Quotes About Artistry

Remember that in order to recover as an artist, you must be willing to be a bad artist. Give yourself permission to be a beginner. By being willing to be a bad artist, you have a chance to be an artist, and perhaps, over time, a very good one.

Great Creator, I will take care of the quantity. You take care of the quality.

Be careful to safeguard your newly recovering artist. Often, creativity is blocked by our falling in with other people's plans for us. We want to set aside time for our creative work, but we feel we should do something else instead. As blocked creatives, we focus not on our responsibilities to ourselves, but on our responsibilities to others. We tend to think such behavior makes us good people. It doesn't. It makes us frustrated people.

You do not take anyone on this artist date but you and your inner artist, a.k.a. your creative child. That means no lovers, friends, spouses, children—no taggers-on of any stripe.

Para lograr una buena relación con nuestra creatividad debemos dedicar el tiempo suficiente a cultivarla y cuidarla.

Our creativity is our gift from God. Our use of it is our gift to God.

When we forget ourselves, when we let go of being good and settle into just being a writer, we begin to have the experience of writing through us.

Artists themselves but ignorant of their true identity, shadow artists are to be found shadowing declared artists. Unable to recognize that they themselves may possess the creativity they so admire, they often date or marry people who

Remember, your artist is a child. Find and protect that child. Learning to let yourself create is like learning to walk.

The artist child must begin by crawling. Baby steps will follow and there will be falls—yecchy first paintings, beginning films that look like unedited home movies, first poems that would shame a greeting card.

Typically, the recovering shadow artist will use these early efforts to discourage continued exploration. To live a creative life, we must lose our fear of being wrong. JOSEPH CHILTON PEARCE

We are the instruments more than the author of our work

Living is a form of not being sure, not knowing what next or how. The moment you know how, you begin to die a little. The artist never entirely knows. We guess. We may be wrong, but we take leap after leap in the dark. AGNES DE MILLE

something, what we mean is that we won't do something unless we can guarantee that we'll do it perfectly. Working artists know the folly of

If you work on your creativity, you will grow spiritually. If you work on your spirituality, you will grow creatively. Creativity and spirituality are so close they are intertwined. We call God 'the Creator' without realizing it is another word for 'artist.' The Creator is the consummate artist. As we explore and express our artistry, we are imitating God. Is it any wonder we begin to find spiritual support?

Creativity is the natural order of life, nothing we need to invent. Put simply, creativity is God's gift to us. Our use of it is our gift back to God. We are intended to be creative.

Whole plots can be stitched up while we sew. As artists, we can very literally reap what we sew.

Remember that it is far harder and more painful to be a blocked artist than it is to do the work.

Creativity requires action, and part of that action must be physical.

I learned to get out of the way and let that creative force work through me.

By being willing to be a bad artist, you have a chance to be an artist, and perhaps, over time, a very good one.

I discovered that when one follows the artist's eye one sees unexpected treasures in so many seemingly ordinary scenes.

the monotony of quiet creativity, imagination fueled by routine and isolation

You can't love someone without imaginative sympathy, without beginning to see the world from another point of view. You can't be a good lover, a good artist or a good politician without this capacity (you can get away with it, but that's not what I mean). Show me the tyrants who have been great lovers.