Artist Imagination Quotes & Sayings

Today the function of the artist is to bring imagination to science and science to imagination, where they meet, in the myth. — Cyril Connolly

An artist's imagination is his greatest tool — Michael Jackson

It's [programming] the only job I can think of where I get to be both an engineer and an artist. There's an incredible, rigorous, technical element to it, which I like because you have to do very precise thinking. On the other hand, it has a wildly creative side where the boundaries of imagination are the only real limitation. — Andy Hertzfeld

It always surprises me when people assume that something an artist has created is based on a true experience or reflects his or her own lifestyle. Often nothing could be farther from the truth. [ ... ] An artist's imagination is his greatest tool. It can create a mood or feeling that people want to have, as well as transport you to a different place altogether. — Michael Jackson

As the philosopher Gilles Deleuze put it, no painter ever stands before a completely blank canvas, no author ever sits before a blank page. In fact, the surface confronting the modern artist is full of inherited images that must first be cleared from the imagination before one can begin to create one's own. — Marie Luise Knott

There's a particular sensitivity required to be an artist, and a certain vulnerability, perhaps, and also, somewhere between, you're in your body a lot, too. It's much more physical than one would imagine because I think it's the body where the imagination lives somehow. I do feel the imagination isn't just in the brain up there. — Michael Leunig

In a way, her strangeness, her naivete, her craving for the other half of her equation was the consequence of idle imagination. Had she paints, or clay, or knew the discipline of the dance, or strings; had she anything to engage her tremendous curiosity and her gift for metaphor, she might have exchanged the restlessness and preoccupation with whim for an activity that provided her with all she yearned for. And like any artist with no art from, she became dangerous. — Toni Morrison

The artist (I suppose) usually pays for the privilege by some sort of partial insomnia, by the possession of one faculty that will not be controlled nor put to sleep. In a poet this must often be the visual imagination, bringing before his eyes a succession of images which he never summoned, and of which some (it is only too likely) will be ugly or pitiful. — Mary Lascelles

Moralism and ignorance are responsible for the constant stereotyping of prostitutes by their lowest common denominator
the sick, strung-out addicts, couched on city stoops, who turn tricks for drug money ... The most successful prostitutes in history have been invisible. That invisibility was produced by their high intelligence, which gives them the power to perceive, and move freely but undetected in the social frame. The prostitute is a superb analyst, not only in evading the law but in initiating the unique constellation of convention and fantasy that produces a stranger's orgasm. She lives by her wits as much as her body. She is a psychologist, actor, and dancer, a performance artist of hyper-developed sexual imagination. — Camille Paglia

Generosity is a two-edged virtue for an artist - it nourishes his imagination but has a fatal effect on his routine. — Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

The gift of imagination is by no means an exclusive property of the artist; it is a gift we all share; to some degree or other all of us are endowed with the powers of fantasy, the dullest of dullards among us has the gift of dreams at night - visions and yearnings and hopes. Everyone can also think; it is the quality thought that makes the difference - not just the quality of logical thinking, but of imaginative thinking. And our greatest thinkers, those who have radically changed our world, have always arrived at their truths by dreaming them; they are first fantasized, and only then subjected to proof. — Leonard Bernstein

A painting is above all a product of the artist's imagination, it must never be a copy. If, at a later stage, he wants to add two or three touches from nature, of course it doesn't spoil anything. — Edgar Degas

I think part of being an artist is having the ability to define your own responsibilities. I certainly wouldn't prescribe any. As far as I'm concerned, my biggest responsibility is to my own imagination. We're all conduits. Art preceded me, and it'll be here long after I'm gone. — Pierre Coupey

Artistic style is only a means to an end, and the more styles you have, the better. To get trapped in a style is to lose all flexibility. If you have only one style, then you're going to do the same book over and over, which is pretty dull. Lots of styles permit you to walk in and out of books. So, develop a fine style, a fat style, and fairly slim style, and a really rough style.
As an aspiring artist, you should strive for originality of vision. Have something to say and a fresh way of saying it. No story is worth the writing, no picture worth the making, if it's not the work of the imagination. — Maurice Sendak

The real truthfulness of all works of imagination, sculpture, painting, and written fiction, is so purely in the imagination, that the artist never seeks to represent positive truth, but the idealized image of a truth — Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton

