Quotes About Art

The art of the pitch was to keep it clear, quick, with a good sense of suspense toward a climax, leading to a single conclusion. It had to be a story, in other words.

History is scholarship. It is also art, and it is literature.

Writing isn't about making money, getting famous, getting dates, getting laid, or making friends. In the end, it's about enriching the lives of those who will read your work, and enriching your own life, as well. It's about getting up, getting well, and getting over. Getting happy, okay? Getting happy.

Life isn't a support system for art. It's the other way around.

Writers remember everything...especially the hurts. Strip a writer to the buff, point to the scars, and he'll tell you the story of each small one. From the big ones you get novels. A little talent is a nice thing to have if you want to be a writer, but the only real requirement is the ability to remember the story of every scar. Art consists of the persistence of memory.

Words create sentences; sentences create paragraphs; sometimes paragraphs quicken and begin to breathe.

It starts with this: put your desk in the corner, and every time you sit down there to write, remind yourself why it isn't in the middle of the room. Life isn't a support system for art. It's the other way around.

Writing is magic, as much the water of life as any other creative art. The water is free. So drink. Drink and be filled up.

The muses are ghosts, and sometimes they come uninvited.

Dancing is life.

Let me say it again: You must not come lightly to the blank page.

Some of this book—perhaps too much—has been about how I learned to do it. Much of it has been about how you can do it better. The rest of it—and perhaps the best of it—is a permission slip: you can, you should, and if you're brave enough to start, you will. Writing is magic, as much the water of life as any other creative art. The water is free. So drink. Drink and be filled up.

Art should be a place of hope.

Reading is the creative center of a writer's life. -

As with all other aspects of the narrative art, you will improve with practice, but practice will never make you perfect. Why should it? What fun would that be?

Grammar is...the pole you grab to get your thoughts up on their feet and walking.

The sleep of reason breeds monsters.

Readers have a loyalty that cannot be matched anywhere else in the creative arts, which explains why so many writers who have run out of gas can keep coasting anyway, propelled on to the bestseller lists by the magic words AUTHOR OF on the covers of their books.

How to Draw a Picture (XII) Know when you're finished, and when you are, put your pencil or your paintbrush down. All the rest is only life.

Sometimes stories cry out to be told in such loud voices that you write them just to shut them up.

Art is the concrete artifact of faith and expectation, the realization of a world that would otherwise be little more than a veil of pointless consciousness stretched over a gulf of mystery.

Writing does not cause misery, it is born of misery. – Montaigne

Sometimes it takes heart to write about a thing, doesn't it? To let that thing out of the room way in the back of your mind and put it up there on the screen.

If you write (or paint or dance or sculpt or sing, I suppose), someone will try to make you feel lousy about it, that's all. I'm not editorializing, just trying to give you the facts as I see them.