Quotes & Sayings About Creating Art

Most artists are brought to their vocation when their own nascent gifts are awakened by the work of a master. That is to say, most artists are converted to art by art itself. Finding one's voice isn't just an emptying and purifying oneself of the words of others but an adopting and embracing of filiations, communities, and discourses. Inspiration could be called inhaling the memory of an act never experienced. Invention, it must be humbly admitted, does not consist in creating out of void but out of chaos. Any artist knows these truths, no matter how deeply he or she submerges that knowing. — Lewis Hyde

The question 'Why poetry?' isn't asking what makes poetry unique among art forms; poetry may indeed share its origins with other forms of privileged utterance. A somewhat more interesting question would be: "What is the nature of experience, and especially the experience of using language, that calls poetic utterance into existence? What is there about experience that's unutterable?" You can't generalize very usefully about poetry; you can't reduce its nature down to a kernel that underlies all its various incarnations. I guess my internal conversation suggests that if you can't successfully answer the question of "Why poetry?," can't reduce it in the way I think you can't, then maybe that's the strongest evidence that poetry's doing its job; it's creating an essential need and then satisfying it. — Richard Ford

I can't think of anything outside of having the gift yourself and creating yourself. I can't think of the next better thing to do than being able to put it back. Creative expression, I think, is vital to the success of any society ... A society without art will die. — Robert Redford

Creating art alone doesn't seem to fill us up, in my opinion, until we begin to truly communicate with it. — Gary Holland

I am not opposed to the art market. I have lots of friends who are collectors. But the whole idea of the art market is complex. Sadly we have a situation where auction houses and secondary market dealers are creating a lot of confusion and unnecessary pollution. — Olafur Eliasson

DJ-ing itself is not just about playing songs. The art of DJ-ing is presenting new songs to the crowd that they haven't heard before and creating a party vibe that's different than just listening to anybody's playlist. It's the only way to truly be big and respected in your craft. — TyDi

Leadership is the art of creating a working climate that inspires others to achieve extraordinary goals and levels of performance. — John Michael Montgomery

I was always interested in drawing and creating, but it never really occurred to me that I could pursue art as my profession until my mid twenties. From all I had heard from other people, art was just something you do as a hobby in between your real work and real jobs. — Julie Dillon

Art is love creating the new world and justice is love rolling up its sleeves to heal the old one. — N. T. Wright

It's good to vandalize one's own work. — John P. Sousa

Creation is not a moment of inspiration but a lifetime of endurance. The drawers of the world are full of things begun. Unfinished sketches, pieces of invention, incomplete product ideas, notebooks with half-formulated hypotheses, abandoned patents, partial manuscripts. Creating is more monotony than adventure. It is early mornings and late nights: long hours doing work that will likely fail or be deleted or erased - a process without progress that must be repeated daily for years. Beginning is hard, but continuing is harder. Those who seek a glamorous life should not pursue art, science, innovation, invention, or anything else that needs new. Creation is a long journey where most turns are wrong and most ends are dead. The most important thing creators do is work. The most important thing they don't do is quit. The — Kevin Ashton

Poetry is the art of creating imaginary gardens with real toads. — Marianne Moore

And so matching by itself is incapable of creating an art of reckoning. Without our ability to arrange things in ordered succession little progress could have been made. Correspondence and succession, the two principles that permeate all mathematics - nay, all realms of exact thought - are woven into the very fabric of our number system. — Tobias Dantzig

With a movie you're creating from the beginning this particular work, let's not call it work of art, because very few movies are works of art, let's just call them bits of popular culture, whatever they are, sometimes very rarely by accident a movie becomes a work of art. — Sydney Pollack

I love meeting contributors and hearing how we inspire them to create art. I'm also proud of creating hundreds of jobs. — Jon Oringer

Tis to create, and in creating live
A being more intense, that we endow
With form our fancy, gaining as we give
The life we image, even as I do now.
What am I? Nothing: but not so art thou,
Soul of my thought! with whom I traverse earth,
Invisible but gazing, as I glow
Mix'd with thy spirit, blended with thy birth,
And feeling still with thee in my crush'd feelings' dearth. — George Gordon Byron