Here, where we reach the sphere of mathematics, we are among processes which seem to some the most inhuman of all human activities and the most remote from poetry. Yet it is here that the artist has the fullest scope of his imagination. — Havelock Ellis

Each one seems to be, in some way, essentially different from the others, and each is a surprise to me. I think that making books, or any kind of art, might also be like mining. The artist digs into his or her life and imagination and never knows what they'll find. That's the adventure. — Mordicai Gerstein

Thoughts are like burning stars, and ideas, they flood, they stretch the universe. — Criss Jami

All of the stuff I can't afford to do on a TV budget, I just put into the comic book because you're really only limited in a comic by your artist's imagination. — Marc Guggenheim

The fact that all of us die anyway (the rumor turns out to be true) is a mere detail in the celestial glow of imagination. The artist's eyes destroy death. — Herbert Gold

I am not afraid of beauty, unlike most artists today. The pollen, the milk, the beeswax, they have a beauty that is incredible, that is beyond the imagination, something which you cannot believe is a reality-and it is the most real. I could not make it myself, I could not create it myself, but I can participate in it. Trying to create it yourself is only a tragedy, participating in it is a big chance. — Wolfgang Laib

This tremendous world I have inside of me. How to free myself, and this world, without tearing myself to pieces. And rather tear myself to a thousand pieces than be buried with this world within me. — Franz Kafka

The real purveyors of the news are artists, for artists are the ones who infuse fact with perception, emotion, and appreciation ... We are beginning to realize that emotions and imagination are more potent in shaping public sentiment and opinion than information and reason. — John Dewey

A director is a man, therefore he has ideas; he is also an artist, therefore he has imagination. Whether they are good or bad, it seems to me that I have an abundance of stories to tell. And the things I see, the things that happen to me, continually renew the supply. — Michelangelo Antonioni

There is at the back of every artist's mind something like a pattern and a type of architecture. The original quality in any man of imagination is imagery. It is a thing like the landscape of his dreams; the sort of world he would like to make or in which he would like to wander, the strange flora and fauna, his own secret planet, the sort of thing he likes to think about. This general atmosphere, and pattern or a structure of growth, governs all his creations, however varied. — G.K. Chesterton

An author is an artist who paints a picture in the imagination of the reader. — Darrell Case

Well, to me, the tensile strength and the very definition of an artist is something that I would place at the top of a vertical hierarchy. To be an artist is to suffer and to lead a life without shelter. It takes a great amount of daring-do, self reinvention, imagination, familial loyalty, sacrifice, economic uncertainty, and the right to be wrong, the right to fail in order to achieve something of noticeable value. — Van Dyke Parks

The artist who uses the least of what is called imagination will be the greatest. — Pierre-Auguste Renoir

The image of the "self-destructive artist" is a culturally implanted kill switch. Ignore it. Imagination is a weapon; you have been indoctrinated with these images so that if you discover the weapon, you will use it on yourself and save them the trouble. — Jason Louv

He's got to have the ability, and it seems to be fairly rare, to see things as they are and at the same time as they might have been. What we mean is the eye of an artist. — Jack Finney

The radiance of which he speaks is the scholastic quidditas, the whatness of a thing. The supreme quality is felt by the artist when the esthetic image is first conceived in his imagination. The mind in that mysterious instant Shelley likened beautifully to a fading coal. The instant wherein that supreme quality of beauty, the clear radiance of the esthetic image, is apprehended luminously by the mind which has been arrested by its wholeness and fascinated by its harmony is the luminous silent stasis of esthetic pleasure, a spiritual state very like to that cardiac condition which the Italian physiologist, Luigi Galvani, using a phrase almost as beautiful as Shelley's, called the enchantment of the heart. — James Joyce

Vergil preferred to give a few touches, and to allow the imagination of his readers to fill out the picture: that is one reason for his almost universal appeal. He changes each of his readers into a poet or an artist. — Gilbert Highet

Through artistry, imagination not only allows one to express their creativity, but also their soul. — Donald L. Hicks

The heart contains passion but the imagination alone contains poetry,' says Charles Baudelaire. This too was the lesson that Theophile Gautier, most subtle of all modern critics, most fascinating of all modern poets, was never tired of teaching - 'Everybody is affected by a sunrise or a sunset.' The absolute distinction of the artist is not his capacity to feel nature so much as his power of rendering it. The entire subordination of all intellectual and emotional faculties to the vital and informing poetic principle is the surest sign of the strength of our Renaissance. — Oscar Wilde

