Quotes About Art

I think telling stories is like pushing something. Pushing against uncreation itself, maybe.

if you tell yourself the great lie of bad art-that you are in charge-your chance at the truth will be lost. The truth isn't always pretty.

How life did imitate art sometimes. And the cruder the art, the closer the imitation.

The idea that creative endeavor and mind-altering substances are entwined is one of the great pop-intellectual myths of our time.

Language does not always have to wear a tie and lace-up shoes. The object of fiction isn't grammatical correctness but to make the reader welcome and then tell a story  . . . . to make him/her forget, whenever possible, that he/she is reading a story at all.

Stay hungry. It worked for Michelangelo, it worked for Picasso, and it works for a hundred thousand artists who do it not for love (although that might play a part) but in order to put food on the table. If you want to translate the world, you need to use your appetites. Does this surprise you? It shouldn't. There's no creation without talent, I give you that, but talent is cheap. Talent goes begging. Hunger is the piston of art.

Don't wait for the muse.

For me writing has always been best when it's intimate, as sexy as skin on skin.

Start with a blank surface. It doesn't have to be paper or canvas, but I feel it should be white. We call it white because we need a word, but its true name is nothing. Black is the absence of light, but white is the absence of memory, the color of can't remember.

I once heard about some millionaire who had a stolen Rembrandt in his basement where no one but him could see it. I could understand that guy. I don't mean that Arnie was a Rembrandt, or even a world-class wit, but I could understand the attraction of knowing about something good ... something that was good but still a secret.

I pointed at Wireman's forehead. This is your brain, I said. Then I pointed at my easel. This is your brain on canvas.

I gradually realized that I was seeing another example of creative ebb, another step by another art on the road that may indeed end in extinction.

I never think of stories as made things; I think of them as found things. As if you pull them out of the ground, and you just pick them up. Someone once told me that that was me low-balling my own creativity. That might or might not be the case. But still, on the story I am working on now, I do have some unresolved problem. It doesn't keep me awake at nights. I feel like when it comes down, it will be there...

I scratched the word HELLO in small letters. ... And as names go, it's a good one, isn't it? In spite of all the damage that followed, I still think that's the perfect name for a picture drawn by a man who was trying his best not to be sad anymore - who was trying to remember how it felt to be happy.

Writing may be masturbatory, but God forbid it should be an act off autocannibalism.

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.

Cheat your landlord if you can and must, but do not try to shortchange the Muse. It cannot be done. You can't fake quality any more than you can fake a good meal.

No one presumes to teach an art that he has not first mastered through study. How foolish therefore for the inexperienced to assume pastoral authority when the care of souls is the art of arts.

Reality is what we tell to go screw itself every time we write or read a book, shoot or watch a movie.

Writing was the only thing that populated my life and made it magic.

Art becomes an honest expression once done for oneself. Failure of that results to empty and transparent art.

Darkness is the womb from which a poet is born.

My job as a writer is simple.Write a book I'm proud of, and present it as a gift to the world.Some will love it.Some will hate it.That's the nature of art.

Writers live twice.