Mastering the art of aloneness doesn't mean living in isolation or never needing the love, support, and involvement of others. It means creating and living a life in which you feel whole and content as an individual on your own; a life in which you can take care of yourself emotionally and financially. — Lauren Mackler

Creating music, visual art, producing music and film are always at the forefront of my life. — Matt Sorum

If some people can imagine that a person they love is alive in another world, why can't I imagine Maurice is alive in this one An artist is a person who uses art to run away from reality. It's not wrong-it's survival. There's nothing wrong with me creating a world in which Maurice is alive. — Robin Gibb

There is a skill to learning. It is all about what is and what is not. While Science is knowing what is, Art is creating what is not. — Sri Sri Ravi Shankar

There are some people who want me and my husband to stay where it is safe and draw a paycheck every week instead of what we are doing (which is creating and sharing our art with others). The truth is that there are people in this world - Dave and I being two - who would die a slow painful death if stuck in an office and made to do the kind of work that we are not made to do. — Mary Engelbreit

We need to think about what cooking is, what context it takes place in and what its relationship to the world of art is. If there were criticisms of my presence at Documenta, that's a good thing because it means we were doing something new. Your mission in creating something artistic is to produce something new and polemical. — Ferran Adria

It's a finger snapping kind of day. — Coco J. Ginger

Art is not meant to change the world, but when you see people interacting, when you see an impact on their lives, then I guess in a smaller way, this is changing the world. So, that's what I believe in. That's why I'm into creating more and more interactions. — JR

One of the core reasons for creating 'Station to Station' was to provide a space for exploration and cultural friction between different mediums. It should be natural for mediums like music, film and art to cross over, and we wanted to empower that process. — Doug Aitken

If you're creating something that has some sort of cultural currency - if the idea is getting out there - then that will probably yield money in some form, whether it's through selling art or selling books or being asked to give a lecture. — Shepard Fairey

it was montage that gave birth to film as an art, setting it apart from mere animated photography, in short, creating a language. — Andre Bazin

McNiff, S. (1992) Art as Medicine: Creating a Therapy of — Debra Kalmanowitz

The "happening" operates by creating an asymmetrical network of surprises, without climax or consummation, this is the alogism of dreams rather than the logic of most art. — Susan Sontag

To forestall misunderstandings: there is value in creating and enjoying art. To many people, drawing, painting, sculpting, singing, and playing a musical instrument are vital forms of self-expression, and their lives would be poorer without them. People produce art in all cultures and in all kinds of situations, even when they cannot satisfy their basic physical needs. Other people enjoy seeing art. In a world in which everyone had enough to eat, basic health care, adequate sanitation, and a place at school for each of their children, there would be no problem about donating to museums and other institutions that offer an opportunity to see original works of art to all who wish to see them, and (more important, in my view) the opportunity to create art to those who lack opportunities to express themselves in this way. Sadly, we don't live in that world, at least not yet. — Peter Singer

But as long as you're creating the art you want to create, if people start liking you, you shouldn't have to apologize. You want your stuff to be heard by as many people as possible. — Nate Ruess

While the concept of the muse is noteworthy, the development of the muse has changed substantially in today's online world. The tables have practically turned as the artist who is responsible for creating music in today's world is now being the muse to others. They have been responsible for the creation of "fan art," a style of performance where people create new forms of media based off of existing creations.
It was originally that the muse was what prompted the artist to create something new. Today it has changed to where the artist is the muse to others in society. — Kytka Hilmar-Jezek

Whether you're starving in a garret or living in a castle like J. K. Rowling, I had this image of the author as a flawless, composed individual, serene in the knowledge they were creating art. — Sarah Rees Brennan

Success or Failure, there should always be a Drive to Keep on Creating. — Henry Johnson Jr

I fight pain, anxiety, and fear every day, and the only method I have found that relieves my illness is to keep creating art. I followed the thread of art and somehow discovered a path that would allow me to live. — Yayoi Kusama