It's the only job I can think of where I get to be both an engineer and an artist. There's an incredible, rigorous, technical element to it, which I like because you have to do very precise thinking. On the other hand, it has a wildly creative side where the boundaries of imagination are the only real limitation." - Andy Hertzfeld — Cory Althoff

The function of the artist is to organize the facets of life according to his imagination. — Romare Bearden

For spiritual companions I have had the many artists who have relied on nature to help shape their imagination. And their most elaborate equipment was a deep reverence for the world through which they passed. Photographers share something with these artists. We seek only to see and to describe with our own voices, and, though we are seldom heard as soloists, we cannot photograph the world in any other way. — Sam Abell

A steampunk nation
Baby pollution rises up then the loving comes arraigning 'cause
Our art's official and only partially artificial
And our heart's in the middle of sharp hardened shards of metal but
There's not where it settles
Because it's beating to the steaming of God's hottest pot or kettle
And now we face it, this creation we made to
To save our craving for a synthetic rebelnation it's
Our safeway they make into a pathetic revelation
In our steampunk nation
Our steampunk nation — Criss Jami

To say that such-and-such a circumstance is 'Kafkaesque' is to admit to the denigration of an imagination that has burned a hole in what we take to be modernism - even in what we take to be the ordinary fabric and intent of language. Nothing is like 'The Hunger Artist.' Nothing is like 'The Metamorphosis.' — Cynthia Ozick

Reverie is the groundwork of creative imagination; it is the privilege of the artist that with him it is not as with other men an escape from reality, but the means by which he accedes to it. — W. Somerset Maugham

To cook, and to do it well, every talent must be used; the strength of a prize-fighter, the imagination of a poet, the brain of an empire builder, the patience of Job, the eye and the touch of an artist, and, to turn your mistakes into edible assets, the cleverness of a politician. — Anne Ellis

'Super 8' was a lot of fun. It was a lot of fun working with J.J. Abrams, who I think is a kid in a grown man's body, which is a great ingredient for any artist in our business. You have to be a kid at heart to be able to make believe, and his imagination is phenomenal. — Glynn Turman

A distinction is made between artists who work directly from nature and those who work purely from imagination. Neither if these methods should be preferred to the exclusion of the other. Often both are used in turn by the same man ... — Henri Matisse

The knowledge an artist possesses is an advanced form of daydreaming. — Marty Rubin

Express your vision,
define your goals,
proceed with precision
till the end is known.

Inspiration is your map,
passion is your driver,
imagination is the vehicle
and art is the destination. — Matshona Dhliwayo

Any artist, in any field, wants to press deeper, to discover further. Image and sound play are among the strongest colors available to poetry's palette. For a long time, I've wanted to invite in more strangeness, more freedom of imagination. Yet music, seeing, and meaning are also cohering disciplines. They can be stretched, and that is part of poetry's helium pleasure. But not to the point of breaking. — Jane Hirshfield

All great scientists have, in a certain sense, been great artists; the man with no imagination may collect facts, but he cannot make great discoveries. — Karl Pearson

There's no artist in this world that doesn't enjoy the dream that if they have bad reviews now, the story of Keats can redeem them, in their fantasy or imagination, in the future. I think Keats' poem 'Endymion' is a really difficult poem, and I'm not surprised that a lot of people pulled it apart in a way. — Jane Campion

I have inflammation of the imagination. — Lera Auerbach

A great artist paints a picture on the canvas of his mind using the colors of his love and imagination before transferring the image onto a real canvas. — Debasish Mridha

The complete recipe for imagination is absolute boredom. — Criss Jami

How often people speak of art and science as though they were two entirely different things, with no interconnection. An artist is emotional, they think, and uses only his intuition; he sees all at once and has no need of reason. A scientist is cold, they think, and uses only his reason; he argues carefully step by step, and needs no imagination. That is all wrong. The true artist is quite rational as well as imaginative and knows what he is doing; if he does not, his art suffers. The true scientist is quite imaginative as well as rational, and sometimes leaps to solutions where reason can follow only slowly; if he does not, his science suffers. — Isaac Asimov

