Without music, life would be a mistake.
Art
Painters, poets, and composers on making things.
94 quotes
Art is a lie that makes us realize truth, at least the truth that is given us to understand.
There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you.
There is nothing more musical than a sunset.
A word after a word after a word is power.
I paint objects as I think them, not as I see them.
If I could tell you what it meant, there would be no point in dancing it.
Creativity requires the courage to let go of certainties.
It is the supreme art of the teacher to awaken joy in creative expression and knowledge.
Begin anywhere.
If you hear a voice within you say you cannot paint, then by all means paint, and that voice will be silenced.
I dream my painting and I paint my dream.
I put my heart and my soul into my work, and have lost my mind in the process.
I am seeking, I am striving, I am in it with all my heart.
Art is to console those who are broken by life.
Paintings have a life of their own that derives from the painter's soul.
Color in a picture is like enthusiasm in life.
Inspiration exists, but it has to find you working.
Everything you can imagine is real.
It took me four years to paint like Raphael, but a lifetime to paint like a child.
The artist is a receptacle for emotions that come from all over the place.
Colors, like features, follow the changes of the emotions.
Painting is just another way of keeping a diary.
I begin with an idea and then it becomes something else.
You can't use up creativity. The more you use, the more you have.
A voice is a human gift; it should be cherished and used, to utter fully human words as possible.
Reading and writing, like everything else, improve with practice.
The Eskimos had fifty-two names for snow because it was important to them; there ought to be as many for love.
Poetry is an act of peace.
I grew up in this town, my poetry was born between the hill and the river, it took its voice from the rain.
Works of art make rules; rules do not make works of art.
There is no theory. You have only to listen. Pleasure is the law.
Beauty must appeal to the senses, must provide us with immediate enjoyment, must not bore us.
Music, even in situations of the greatest horror, should never be painful to the ear, but should flatter and charm it, and thereby always remain music.
I will seize fate by the throat; it shall certainly never wholly overcome me.
Don't only practice your art, but force your way into its secrets; art deserves that, for it and knowledge can raise man to the Divine.
Music is a higher revelation than all wisdom and philosophy.
To play a wrong note is insignificant; to play without passion is inexcusable.
What I have in my heart and soul — must find a way out. That's the reason for music.
I declare after all there is no enjoyment like reading!
A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.
Lock up your libraries if you like; but there is no gate, no lock, no bolt that you can set upon the freedom of my mind.
Every secret of a writer's soul, every experience of his life, every quality of his mind, is written large in his works.
Go into yourself. Search for the reason that bids you write; find out whether it is spreading out its roots in the deepest places of your heart.
A work of art is good if it has arisen out of necessity.
Works of art are of an infinite loneliness.
If your daily life seems poor, do not blame it; blame yourself, tell yourself that you are not poet enough to call forth its riches.
Being an artist means, not reckoning and counting, but ripening like the tree which does not force its sap.
Write hard and clear about what hurts.
I rewrote the ending of A Farewell to Arms, the last page of it, thirty-nine times before I was satisfied.
The most essential gift for a good writer is a built-in, shockproof, shit detector.
We are all apprentices in a craft where no one ever becomes a master.
Prose is architecture, not interior decoration.
Good prose is like a windowpane.
Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness.
If people cannot write well, they cannot think well, and if they cannot think well, others will do their thinking for them.
If there's a book that you want to read, but it hasn't been written yet, then you must write it.
We die. That may be the meaning of life. But we do language. That may be the measure of our lives.
You write in order to change the world.
Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.
The poet or the revolutionary is there to articulate the necessity.
I found I could say things with color and shapes that I couldn't say any other way.
To create one's world in any of the arts takes courage.
I decided that if I could paint that flower in a huge scale, you could not ignore its beauty.
Nobody sees a flower really; it is so small. We haven't time, and to see takes time.
I paint my own reality.
Feet, what do I need them for if I have wings to fly?
I never paint dreams or nightmares. I paint my own reality.
Creativity takes courage.
What I dream of is an art of balance, of purity and serenity, devoid of troubling or depressing subject matter.
I don't paint things. I only paint the difference between things.
Every block of stone has a statue inside it and it is the task of the sculptor to discover it.
The best of artists hath no thought to show which the rough stone in its superfluous shell doth not include; to break the marble spell is all the hand that serves the brain can do.
A man paints with his brains and not with his hands.
Painting is poetry that is seen rather than felt, and poetry is painting that is felt rather than seen.
Where the spirit does not work with the hand, there is no art.
Color is a power which directly influences the soul.
There is no must in art because art is free.
Inside you there's an artist that you don't know about.
Simplicity is the final achievement.
The piano looks right at me like a friend.
I haven't understood a bar of music in my life, but I have felt it.
The more constraints one imposes, the more one frees one's self.
Less artifice in art, please.
Poetry is just the evidence of life. If your life is burning well, poetry is just the ash.
Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal.
No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader.
Poetry is when an emotion has found its thought and the thought has found words.
If I read a book and it makes my whole body so cold no fire can ever warm me, I know that is poetry.
A word is dead when it is said, some say. I say it just begins to live that day.
Tell all the truth but tell it slant.
The art of art, the glory of expression and the sunshine of the light of letters, is simplicity.
If poetry comes not as naturally as the leaves to a tree it had better not come at all.
And now we welcome the new year, full of things that have never been.