For your pleasure I'm creating a collection of erotic drawings so poorly rendered that I feel certain they will completely shake your belief in my understanding of human anatomy. — Ginn Hale

Like great art, something essential dies when great jokes are explained. So what's the key to telling a good joke/creating great art timing. — Travis Nichols

I am more interested in human beings than in writing, more interested in lovemaking than in writing, more interested in living than in writing. More interested in becoming a work of art than in creating one. — Anais Nin

Creating art is paradoxical because an artist seeks to express truth by penetrating and destroying illusions. Art is always the outpouring of a mind striving to achieve the impossible reconciliation of all the fragmented shards that make people human: frivolous amusements, idle moments, feelings of tenderness and pain, stored memories, future expectations, and unquenchable thirst to experience love and witness beauty. — Kilroy J. Oldster

I received from my experience in Japan an incredible sense of respect for the art of creating, not just the creative product. We're all about the product. To me, the process was also an incredibly important aspect of the total form. — Julie Taymor

Humor has been a fashioning instrument in America, cleaving its way through the national life, holding tenaciously to the spread elements of that life. Its mode has often been swift and coarse and ruthless, beyond art and beyond established civilization. It has engaged in warfare against the established heritage, against the bonds of pioneer existence. Its objective
the unconscious objective of a disunited people
has seemed to be that of creating fresh bonds, a new unity, the semblance of a society and the rounded completion of an American type. — Constance Rourke

I'm an actor, and I love the art of creating a character. — Lee Norris

Real haiku is the soul of poetry. Anything that is not actually present in one's heart is not haiku. The moon glows, flowers bloom, insects cry, water flows. There is no place we cannot find flowers or think of the moon. This is the essence of haiku. Go beyond the restrictions of your era, forget about purpose or meaning, separate yourself from historical limitations - there you will find the essence of true art, religion, and science. — Santoka Taneda

Art provides us with clues about how to live our lives more fully ... about how creating, collecting, and even just appreciating art can make daily living a masterpiece. — Michael Kimmelman

We grew tired together, creating our own kind of art. We became the masterpieces of the loneliest souls. The colors in both of our eyes bled out, knowing that sometimes the most beautiful pieces of art were created from the darkest of souls. — Brittainy C. Cherry

Science is the art of creating suitable illusions which the fool believes or argues against, but the wise man enjoys for their beauty or their ingenuity, without being blind to the fact that they are human veils and curtains concealing the abysmal darkness of the unknowable — Carl Jung

Our fine arts were developed, their types and uses were established, in times very different from the present, by men whose power of action upon things was insignificant in comparison with ours. But the amazing growth of our techniques, the adaptability and precision they have attained, the ideas and habits they are creating, make it a certainty that profound changes are impending in the ancient craft of the Beautiful. In all the arts there is a physical component which can no longer be considered or treated as it used to be, which cannot remain unaffected by our modern knowledge and power. For the last twenty years neither matter nor space nor time has been what it was from time immemorial. We must expect great innovations to transform the entire technique of the arts, thereby affecting artistic invention itself and perhaps even bringing about an amazing change in our very notion of art. — Paul Valery

There are no bad drawings.
Drawings are experiences.
The more you draw, the more experienced you'll get.
In fact, you'll learn more from bad or unpredictable or weird experiences than from those that go exactly as you'd hoped and planned.
So let it go.
Release your ego's desire for perfection.
Take risks.
Stretch.
Grow.
Create as much as you can, whenever you can. — Danny Gregory

People look at technology as sometimes an end to things, and it isn't an end in certain cases. In the movie business, the act of creating in the art form of movies, the craft of movies is completely technical, and that's all it is. — George Lucas

Our senses and emotions are the great source of inspiration for creating compelling and interesting art pieces (books included). Each art piece, be it a book, a song, a painting, a photograph or a product should touch our senses and evoke emotions. Emotionless art lacks purpose and interest. — Serafima

All artists are mothers. To be an artist is to be a creator, whether of a symphony or a supper or a painting or a person. Motherhood is the primary art, the art of creating (procreating) people. — Peter Kreeft