Not since the Lord himself showed his stuff to Ezekiel in the valley of dry bones had anyone shown such grace and skill in the reconstruction of animals from disarticulated skeletons. Charles R. Knight, the most celebrated of artists in the reanimation of fossils, painted all the canonical figures of dinosaurs that fire our fear and imagination to this day. — Stephen Jay Gould

Peter Cooper looks at the world with an artist's eye and a human heart and soul. His songs are the work of an original, creative imagination, alive with humor and heartbreak and irony and intelligence, with truth and beauty in the details. Deep stuff. And they get better every time you listen to them. — Kris Kristofferson

I am enough of an artist to draw freely upon my imagination. Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world. — Albert Einstein

All the mistakes committed by artists are due to their having separated themselves from truth, believing that their imagination is stronger. There is nothing stronger than nature. With nature in front of us we can do everything well. — Joaquin Sorolla

So, to do right by a Gothic tale, let's be frank, requires that the author be a militant romantic who relates the action of his narratives in dreamy and more than usually emotive language. Hence, the well-known grandiose rhetoric of the Gothic tale, which may be understood by the sympathetic reader as not just an inflatable raft on which the imagination floats at its leisure upon waves of bombast, but also as the sails of the Gothic artist's soul filling up with the winds of ecstatic hysteria. So it's hard to tell someone how to write the Gothic tale, since one really has to be born to the task. Too bad. — Thomas Ligotti

Artists are ... stubborn egomaniacs who are mysteriously - and sometimes correctly - certain that the world needs to know all about the figments of their imaginations and who gear their lives to getting those figments into circulation. — Jon Pareles

As we, or mother Dana, weave and unweave our bodies, Stephen said, from day to day, their molecules shuttled to and fro, so does the artist weave and unweave his image. And as the mole on my right breast is where it was when I was born, though all my body has been woven of new stuff time after time, so through the ghost of the unquiet father the image of the unliving son looks forth. In the intense instant of imagination, when the mind, Shelley says, is a fading coal, that which I was is that which I am and that which in possibility I may come to be. So in the future, the sister of the past, I may see myself as I sit here now but by reflection from that which then I shall be. — James Joyce

Every brilliant experiment, like every great work of art, starts with an act of imagination. Unfortunately, our current culture subscribes to a very narrow definition of truth. If something can't be quantified and calculated, then it can't be true. Because this strict scientific approach has explained so much, we assume that it can explain everything. But every method, even the experimental method, has limits. Take the human mind. Scientists describe our brain in terms of its physical details; they say we are nothing but a loom of electrical cells and synaptic spaces. What science forgets is that this isn't how we experience the world. (We feel like the ghost, not like the machine.) It is ironic but true: the one reality science cannot reduce is the only reality we will ever know. This is why we need art. By expressing our actual experience, the artist reminds us that our science is incomplete, that no map of matter will ever explain the immateriality of our consciousness. — Jonah Lehrer

I wished to be an artist," Ivanya confides to Shara. "But it simply didn't turn out that way. I didn't have the ... I'm not sure. The imagination, I suppose, or the ambition, or both. You have to be a bit outside things to make something new, but I was always very much inside things. — Robert Jackson Bennett

An artist must have imagination. An artist who does not use his imagination is a mechanic. — Robert Henri

Creating a world within the imagination one day at a time through words and colors. — Peggy A. Borel

The prophet engages in futuring fantasy. The prophet does not ask if the vision can be implemented, for questions of implementation are of no consequence until the vision can be imagined. The imagination must come before the implementation. Our culture is competent to implement almost anything and to imagine almost nothing. The same royal consciousness that make it possible to implement anything and everything is the one that shrinks imagination because imagination is a danger. Thus every totalitarian regime is frightened of the artist. It is the vocation of the prophet to keep alive the ministry of imagination, to keep on conjuring and proposing futures alternative to the single one the king wants to urge as the only thinkable one. — Walter Brueggemann

As an artist, her imagination isn't fettered by the constraints of reality. — Sarah Cross

To be a writer is to constantly evolve and keep ones imagination expanding and that's what make a great author and artist. — Adona M. Pierre

The artist's imagination may wander far from nature. But as long as it is a living, moving power in his brain, isn't it just as real as any other natural phenomenon? The artist justifies his existence only when he can transform his imagination into truth. — Bill Vaughan

