Quotes About Art

When artists are burdened with the label of "genius," I think they lose the ability to take themselves lightly, or to create freely.

Creative living is a path for the brave. a

Creativity is a path for the brave, yes, but it is not a path for the fearless, and it's important to recognize the distinction.

Stop treating your creativity like it's a tired, old, unhappy marriage (a grind, a drag) and start regarding it with the fresh eyes of a passionate lover. Even if you have only fifteen minutes a day in a stairwell alone with your creativity, take it. Go hide in that stairwell and make out with your art.

And while the paths and outcomes of creative living will vary wildly from person to person, I can guarantee you this: A creative life is an amplified life. It's a bigger life, a happier life, an expanded life, and a hell of a lot more interesting life. Living in this manner—continually and stubbornly bringing forth the jewels that are hidden within you—is a fine art, in and of itself.

You can recognize the people who live for others by the haunted look on the faces of the others. I would so much rather you wrote a book in order to entertain yourself than to help me. Or if your subject matter is darker and more serious, I would prefer that you made your art in order to save yourself or to relive yourself of some great psychic burden, rather than to save or relieve us.

But you do not need your fear in the realm of creative expression.

Music is nothing more than decoration for the imagination. That

Artists, by nature, are gamblers. Gambling is a dangerous habit. But whenever you make art, you're always gambling. You're rolling the dice on the slim odds that your investment of time, energy, and resources now might pay off later in a big way—that somebody might buy your work, and that you might become successful.

The guardians of high culture will try to convince you that the arts belong only to a chosen few, but they are wrong and they are also annoying. We are all the chosen few. We are all makers by design.

I would so much rather that you wrote a book in order to entertain yourself than to help me. Or if your subject matter is darker and more serious, I would prefer that you made your art in order to save yourself, or to relieve yourself of some great psychic burden, rather than to save or relieve us.

Your own reasons to create are reason enough.

creative living is a path for the brave. We

One year, Alma bought Prudence- who liked to draw flowers (beautifully, though not 'accurately')- a lovely book on botanical illustration called Every Lady Her Own Drawing Master: A New Treatise on Flower Painting. That same year, Prudence made for Alma an exquisite satin pincushion, rendered in Alma's favorite color, aubergine.

I believe that our creativity grows like sidewalk weeds out of the cracks between our pathologies—not from the pathologies themselves. But so many people think it's the other way around.

Even if you have only fifteen minutes a day in a stairwell alone with your creativity, take it. Go hide in that stairwell and make out with your art! (You can get a lot of making out done in fifteen minutes, as any furtive teenager can tell you.)

There's a hole in our world from all the art those people did not make—there is a hole in us from the loss of their work—and I cannot imagine this was ever anyone's divine plan.

Creativity is sacred, and it is not sacred. What we make matters enormously, and it doesn't matter at all. We toil alone, and we are accompanied by spirits. We are terrified, and we are brave. Art is a crushing chore and a wonderful privilege. Only when we are at our most playful can divinity finally get serious with us.

it seems to me that my fear and my creativity are basically conjoined twins—as evidenced by the fact that creativity cannot take a single step forward without fear marching right alongside it.

Creative living is a path for the brave.

Creativity is sacred, and it is not sacred. What we make matters enormously, and it doesn't matter at all. We toil alone, and we are accompanied by spirits. We are terrified, and we are brave. Art is a crushing chore and a wonderful privilege.

I believe that our creativity grows like sidewalk weeds out of the cracks between our pathologies—not from the pathologies themselves.

Wendell Berry warned, "To attribute to the Muse a special fondness for pain is to come too close to desiring and cultivating pain.

I'm with the British psychoanalyst Adam Phillips on this point, when he observes: "If the art legitimates cruelty, I think the art is not worth having.