At a certain point you have to leave childish things behind, and one of the childish things is a sense that 'Wow, I can draw' or in my case 'Wow, I can read'... You feel you have what's called a talent, but as you become an adult, if you hope to make things, you have to give up the preoccupation with talent otherwise you'll spend your life painting beautiful pictures of fruit bowls that look like fruit bowls. — Zadie Smith

I don't want to deal with big, grand themes in my stories; art has nothing to do with themes. When you deal with themes, you are not creating; you are lecturing. — Tatyana Tolstaya

Hopefully if you create something fine, people will relate to it, so you're communicating with people, and you're not in a void. On the other hand, because you're always creating and transforming, art always separates you - always. — Patti Smith

Be always adventurous in the creating and sharing of your art in any form. Take risks and do not settle for playing safe. If you hesitate you are restraining your creativity. Some will appreciate your creative work and others will not. Just be free in expressing the creative you! — Alison Blackmore

For me, art in our time is strongest when it is aware of science, includes science, is inspired by science, or is about science. On the linguistic level, the new words coined by scientists to describe their new discoveries form a giant growing lexicon that means English is simply bursting with new possibilities, resembling the Elizabethan age in that respect. Then conceptually, science is creating new stories to tell, by deluging us with new information and potentialities. In this deluge we need art to do its usual job of sorting things out, by giving things their human dimension and by exploring how they might feel and what they might mean. So to me the arts and the sciences are completely intertwined. Maybe that's always been true, but now more than ever. — Kim Stanley Robinson

Art revolves around creating something that isn't there. — Kathleen Hanna

I have heard it said
There is an art which in their piedness shares
With great creating nature. — William Shakespeare

When I see brokenness, poverty and crime in inner cities, I also see the enormous potential and readiness for transformation and rebirth. We are creating an art form that comes from the heart and reflects the pain and sorrow of people's lives. It also expresses joy, beauty, and love. This process lays the foundation of building a genuine community in which people are reconnected with their families, sustained by meaningful work, nurtured by the care of each other and will together raise and educate their children. Then we witness social change in action. — Lily Yeh

Art doesn't bare itself to just anyone, but to believers called artists. — Richelle E. Goodrich

Decorating in relation to hotels is really nothing more than planned showmanship or the art of attracting attention in a delightful way and thus creating an increased consumer acceptance. It gives the guest the feeling of anticipation, excitement, expectancy, delight, and pride in the management of his favorit hotel. — Dorothy Draper

I'm always thinking about creating. My future starts when I wake up in the morning and see the light. — Miles Davis

It was shameless how life made fun of one; it was a joke, a cause for weeping! Either one lived and let one's senses play, drank full at the primitive mother's breast - which brought great bliss but was no protection against death; then one lived like a mushroom in the forest, colorful today and rotten tomorrow. Or else one put up a defense, imprisoned oneself for work and tried to build a monument to the fleeting passage of life - then one renounced life, was nothing but a tool; one enlisted in the service of that which endured, but one dried up in the process and lost one's freedom, scope, lust for life...
Ach, life made sense only if one achieved both, only if it was not split by this brittle alternative! To create, without sacrificing one's senses for it. To live, without renouncing the mobility of creating. Was that impossible? — Hermann Hesse

You can disseminate your art, and it's all such easy access now. The upside to it is that more people are creating than ever before. — Stanley Clarke

If one takes meaning into consideration, happiness might best be described as "a zest for life in all its complexity," as Sissela Bok writes in her book. To achieve it means to "attach our lives to something larger than ourselves." To be happy, one must do. It could be something as simple as teaching Sunday school or as grand as leading nonviolent protests. It could be as cerebral as seeking the cure for cancer or as physical as climbing mountains. It could be creating art. And it could be raising a child - my "best piece of poetrie," as Ben Jonson said in his elegy for his seven-year-old son. — Jennifer Senior

So you might say, 'Why do you end up making theatre in a world in which there is already too much of that? Creating layer upon layer of artifice?' Perhaps the function is to pierce through that cloud and show reality - so the function of art is to make things - to show: 'Hang on, this is real.' — Simon McBurney

