Quotes About Artistry

All gut strings. That's just the first kind of guitar I played, it was a nylon string guitar. And to me, it's the purest form of guitar making, and I just enjoy doing it.

true art, be it painting or novel or drama or music, selects and arranges.

He wasn't a poet, not everyone is.

A writer's brush is a warrior's bow, the letters it shapes are arrows that must hit the mark on the page. The calligrapher is an archer, or a general on a battlefield. Someone wrote that long ago. She feels that way this morning. She is at war.

We are the total of our longings, he had written. But Kevin was a song-writer, not a poet, and he never did use it.

And knowing, too, that this sort of artistry could not endure past the shaping moment, could only be spoken of after by those who recalled, or misrecalled, who had seen and half seen and not seen at all, distorted by memory and desire and ignorance, the achievement of it written as if on water or on sand. It mattered, terribly, and just now it didn't matter at all. Or could the fragility, the defining impermanence actually intensify the glory? The thing lost as soon as made?

You work on things and you have such faith in them while you're making them that everything feels special - in a way.

Being in a band you can wear whatever you want — it's like an excuse for Halloween everyday.

What she wanted was to donate to the world a good Maud Martha. That was the offering, the bit of art, that could not come from any other. She would polish and hone that.

The whole thing starts with a single knot and needles. A word and pen. Tie a loop in nothing. Look at it. Cast on, repeat the procedure till you have a line that you can work with. It's a pattern made of relation alone, my patience, my rhythm, till empty bights create a fabric that can be worn, if you're lucky and practised. It's never too late to pick up dropped stitches... (from "How to Knit a Poem")

Creativity, we're told, is not the finding of a thing, but the making something out of it after it is found.

Dreaming is an act of pure imagination, attesting in all men a creative power, which if it were available in waking, would make every man a Dante or Shakespeare.

A writer is] a priest of eternal imagination, transmuting the daily bread of experience into the radiant body of everliving life.

His soul had arisen from the grave of boyhood, spurning her grave-clothes. Yes! Yes! Yes! He would create proudly out of the freedom and power of his soul, as the great artificer whose name he bore, a living thing, new and soaring and beautiful, impalpable, imperishable.

Oftwhile balbulous, mithre ahead, with goodly trowel in grasp and ivoroiled overalls which he habitacularly fondseed...

No man, said the Nolan, can be a lover of the true or the good unless he abhors the multitude; and the artist, though he may employ the crowd, is very careful to isolate himself.

Do you feel how profound that is because you are a poet?

When all is said Dumas fils (or is it Dumas père?) is right. After God Shakespeare has created most.

The artist, like the God of creation, remains within or behind or beyond or above his handiwork, invisible, refined out of existence, indifferent, paring his fingernails.

In a mass culture, those few ideas or feelings unique to a person are easily deformed into conventional clichés: otherwise, everyone would be an artist.

There existed very long saxophones from years ago. The player sat on their chair like a cellist; that same sort of feeling to it as well - unlike for example the way a harpist would be: the whole act differing in a very fundamental sense. Although harpists are fine. There is nothing to be said against harpists by any means whatsoever.

You could see into your own soul with total honesty of vision and find the wherewithal to get it down, that steady hand.

El problema es que para cuando los profesores han acabado contigo, han arrasado completamente tu creatividad. Habla con los buenos estudiantes de «sobresaliente» y descubrirás que se han olvidado, en primer lugar, de porqué querían ser artistas. Todo lo que saben es reciclar la vieja basura rígida que aprendieron en la escuela.

We try not to encourage demonstrations of his mastery of the gaseous arts.