Quotes About Art

Younger artists are seedlings. Their early work resembles thicket and underbrush, even weeds. The halls of academia, with their preference for lofty intellectual theorems, do little to support the life of the forest floor.

The act of making art is both scary and healing. Art brings light to places that have remained dark. Art brings perspective. Making art, at any level, is an act of courage and an expression of faith.

Self-expression is something that does not—and should not—ever stop.

Most of us are really willing only to write well, and this is why the act of writing strains us.

Painting is just another way of keeping a diary. PABLO PICASSO

Poetry often enters through the window of irrelevance. M. C. RICHARDS

The great acting coach Michael Chekhov advised his students, "If you want to work on your art, work on your life.

Artists and intellectuals are not he same animal. This causes a great deal of confusion. Our schools teach educate us intellectually but not artistically. We learn to deconstruct art, not construct it.

Perfectionism is a refusal to let yourself move ahead. It is a loop—an obsessive, debilitating closed system that causes you to get stuck in the details of what you are writing or painting or making and to lose sight of the whole.

If we are invested in a writing life—as opposed to a writing career—then we are in it for the process and not the product.

We cannot control the reception of our work. We must find our dignity in the doing.

Artists who seek perfection in everything are those who cannot attain it in anything. EUGÈNE DELACROIX

Writing goes much better when we don't work at it so much. When we give ourselves permission to just hang out on the page.

The primary imagination I hold to be the Living Power. SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE

Making art has taught me that the tiniest smidgen of progress is something to be savored.

The purpose of art is not a rarified, intellectual distillate— it is life, intensified, brilliant life. ALAIN ARIAS-MISSON

Doing it all the time, whether or not we are in the mood, gives us ownership of our writing ability. It takes it out of the realm of conjuring where we stand on the rock of isolation, begging the winds for inspiration, and it makes it something as do-able as picking up a hammer and pounding a nail. Writing may be an art, but it is certainly a craft. It is a simple and workable thing that can be as steady and reliable as a chore—does that ruin the romance?

I do not put in long hours at the keys - or very seldom. Instead, I snatch time. I write in the crannies of my life.

Mulling on the page is an artless art form. It is fooling around. It is doodling. It is the way that ideas slowly take shape and form until they are ready to help us see the light. All too often, we try to push, pull, outline, and control our ideas instead of letting them grow organically. The creative process is a process of surrender, not control.

Creativity lives in paradox: serious art is born from serious play.

Writing is like breathing, it's possible to learn to do it well, but the point is to do it no matter what.

Boredom is just "What's the use?" in disguise. And "What's the use?" is fear, and fear means you are secretly in despair. So put your fears on the page. Put anything on the page. Put three pages of it on the page. THE ARTIST DATE The other basic tool of The Artist's Way may strike you as a nontool, a diversion.

Writing, as we are taught to do it, becomes an antihuman activity. We are forever editing, leaving out the details that might not be pertinent. We are trained to self-doubt, to self-scrutiny in the place of self-expression.

The trick to finding writing time, then, is to write from love and not with an eye to product. Don't try to write something perfect; just write. Don't try to write the whole megillah; just start the whole megillah.