Quotes About Artistry

Art is the sex of imagination.

A dainty rogue in porcelain

America is very, very cruel to its artists. It doesn't give them a chance for growth. It doesn't give them elbow room for change. There's no room at all for failure." - Carol Marcus Matthau

Art is not a democracy.

A harp can be a dangerous as a sword, in the right hands.

Ten years from now, no one is going to care how quickly the books came out. The only thing that will matter, the only thing anyone will remember, is how good they were. That's my main concern, and always will be.

One day the singers will make all of us immortal.

If the novels are still being read in 50 years, no one is ever going to say: 'What's great about that sixth book is that he met his deadline!' It will be about how the whole thing stands up.

The effort of art is to keep what is interesting in existence, to recreate it in the eternal.

When I write a page that reads badly I know that it is myself who has written it. When it reads well it has come through from somewhere else.

There are only three things that America will be remembered for 2000 years from now when they study this civilization: The Constitution, Jazz music, and Baseball. These are the 3 most beautiful things this culture's ever created.

But perhaps one day I will be entrusted with daughters of my own, and if so, I swear I will not see their minds molded into society's simpering ideal of womanhood. Oh how I would like to raise writers and artists who would make the world acknowledge what women can do!

People think the Beatles know what's going on. We don't. We're just doing it.

Living is a form of not being sure, not knowing what next or how. The moment you know how, you begin to die a little. The artist never entirely knows. We guess. We may be wrong, but we take leap after leap in the dark.

A good imitation is the most perfect originality.

Inspiration does not come like a bolt, nor is it kinetic energy striving, but it comes to us slowly and quietly and all the time.

I write out of instinct.

You know what you do when you shit, singing is the same thing, only up!

Oboe - an ill woodwind that nobody blows good.

I write as a sow piddles.

Harpists spend half their life tuning and the other half playing out of tune.

O black and unknown bards of long ago, How came your lips to touch the sacred fire? How, in your darkness, did you come to know The power and beauty of the minstrel's lyre?

I must study politics and war, that my sons may have the liberty to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history, and naval architecture, navigation, commerce, and agriculture, in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry and porcelain.

At times failure is very necessary for the artist. It reminds him that failure is not the ultimate disaster. And this reminder liberates him from the mean fussing of perfectionism.