As a writer, I can't really take days off. Writing is like creating an art. Once you stop writing, you can lose your rhythm and context, meaning that your writing may lose its power. — Andrea Hirata

Part of the art of creating is in discovering your own kind. They are everywhere. But don't look for them in the wrong places
Henry Miller
As you put yourself and your work out there, you will run into your fellow knuckleballers. These are your real peers-the people who share your obsessions, the people who share a similar mission to your own, the people with whom you share a mutual respect. There will only be a handful or so of them, but they're so, so important. Do what you can to nurture your relationships with these people. Show them work before you show anybody else. Keep them as close as you can. — Austin Kleon

These ways to make people buy were strange and new to us, and many bought for the sheer pleasure at first of holding in the hand and talking of something new. And once this was done, it was like opium, we could no longer do without this new bauble, and thus, though we hated the foreigners and though we knew they were ruining us, we bought their goods. Thus I learned the art of the foreigners, the art of creating in the human heart restlessness, disquiet, hunger for new things, and these new desires became their best helpers. — Han Suyin

How physical beauty turns out to be chemistry and geometry and anatomy. Art is really science. Discovering why people like something is so you can replicate it. Copy it. It's a paradox, "creating" a real smile. Rehearsing again and again a spontaneous moment of horror. All the sweat and boring effort that goes into creating what looks easy and instant. — Chuck Palahniuk

I think we ought to find something else to do," said Mandy. "But Alecto my love, you're the first person to notice my retro diner kitchen. When my parents saw it, they thought I was creating a weird art project."
"I like it. It's got that let's-drown-ourselves-in-better-days type ambiance," Alecto declared, his gray eyes narrowed. — Rebecca McNutt

The riskiness of Art, the reason why it affects us, is not the riskiness of its subject matter, it is the risk of creating a new way of seeing, a new way of thinking. — Jeanette Winterson

Creating art is painful. It takes time, practice, and the courage to stand alone. — Maria Semple

Shalom is the Hebrew word for "peace." For rhythm. For everything lining up exactly how it was meant to line up. Shalom is happening in those moments when you are at the dinner table for hours with good friends, good food, and good wine. Shalom is when you hear or see something and can't quite explain it, but you know it's calling and stirring something deep inside of you. Shalom is a sunset, that sense of exhaustion yet satisfaction from a hard day's work, creating art that is bigger than itself. Shalom is enemies being reconciled by love. Shalom is when you are dancing to the rhythm of God's voice. — Jefferson Bethke

No thanks. I'm not an artist." "You don't have to be. That's the beauty of creating art. It's cathartic. Think of your past, your present, your future. Draw what troubles you. It can be a face, a place, a story inside of one single image. — Keri Lake

One must have a high opinion of a work of art - not the work one is creating at the moment, but of that which one desires to achieve one day. Without this it is not worthwhile working. — Edgar Degas

I think, like any artist, those baby songs are not the best things you've ever written, but they count because they're you're first attempts at creating art and expressing yourself. — Rachel Platten

We must guard jealously all we have inherited from a long past, all we are capable of creating in a trying present, and all we are determined to preserve in a foreseeable future. Art — Robert M. Edsel

Civilization is the art of creating useless needs. — Leo Errera

Art was a way for me to express myself and for me to also escape because it was tough growing up as a child. We didn't have a lot of money. I was always creating. I was writing stories. I was doing comic books. I made my own universe. — Michelle Phan

Your greatest creation is yourself. Like any great work of art, creating a great self means putting in hard work, every day, for years. — Vi Hart

Come with me." He led her to the beach again, but during dinner a few people had been busy. It was now lined with an aisle of candles. A man stood close to the breaking surf, hands crossed, waiting. Someone had used the surrounding sand as a canvas, creating a swirling pattern. Their names were part of the art.
What? She asked without a sound.
"I want you to marry me. Here. Now."
Beckett let go of her hand and strode away from her. When he turned around, close to the water at the end of the aisle, he hoped to hell she wasn't running in the other direction. — Debra Anastasia

