Quotes About Artistry

The hands of the artificer," Paul said, "had wu, and allowed that wu to flow into this piece. Possibly he himself knows only that this piece satisfies. It is complete, Robert. By contemplating it, we gain more wu ourselves.

They know a million tricks, those novelists.

Anything that was associated with human workmanship and human thought was surrounded by Shadows.…

It was just as Dr. Relf had described it to him, but finer than he could ever have imagined. The thirty-six pictures around the dial were minute and clear, the three hands and the one needle were exquisitely shaped out of some silver-gray metal, and a golden sunburst surrounded the center of the dial.

With every second that went past, with every sentence she spoke, she felt a little strength flowing back. And now that she was doing something difficult and familiar and never quite predictable, namely lying, she felt a sort of mastery again, the same sense of complexity and control that the alethiometer gave her. She had to be careful not to say anything obviously impossible; she had to be vague in some places and invent plausible details in others; she had to be an artist, in short.

I turn sentences around. That's my life. I write a sentence and then I turn it around. Then I look at it and turn it around again...

He is not simply looking into the mirror because he is transfixed by what he sees. Rather, the artist's success depends as much as anything on his powers of detachment, on de-narcissizing himself… Freud… studied his own dreams not because he was a "narcissist," but because he was a student of dreams. And whose were at once the least and most accessible of dreams, if not his own?

I turn sentences around. That's my life. I write a sentence and then I turn it around. Then I look at it and I turn it around again. Then I have lunch. Then I come back in and write another sentence. Then I have tea and turn the new sentence around. Then I read the two sentences over and turn them both around. Then I lie down on my sofa and think. Then I get up and throw them out and start from the beginning.

The life he described sounded like paradise to me; that he could think to do nothing better with his time than turn sentences around seemed to me a blessing bestowed not only upon him but upon world literature.

La fente, comme tracée au tire-ligne, cette superbe couture rabattue, qui s'épanouira un jour en pétales et, au fil du temps, deviendra le con de la femme, un pliage d'origami.

If artists, writers and musicians were not just a little delusional, they would all have office jobs.

The finest workers in stone are not copper or steel tools but the gentle touches of air and water working at their leisure with their liberal allowance of time.

Striving for perfection can get in the way during the early stages of the creative process.

Making love without noise is like playing a muted piano-fine for practice, but you cheat yourself out of hearing the glorious results.

You do not need to be writing or painting or sculpting in order to be creative. You must simply create.

She is sitting right next to me. I want to run my finger along her arm. I want to kiss her neck. I want to whisper the truth in her ear. But instead I watch as she conjugates verbs. I listen as the air is filled with a foreign language, spoken in haphazard bursts. I try to sketch her in my notebook, but I am not an artist, and all that comes out are the wrong shapes, the wrong lines. I cannot hold onto anything that's her.

but the creative juices dry up if they're not kept in circulation.

It is more frightening but it is not less productive to go your own way, to form your own theatre company, to write and stage your own plays, to make your own films. You have an enormously greater chance of eventually presenting yourself to, and eventually appealing to, an audience by striking out on your own, by making your own plays and films, than by submitting to the industrial model of the school and studio.

Demasiadas notas, mi querido Mozart.

If you write a phrase and think, 'Wow, that's really poetic, that's really pretty, I really nailed it,' you get rid of it [because] you've overdone it.

Do you have a feel for the guitar? Do you have any idea what this little baby is capable of?" Without waiting for an answer, he climbed up into his chair and began playing "Light My Fire," adding, "This one is for Joan.

Artists can color the sky red because they know it's blue. Those of us who aren't artists must color things the way they really are or people might think we're stupid." —Jules Feiffer

Too many musicians — singers and instrumentalists — performed it so many times that it's hard not to just go through the motions of playing (or singing) the notes, rather than remembering that you have to turn the notes into real music.

Although there can be fast improvements all over a book, it won't gel into a single cohesive life right away. Keep going, keep faith, because it can follow the reductive dynamic of a slow meat stock. You boil it down for fifty hours, and, sure, it distils mathematically, you can see it reducing and growing richer hour by hour. But flavour and texture don't gel until the last ten minutes. Always simmer your work until then.