Art Quotes - Page 61

Doggedness in art is no substitute for inspiration.

You have to believe that your voice can mean something. You have to believe that what you do matters. And you have to keep going even on days you can't find that belief. If you can't do it for yourself, you do it for all the other young souls who need to be shown that things are possible. That they too can do that thing they dream of. You do it despite the doubts and the struggles. You do it because it's what you came here to do.That's what makes an artist.

Charlotte Eriksson

There's a table with some catalogues and a guest book in the corner; there are artworks. Today, I need so badly to be inspired by them, even though I hate that word: inspiration. It crops up in too many advertisements, politcians' speeches, Disney films, its meaning obliterated. I refuse to be 'inspired' in the same insipid way that ad executives and politicians and Hollywood producers suggest I should be. What I need from these works is to be reminded of why I used to care about art—so much that I'd try and make it for myself.

Sara Baume

Art and disease proliferate via contagion, and similar conditions favor both.

Ted Gioia

Only work which is the product of inner compulsion can have spiritual meaning.

Walter Gropius

The Nobel Prize is the best thing that can happen to a writer in terms of how it affects your contracts, the publishers, and the seriousness with which your work is taken. On the other hand, it does interfere with your private life, or it can if you let it, and it has zero effect on the writing.It doesn't help you write better and if you let it, it will intimidate you about future projects.

Toni Morrison

In the same way there is much, much in all of us, but we do not know it. No one ever calls it out in us, unless we are lucky enough to know intelligent, imaginative, sympathetic people who love us and have the magnanimity to encourage us, to believe in us, by listening, by praise, by appreciation, by laughing. If you are going to write, you must become aware of this richness in you and come to believe in it and know it is there so that you can write opulently with with self-trust. Once you become aware of it, have faith in it, you will be all right. But it is like this: if you have a million dollars in the bank and don't know, it doesn't so you any good.

Brenda Ueland

Our tragedy is their beauty. Our pain is their art. The beatific bereavement that is our life captured on a canvas for all the world to see.

Solange nicole

It has been my personal experience that as I allow the painting to speak I become lost, it is delicious and at the same time frightening. The best ones, to me, have a life of their own.

Luther E. Vann

She preferred the quiet solitary atmosphere, to create in her own world of paint and colour, the thrill of anticipating how her works would turn out as she eyed the blank sheets of paper or canvas before starting her next masterpiece. How satisfying it was to mess around in paint gear, without having to worry about spills, starch or frills, that was the life!

E.A. Bucchianeri

Art builds upon art, builds upon art...nothing is purely original. We're all inspired by something...or someone. It's a never-ending chain of ideas...and it's magical.

Shannon Taylor Hodnett

Speed is not always a constituent to great work, the process of creation should be given time and thought.

E.A. Bucchianeri

Inspiration comes unawares, from unaccountable sources that have nothing to do with planning or intelligence. Let it cool ever so slightly, and you are left, pen or brush in hand, with no inspiration at all. Gifted people need not, therefore, make a song and dance about being or supposing themselves superior. They simply happened to be born with that fortunate, subconscious equipment of theirs, and the mystery exists independently of intelligence or ambition.

Maurice Chevalier

The whole concatenation of wild and artificial things, the natural ecosystem as modified by people over the centuries, the build environment layered over layers, the eerie mix of sounds and smells and glimpses neither natural nor crafted- all of it is free for the taking, for the taking in. Take it, take it in, take in more every weekend, every day, and quickly it becomes the theater that intrigues, relaxes, fascinates, seduces, and above all expands any mind focused on it. Outside lies utterly ordinary space open to any casual explorer willing to find the extraordinary. Outside lies unprogrammed awareness that at times becomes directed serendipity. Outside lies magic.

John R. Stilgoe

Još uvijek silno vjerujem u umjetnost kao medikament!

Jasna Horvat

Imitation is not inspiration, and inspiration only can give birth to a work of art. The least of man's original emanation is better than the best of borrowed thought.

Albert Pinkham Ryder

If a picture paints a thousand words, then a let a picture inspire a thousand words.

Nicholas Boyd Crutchley

An artist without ideas is a mendicant; barren, he goes begging among the hours.

Irving Stone

Is being burnt a requisite for the making of art? Personally, I don't think it is. But art is poultice for a burn. It is a privilege to have, somewhere within you, a capacity for making something speak from your own seared experience.

Molly Peacock

What is lovely never dies, but passes into other loveliness, Star-dust, or sea-foam, flower or winged air.

Thomas Bailey Aldrich

Don't try to follow trends. Create them.

Simon Zingerman

For a true artist, difficulties become opportunities and clouds become solid present.