It is the form that allows a writer the greatest opportunity to explore human experience ... For that reason, reading a novel is potentially a significant act. Because there are so many varieties of human experience, so many kinds of interaction between humans, and so many ways of creating patterns in the novel that can't be created in a short story, a play, a poem or a movie. The novel, simply, offers more opportunities for a reader to understand the world better, including the world of artistic creation. That sounds pretty grand, but I think it's true. — Don DeLillo

My art is not limited to the songs I create but also to the reaction it creates. I like to sit back and look at the whole thing as if it's a tornado that I'm controlling. It's creating chaos. When you create chaos, ideas are turned upside down, and everybody looks at things in a different way. — Marilyn Manson

One has to guard against a formula that is good for everything, that can interpret reality in addition to the other arts, and that rather than creating can only result in a style, or a stylization. — Georges Braque

The art of investing is not about figuring out what has already happened. It's about anticipating the futureand creating the future that others will read about in The Wall Street Journal. — Joshua Rogers

All human beings are born with the same creative potential. Most people squander theirs away on a million superfluous things. I expend mine on one thing and one thing only: my art. — Pablo Picasso

My career? I never think of it as a 'career.' Art and music and all those things that I'm creating are just part of me. — Yoko Ono

I think making a movie is like drawing or creating an art piece. The artwork reflects part of your personality, but not all. — Tony Jaa

Like creating a masterpiece, quitting is an art: you have to decide what to keep within the frame and what to keep out. — Richie Norton

One of the most connective things we can do for ourselves, is to become world travelers of our own internal landscapes. What i love about creating art, is the excitement of turning that landscape inside out for all to see. And the kind of courage that takes, when i don't know what the outcome will be ... — Jaeda DeWalt

Art is a meta-language, with the help of which people try to communicate with one another; to impart information about themselves and assimilate the experience of others. Again, this has not to do with practical advantage but with realising the idea of love, the meaning of which is in sacrifice: the very antithesis of pragmatism. I simply cannot believe that an artist can ever work only for the sake of 'self-expression.' Self-expression if meaningless unless it meets with a response. For the sake of creating a spiritual bond with others it can only be an agonising process, one that involves no practical gain: ultimately it is an act of sacrifice. But surely it cannot be worth the effort merely for the sake of hearing one's own echo? — Andrei Tarkovsky

I really do appreciate the awareness and the hype that the fans are creating. I, myself, have become totally addicted to checking out the fan art. — Harald Zwart

Great writers are indecent people they live unfairly saving the best part for paper. good human beings save the world so that bastards like me can keep creating art, become immortal. if you read this after I am dead it means I made it. — Charles Bukowski

Everybody has that feeling when they look at a work of art and it's right, that sudden familiarity, a sort of ... recognition, as though they were creating it themselves, as though it were being created through them while they look at it or listen to it ... — William Gaddis

But I had two very special people who helped to take my style to the next level. Thank God for my first MC Cowboy and my first student Grand Wizard Theodore, and to go out after creating this art form and finding everyone jamming to it - that too was pretty scary. — Grandmaster Flash

You don't have to be Picasso or Rembrandt to create something. The fun of it, the joy of creating, is way high above anything else to do with the art form. — Chick Corea

I feel strong in my belief, based on my widely traveled collaborations, that a one-to-one contact through art contains potent peaceful powers, and is the most non-elitist way to share information, hopefully seducing us into creating mutual understandings for the benefit of all. — Robert Rauschenberg

Rock was different from rock and roll. Rock was virtuosic and adult, as opposed to popsy and teenaged. Rock and roll was apolitical and fun, while rock was "heavy" and often political, creating vistas of psychic energy that carried beyond the music itself and into radical politics and art. — Stephen Davis

In all great works of fiction, regardless of the grim reality they present, there is an affirmation of life against the transience of that life, an essential defiance. This affirmation lies in the way the author takes control of reality by retelling it in his own way, thus creating a new world. Every great work of art, I would declare pompously, is a celebration, an act of insubordination against the betrayals, horrors and infidelities of life. The perfection and beauty of form rebels against the ugliness and shabbiness of the subject matter. — Azar Nafisi