Quotes About Artistry

When I was a kid my Dad never let me sing Patsy Cline songs for one simple reason: they've already been done.

Constantly risking absurdity and death whenever he performs above the heads of his audience, the poet, like an acrobat, climbs on rhyme to a high wire of his own making.

To finish is sadness to a writer — a little death. He puts the last word down and it is done. But it isn't really done. The story goes on and leaves the writer behind, for no story is ever done.

I am not opposed to doing a side project, like Death Cab for Cutie, where it's completely different from my own band.

The artist in his calling of interpreter creates because he must. He is so much of a voice that, for him, silence is like death

By the creative act, we are able to reach beyond our own death.

Whatever we set out to make- a meal, a table, a bed- we should make as well as we can. To do otherwise is spiritless.

We understand God best, Dorothy Sayers suggests, by thinking of God as a creative artist. Imagine God as an engineer or watchmaker or immovable force, and you will go astray. God's image shines through us most clearly in the act of creation-comprising the three stages of Idea, Expression, and Recognition-and by reproducing this act we may begin to grasp, by analogy, the Trinity.

The artist became a subcreator.

When you are still and thoughtful you are as lovely as the statues they are carving in Italy.

and publishing. To take a thought and work on it, to render it into the clearest form possible, and then to send it out into the world – this is work so precious and so joyful that I am not surprised that men have kept it to themselves.

Everybody has the same energy potential. The average person wastes his in a dozen little ways. I bring mine to bear on one thing only: my paintings, and everything else is sacrificed to it...myself included.

Todos los niños nacen artistas. El problema es cómo seguir siendo artista cuando creces.

Will not the good man, who says whatever he says with a view to the best, speak with a reference to some standard and not at random; just as all other artists, whether the painter, the builder, the shipwright, or any other look all of them to their own work, and do not select and apply at random what they apply, but strive to give a definite form to it?

Everything that is responsible for creating something out of nothing is a kind of poetry; and so all the creations of every craft and profession are themselves a kind of poetry, and everyone who practices a craft is a poet.

Bending to her task, she picked up the pen, dipped it into the inkwell, and feverishly began to write again.

Any fool can kill. It takes genius to create.

I hate that I see the world through eyes you crafted.

You don't just have ink in your blood. It's in your bones. Your skeleton's black with it.

If you have to pay the bills, and you write something you're not proud of, use a pen-name for that.

Mozart's concerto K. 453

Poets are excellent students of blizzards and salt and broken statuary, but they are always elsewhere for the test. Any intention in the writing of poetry besides the aim to make a poem, of engaging the materials, SHOULD be disappointed. If the poet does not have the chutzpah to jeopardize habituated assumptions and practices, what will be produced will be sleep without dream, a copy of a copy of a copy.

one of the saddest things in life is to die with the music still inside us. There's tremendous talent in Peter that has been long denied. When I knew him, he was one of the most promising artists in college. His work was praised by staff and students alike. His potential was breathtaking.

Addicted to the small comfort I felt when I centered myself and concentrated on creating something beautiful.