Alejandro Jodorowsky

Calligraphy is a geometry of the soul which manifests itself physically.

Plato

What in hell are you really made of, Howard? After all, it's only a building. It's not the combination of holy sacrament, Indian torture, and sexual ecstasy that you seem to make of it.""Isn't it?

Ayn Rand

Steal from anywhere that resonates with inspiration or fuels your imagination. Devour old films, new film, music, books, paintings, photographs, poems, dreams, random conversations, architecture, bridges, street signs, trees, clouds, bodies of water, light and shadows. Select only things to steal from that speak directly to your soul.

Jim Jarmusch

Every production of an artist should be the expression of an adventure of his soul.

W Somerset Maugham

When the creative impulse sweeps over you, grab it. You grab it and honor it and use it, because momentum is a rare gift.

Justina Chen

Never judge a work of art by its defects

Washington Allston

If you make art, people will talk about it. Some of the things they say will be nice, some won’t. You’ll already have made that art, and when they’re talking about the last thing you did, you should already be making the next thing.If bad reviews (of whatever kind) upset you, just don’t read them. It’s not like you’ve signed an agreement with the person buying the book to exchange your book for their opinion.Do whatever you have to do to keep making art. I know people who love bad reviews, because it means they’ve made something happen and made people talk; I know people who have never read any of their reviews. It’s their call. You get on with making art.

Neil Gaiman

A deadline is negative inspiration. Still, it's better than no inspiration at all.

Rita Mae Brown

The ‘Muse’ is not an artistic mystery, but a mathematical equation. The gift are those ideas you think of as you drift to sleep. The giver is that one you think of when you first awake.

Roman Payne

I dream my painting and I paint my dream.

Vincent van Gogh

If we can write or sing or create in some way, even when we are dealing with difficulties or pain, then it becomes something bigger than ourselves — and often beautiful.

Brenda Peterson

Perhaps what matters is not the human pain or joy at all but, rather, the play of shadow and light on a live body, the harmony of trifles assembled...in a unique and inimitable way.

Vladimir Nabokov

For some young artists, it can take a bit of time to discover which tools (which medium, or genre, or career pathway) will truly suit them best. For me, although many different art forms attract me, the tools that I find most natural and comfortable are language and oil paint; I've also learned that as someone with a limited number of spoons it's best to keep my toolbox clean and simple. My husband, by contrast, thrives with a toolbox absolutely crowded to bursting, working with language, voice, musical instruments, puppets, masks animated on a theater stage, computer and video imagery, and half a dozen other things besides, no one of these tools more important than the others, and all somehow working together. For other artists, the tools at hand might be needles and thread; or a jeweller's torch; or a rack of cooking spices; or the time to shape a young child's day....To me, it's all art, inside the studio and out. At least it is if we approach our lives that way.

Terri Windling

It's often about the simple things, isn't it? Painting and photography are first about seeing, they say. Writing is about observing. Technique is secondary. Sometimes the simple is the most difficult.

Linda Olsson

Poetry is the wailing of a broken heart―the etched sorrows of despairing souls. These artful words are an exclamation in rare colors expressed noiselessly on parchment. Poetry is the unheard cry of a flower, wilting. It is a humble, lucent tear shed with meaning. It is the lovely portrayal of ugliness and the bitter edge of sweet. Poetry speaks to the spirit by piercing understanding. It interprets all senseless truths―beauty, love, emotion―into sensible scrawl. Poetry is vague affirmation and bewildering clarification. Like the most poignant of emotions, we understand the essence but cannot adequately do it verbal justice, crippled by inherently weak tongues. A spiritual soothsayer, poetry is the closest thing to expression of feelings unutterable.

Richelle E. Goodrich

The other day, when I was deciding where to place a mountain range, how to make a river's flow detour around underground stalactite caves, and what precise color to give the sky at sunset, I realized I was God... or an artist and a writer.

Vera Nazarian

The artist must manage to make posterity believe that he never existed.

Gustave Flaubert

Well then – I see two ways of letting things take their course – Create one’s own sensations with the help of a flamboyant collision of rare words – not often, mind you – or else neatly draw the angles, the squares, the entire geometry of feelings – those of the moment, naturally.

Jacques Vaché

The material's out there, a calm lake waiting for us to dive in.

Beverly Lowry

he best thing to do is to loosen my grip on my pen and let it go wandering about until it finds an entrance. There must be one – everything depends on the circumstances, a rule applicable as much to literary style as to life. Each word tugs another one along, one idea another, and that is how books, governments and revolutions are made – some even say that is how Nature created her species.

