Quotes About Artistry

the great thing about literature is that you can imagine; the great thing about film is that you can't.

Artists cannot be trained. One does not become an artist by acquiring certain skills or techniques, though one can use any number of skills and techniques in artistic activity. The creative is found in anyone who is prepared for surprise. Such a person cannot go to school to be an artist, but can only go to school as an artist.

Artists cannot be trained. One does not become an artist by acquiring certain skills or techniques, though one can use any number of skills and techniques in artistic activity. The creative is found in anyone who is prepared for surprise. Such a person cannot go to school to be an artist, but can only go to school as an artist. Therefore

Michelangelo once said that David already exists in the unpolished block of marble; the artist's job is to set him free by carving away everything that isn't David.

Craftwork--it is neither as easy as faith, nor as sure as science.

Give yourself permission to be bad. Write first, polish later.

Well, I think one of the main things that you have to think about when acting in the movies is to try not to make the acting show.

I don't read music. I don't write it. So I wander around on the guitar until something starts to present itself.

You know what Picasso says. 'Bad artists copy, good artists steal.' Still with real greatness, there's a jolt at the end of the wire. It doesn't matter how often you grab hold of the line, or how many people have grabbed hold of it before you. It's the same line. Fallen from a higher life. It still carries some of the same shock.

I write because I've always written, can't stop. I am a writing animal. The way a silk worm is a silk-producing animal.

she could not see what good it would do anyone to read a novel of this kind. Yet she was writing it.

There are no laws for the novel. There never have been, nor can there ever be.

And for Adam Blacklock the artist, older, wiser, and perhaps less vulnerable than once he had been, a chance to assess from maturity a person whose maturity was and always had been a thing disconcerting to witness. For what, after these violent years, would entertain or even interest Francis Crawford, Blacklock found he had no idea.

Whatever is wrong, I am sure with his sense of the picturesque, Francis will succeed in manifesting a fadeur exquise.

I asked,' Sybilla said, 'because I have seen him like this before … once; when he elected to take everyone else's business in hand and return it to them correctly aligned, like an artist with a child's drawing.

Mother of God, Francis Crawford of Lymond, you've made a slut of your art, have you not, as well as a whore of yourself?

To make a deliberate falsification for personal gain is the last, worst depth to which either scholar or artist can descend in work or life. ( Letter to Muriel St. Clare Byrne , 8 September 1935)

N]othing about a book is so unmistakable and so irreplaceable as the stamp of the cultured mind. I don't care what the story is about or what may be the momentary craze for books that appear to have been hammered out by the village blacksmith in a state of intoxication; the minute you get the easy touch of the real craftsman with centuries of civilisation behind him, you get literature.

Authors and actors and artists and such - Never know nothing, and never know much.

Creativity is a wild mind and a disciplined eye.

You see some of these actors, they have a permanent smile on their face. How can they do that? It really fascinates me.

That's the thing with handmade items. They still have the person's mark on them, and when you hold them, you feel less alone.

But now, as I recall my past works in order to write about them, the people from the past whom I had at last forgotten come to life again in my head, clamoring for attention, each one asserting his own individuality. I am at a loss. Each one is to me like a child of my own that I gave birth to and raised.

There is nothing that says more about its creator than the work itself.