Any artist is insulted by the suggestion that art is merely a matter of recording reality, and knows that it is impossible to explain how imagination can transform not only events and people, but the artist as well, into quite different "realities". — Joan Lindsay

Every production of an artist should be the expression of an adventure of his soul. — W. Somerset Maugham

Brush strokes write poetry harmonized through the cords of an artist's imagination.
Color, contrast, simple compassion splattered across paper leaves tainted with the melody of the silent wind.
Gasping, grasping, simply glancing at the souls of those who were not blessed with the visionary sight of inspirational artistry. — Laura S. Al Bast

Artists with serious aspirations need to be left alone to follow the course of their own imagination. — Robert Genn

Israel is a wonderful place to be an artist - a place where imagination flourishes. Israeli culture is refreshingly avant garde - making films, music, performance art and visual art that continues to push the envelope, inspire and empower. — Ryan Kavanaugh

Despite the hundreds of attempts, police terror and the concentration camps have proved to be more or less impossible subjects for the artist; since what happened in them was beyond the imagination, it was therefore also beyond art and all those human values on which art is traditionally based. — Al Alvarez

For some reason I can't explain, artist and musicians tend to look younger than our age. Being in music, you need this youthful sense of discovery and wonder for what you're doing and keep your imagination open. That's a youthful way of looking at life and I think that reflects in how you age. — Joshua Bell

I blame myself without reserve for my weakness. It was merely weakness. One half-hour with Art was always more to me than a cycle with you. Nothing really at any period of my life was ever of the smallest importance to me compared with Art. But in the case of an artist, weakness is nothing less than a crime, when it is a weakness that paralyses the imagination. — Oscar Wilde

A poet is an artist that paints pictures by mixing thought, imagination, and emotion with words. — Debasish Mridha

Beauty is something wonderful and strange that the artist fashions out of the chaos of the world in the torment of his soul. And when he has made it, it is not given to all to know it. To recognize it you must repeat the adventure of the artist. It is a melody that he sings to you, and to hear it again in your own heart you want knowledge and sensitiveness and imagination. — W. Somerset Maugham

It art can only succeed through the cooperating imagination and intelligence of its consumers, who fill out, for themselves, the artist's world and make it round, and whose own special genius partly determine the ultimate glory of it. — William H Gass

One of the proud joys of the man of letters
if that man of letters is an artist is to feel within himself the power to immortalize at will anything he chooses to immortalize. Insignificant though he may be, he is conscious of possessing a creative divinity. God creates lives; the man of imagination creates fictional lives which may make a profound and as it were more living impression on the world's memory. — Edmond De Goncourt

The art wouldn't complain if we leave her alone. Losing a touch with art, however, is losing a touch with our imagination. — Pawan Mishra

Memory cannot produce a picture that Imagination has not retouched; and her pictures, even the ones least touched by Imagination, are no mere photographs, but the world of an artist. — Henry De Vere Stacpoole

maybe god created us because his own awareness of beauty and truth was so overwhelming that he couldn't keep it to himself any longer, like an artist who bubbles over with desire to communicate to someone else. but god isn't limited to smaller forms like we are.

if he desired at all to create it must be so intensely beautiful as to surpass human imagination. they say that everything was made for his glory, and this has often been presented as a sterile or an unsympathetic thing. but when you have found beauty or created it, you desire to share it with someone else, and maybe he created us to be admirers of this intricacy as well.

and the beauty would somehow be only a token of knowing him. — Benjamin DeVries

I don't paint what people expect,
I paint what my heart yearns to express. — Nikki Rowe

Where do we get the notion that our idea of success and God's are the same? You have written a book; you are a clever manager and promoter; you are a talented artist; you are independently wealthy; you have achieved fame and fortune. Without the gifts of intelligence, imagination, personality, and physical energy - which are all endowed by God - where would you be? — Billy Graham

The writer, indeed every real artist, was the devil, rivalling God in creativity, trying even to surpass him. God was surely man's most fatal creation, the devil's kitsch bitch. It was God, with his insistence on being worshipped and admired, who made the argument of art necessary, keeping the fire of dissent alive in men and women. This dissident was the artist, who spanned with his imagination reason and unreason, the under and the over, the dream and the world, men and women. — Hanif Kureishi

