other.

Great creations use something we understand to give us something we've never experienced.

Frankly, our music has too often been shallow, discordant, or played with a wooden concern for technical correctness but without feeling and passion.

This is what an artist is, she thought. This is the temperament you need to spend a whole day tinkering with a sentence, making sure that both the meaning and the music are right; to spend three or seven or ten years working on a book.

This is a book in which we will dance with language, not a book in which we will trudge toward remedial correctness.

What I have printed gives no knowledge of me--it evidences abilities of various kinds, if you will--and a dramatic sympathy with certain modifications of passion ... But I never have begun, even, what I hope I was born to begin and end--'R.B. a poem'.

Our current public education system is good at producing workers, but it can be a miserable place for creators, artists, and future leaders.

Advice for writers: if you're a writer, a real writer, a really, really real writer, like, REALLY a writer, you should not write a sentence like this one.

L.A. Woman is amazing, but when I was growing up I was into the Who.

I've generally got a good eye for design and proportion.

Being an artist is this kind of occupation in which you have to make people care about your obsession.

I wanted to be a voice that reflected experience and the world I lived in. So I knew in 1972 that to do this I would need to write very well and more individually than I had ever written before.

My Mind" and the country music I'd so long ignored. Hank

I put the mud on the wheel, I spun it, and I could work clay. It was a miracle. I could do clay without any thought, without any doubt. I knew nothing about clay and yet the skill came out of my hands. Clay was all I had—all that I was. Clay was all that was left of me. I was an animal that made pots.

Focus on your music and not technology.

Do you remember why you started playing?" "Why does anybody play? ... Are you a musician?" "Yes. ... Yes, I am." ... "Then you know why I play." ... "Because your spirit has to sing. Every musician's heart bears a song from the Creator, and he spends his life trying to duplicate it as an act of worship.

Other bands wanted to wreck hotel rooms; Roxy Music wanted to redecorate them.