Quotes About Artistry

The more technique you have the less you have to worry about it. The more technique there is the less there is.

My hand tells me what I'm thinking.

To copy others is necessary, but to copy oneself is pathetic.

We artists are indestructible, even in a prison cell or a concentration camp I would be all right in my own world of art. Even if I had to paint my pictures with my tongue on the dusty floor of my cell.

Jedes Kind ist ein Künstler. Das Problem ist, ein Künstler zu bleiben, wenn du erwachsen bist.

Impara le regole come un professionista, in modo da poterle rompere come un artista.

Magic happens in the rewrite!

Nobody wants you to be an artist or a writer, Maggie said. Not only did the world not care if you ever painted a picture or wrote a book, the world kind of wished you wouldn't. Your challenge was to do it anyway.

True or false? Ars est celare artem (Art lies in concealing the art).

To develop will by yourself is extremely difficult. You require an example before you. If you would be an artist, surround yourself with good paintings and artists. If you would be a divine man, surround yourself with spiritual company.

If any man love the instruments of any craft, the gods have called him.

If any man loves the instruments of any craft, the gods have called him.

when the words pour out of you just right, you understand that these sentences are all part of a river flowing out of your own distant, hidden ranges, and all words become the dissolving snow that feeds your mountain streams forever. The language locks itself in the icy slopes of our own high passes, and it is up to us, the writers, to melt the glaciers within us. When these glaciers break off, we get to call them novels, the changelings of our burning spirits, our life's work.

In our modern age, there are writers who have heaped scorn on the very idea of the primacy of story. I'd rather warm my hands on a sunlit ice floe than try to coax fire from the books they carve from glaciers.

She pronounced each word carefully, as though she was tasting fruit. The words of her poems were a most private and fragrant orchard.

Generally, writers descend from a lesser tribe, and whatever claim to beauty we have shows up on the printed page far more often than it does in our mirrors. Even as I writer these words I think of dozens off writers, both male and female, who make a mockery of this generalization. But comeliness among writers is rare enough to be noteworthy.

she was writing a letter in her beautiful penmanship, her sentences all like well-made bracelets.

You can say anything, anything, if it is beautifully said.

If the writer thinks about his material long enough, until it becomes a part of his mind and wakes up thinking about it- then at least when he starts to work, it will flow out as if by itself.

An artist does things naturally, without effort. Some power guides his hand. A forger struggles, and if he succeeds, it is a genuine achievement.

What immense satisfaction it must be to fashion a story like [Maupassant's]! One must say 'fashion' because it is not merely writing, but massing and cutting away like a sculptor, chiseling lean and clear. And to put one's work confidently in the crucible of Time; to know that in six perfect pages is the finest form of one's idea: This satisfaction is the only true reward of the artist, and this his highest possible joy on Earth.

For many centuries, nobles and magnates supported artists, musicians and authors so that their creative works would be dedicated to them.

One great work of art inspired by another.

Do you think it's ready? I [Silenus, The Poet] asked. It's perfect... a masterpiece. Do you think it'll sell? I asked. No fucking way.