Quotes About Artistry

One must not hold one's self so divine as to be unwilling occasionally to make improvements in one's creations.

Photographers, along with dentists, are the two professions never satisfied with what they do. Every dentist would like to be a doctor and inside every photographer is a painter trying to get out.

Before a painter puts a brush to his canvas he sees his picture mentally.... If you think of yourself in terms of a painting, what do you see? ... Is the picture one you think worth painting? ... You create yourself in the image you hold in your mind.

Every director bites the hand that lays the golden egg.

I have the feeling when I write poetry that I'm doing what I'm supposed to do. You don't think about whether you're going to get money or fame, you just do it.

A man like Verdi must write like Verdi.

I write lustily and humorously. It isn't calculated; it's the way I think. I've invented a writing style that expresses who I am.

A musician must make music, an artist must paint, a poet must write, if he to be at peace with himself. What a man can be, he must be.

He gets a good hold on the paintbrush, then confidently has the ladder removed.

Imitation can acquire pretty much everything but the power which created the thing imitated.

Sex is the great amateur art.

Style is the dress of thoughts.

My mother said to me, "If you become a soldier, you'll be a general, if you become a monk you'll end up as the pope." Instead, I became a painter and wound up as Picasso.

The present moment is creative, creating with an unheard-of intensity.

Take your needle, my child, and work at your pattern; it will come out a rose by and by. Life is like that; one stitch at a time taken patiently, and the pattern will come out all right, like embroidery.

The artist doesn't see things as they are, but as he is.

It is only when I am doing my work that I feel truly alive. It is like having sex.

Writers aren't exactly people, they're a whole lot of people trying to be one person.

Writing is one of the easiest things: erasing is one of the hardest.

Read over your compositions, and when you meet a passage which you think is particularly fine, strike it out.

Every writer, without exception, is a masochist, a sadist, a peeping Tom, an exhibitionist, a narcissist, an injustice collector and a depressed person constantly haunted by fears of unproductivity.

When the style is fully formed, if it has a sweet undersong, we call it beautiful, and the writer may do what he likes in words or syntax.

A writer and nothing else: a man alone in a room with the English language, trying to get human feelings right.

Writing is easy: all you do is sit staring at the blank sheet of paper until the drops of blood form on your forehead.