Luckily, the world is absolutely full of interesting things to do. Only lack of imagination, or lack of energy, stand in the way. Otherwise each of us could be a poet or musician, an inventor or explorer, an amateur scholar, scientist, artist, or collector. — Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

Care of the soul may take the form of living in a fully embodied imagination, being an artist at home and at work. You don't have to be a professional in order to bring art into the care of your soul; anyone can have an art studio at home, for instance. — Thomas Moore

I'm speaking of the pursuit of excellence in all things. All things! Presence of mind and devotion to craft. A great artist has these. A great chef. A great master of tea. There's powerful kung fu in a well-built house or an eloquent letter, but the limit of your imagination is bones breaking and bullets flying. — Scott Lynch

The higher the artist, the fewer the gestures. The fewer the tools, the greater the imagination. The greater the will, the greater the secret failure. — Ben Okri

I do not possess the ability to draw or paint.
I can't sing or dance.
I can't knit or sew.
But I am an artist.
I have the ability to put onto paper, words that tell an intriguing story.
I am a writer.
A writer is someone who, with just words, can paint a beautiful picture.
A writer can open up a world of imagination you didn't realize was possible.
When you open up a book and become so consumed in the story, you feel like you're a part of it ... you're standing next to that character and feeling the same way that character feels,
That's the art of a writer.
I am an artist.
My inspiration is the world around me.
My paintbrush is my words.
My easel is my computer.
My canvas is the mind of my reader. — Bri Justine

Phidias and the achievements of Greek art are foreshadowed in Homer: Dante prefigures for us the passion and colour and intensity of Italian painting: the modern love of landscape dates from Rousseau, and it is in Keats that one discerns the beginning of the artistic renaissance of England. Byron was a rebel and Shelley a dreamer; but in the calmness and clearness of his vision, his perfect self-control, his unerring sense of beauty and his recognition of a separate realm for the imagination, Keats was the pure and serene artist, the forerunner of the pre-Raphaelite school, and so of the great romantic movement of which I am to speak. — Oscar Wilde

I make art when I can't gather the words to say. — Nikki Rowe

Every artist knows that there is no such thing as "freedom" in art. The first thing an artist does when he begins a new work is to lay down the barriers and limitations; he decides upon a certain composition, a certain key, a certain relation of creatures or objects to each other. He is never free, and the more splendid his imagination, the more intense his feeling, the farther he goes from general truth and general emotion. — Willa Cather

To get such beauty from something that has been produced from the artist's own imagination appealed to me enormously, — Solomon R. Guggenheim

It is surprising that people do not believe that there is imagination in science. It is a very interesting kind of imagination, unlike that of the artist. The great difficulty is in trying to imagine something that you have never seen, that is consistent in every detail with what has already been seen, and that is different from what has been thought of; furthermore, it must be definite and not a vague proposition. That is indeed difficult. — Richard Feynman

Books on scientific photography with such beauty, breadth, and insight are rare. Felice Frankel's Envisioning Science is chock full of mind-boggling images and valuable information
not only for curious artists, students, and lay people, but also for seasoned researchers and photographers. The eclectic Frankel is both a scientist and photographer, and with the cold logic of the one and the inspired vision of the other, she covers an array of topics sure to stimulate your imagination and sense of wonder at the incredible vastness of the physical world. — Clifford A. Pickover

The artist must bow to the monster of his own imagination. — Richard Wright

Who am I? I am who I say I am and tomorrow someone else entirely. You are too nostalgic, you want memory to secure you, console you. The past is a bore. What matters is only oneself and what one creates from what one has learned. Imagination uses what it needs and discards the rest - where you want to erect a museum. Don't hoard the past, Astrid. Don't cherish anything. Burn it. The artist is the phoenix who burns to emerge. — Janet Fitch

Every true artist does feel, consciously or unconsciously, that he is touching transcendental truths; that his images are shadows of things seen through the veil. In other words, the natural mystic does know that there is something there, something behind the clouds or within the trees; but he believes that the pursuit of beauty is the way to find it; that imagination is a sort of incantation that can call it up. — Gilbert K. Chesterton

Who but the artist has the power to open man up, to set free the imagination? The others - priest, teacher, saint, statesman, warrior - hold us to the path of history. They keep us chained to the rock, that the vultures may eat out our hearts. It is the artist who has the courage to go against the crowd; he is the unrecognized "hero of our time" - and of all time. — Henry Miller