Machado de Assis

In a sense, the first (if not necessarily the prime) function of a novelist, of ANY artist, is to entertain. If the poem, painting, play or novel does not immediately engage one's surface interest then it has failed. Whatever else it may or may not be, art is also entertainment. Bad art fails to entertain. Good art does something in addition.

Brigid Brophy

Art and commerce are not irreconciliable, they are inextricably intertwined.

Nicholas Meyer

The most effective way of destroying art is the canonization of one given form. And one philosophy.

Yevgeny Zamyatin

Literature is painting, architecture, and music.

Yevgeny Zamyatin

As I write, My fingers tap tap the keys the way Ravi Shankar's fingers pluck and strum the strings of his sitar.

Christina Westover

They know a million tricks, those novelists. Take Doctor Goebbels; that's how he started out, writing fiction. Appeals to the base lusts that hide in everyone no matter how respectable on the surface. Yes, the novelist knows humanity, how worthless they are, ruled by their testicles, swayed by cowardice, selling out every cause because of their greed - all he's got to do is thump on the drum, and there's his response. And he's laughing, of course, behind his hand at the effect he gets.

Philip K Dick

Art is the overflow of emotion into action.

Brian Raif

Yell. Jump. Play. Out-run those sons-of-bitches. They'll never live the way you live. Go do it.

Ray Bradbury

The subject may be crude and repulsive. Its expression is artistically modulated and balanced. This is style. This is art. This is the only thing that really matters in books.

Vladimir Nabokov

But if what interests you are stories of the fantastic, I must warn you that this kind of story demands more art and judgment than is ordinarily imagined.

Charles Nodier

Farber says (in my recollection, anyway) the European (or classical) art, including film, is culturally assumed to be a monumental slab. It's about that slab, and how it's been shaped, or what's been carved on it. In "termite art" though, your slab has been wormholed countless times, and its meaning is really taking place in the resulting interstices. The actual art of the piece, in other words, and your enjoyment of it, is taking place in the cracks, and the shape of the slab is coincidental and ultimately meaningless.

William Gibson

I don't believe any real artists have ever been non-political. They may have been insensitive to this particular plight or insensitive to that, but they were political, because that's what an artist is―a politician.

Toni Morrison

On my website there's a quote from the writer Anthony Burgess: "The greatest gift is the passion for reading. It is cheap, it consoles, it distracts, it excites, it gives you knowledge of the world and experience of a wide kind." I've always found that inspiring because the written word, as an art form, is unlike any other: movies, TV, music, they're shared experiences, but books aren't like that. The relationship between a writer and a reader is utterly unique to those two individuals. The world that forms in your head as you read a book will be slightly different to that experienced by every other reader. Anywhere. Ever. Reading is very personal, a communication from one mind to another, something which can't be exactly copied, or replicated, or directly shared. If I read the work of, say, one of the great Victorian novelists, it's like a gift from the past, a momentary connection to another's thoughts. Their ideas are down on paper, to be picked up by me, over a century later. Writers can speak individually to readers across a year, or ten years, or a thousand. That's why I love books.

Simon Cheshire

In our modern world, this elemental quality of storytelling is denied. We live today in a world in which everything has its place and function and nothing is left out of place. Storytelling is thus at a discount and like everything else in a world ruled by the laws of exchange value, literature is required to submit itself to the requirements of the market and must learn, like any other commodity, to adapt and serve needs that lie outside of itself and its concrete value. It is forced to stand not for itself but for an ideological cause of one sort or another, whether it be political, social or literary. It cannot exist for itself: like everything else it has to be justified. And for this very reason the power of storytelling is automatically devalued. Literature is reduced to the status of complimentary utilitarian functions: as a pastime to provide distraction and entertainment, or as a heightened activity that would claim to explore 'great truths' about the human condition.

Michael Richardson

Heretics are the only [bitter] remedy against the entropy of human thought.("Literature, Revolution, and Entropy")

Yevgeny Zamyatin

The best literature is always a take [in the musical sense]; there is an implicit risk in its execution, a margin of danger that is the pleasure of the flight, of the love, carrying with it a tangible loss but also a total engagement that, on another level, lends the theater its unparalleled imperfection faced with the perfection of film.I don’t want to write anything but takes.

Julio Cortázar

A work in which there are theories is like an object which still has its price-tag on.

Marcel Proust

I think women dwell quite a bit on the duress under which they work, on how hard it is just to do it at all. We are traditionally rather proud of ourselves for having slipped creative work in there between the domestic chores and obligations. I'm not sure we deserve such big A-pluses for all that.

Toni Morrison

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Art Quotes - Page 61

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