Artists And Writers Quotes

That friend of hers has got to go, though. You're lucky you got stuck with that Dexter guy instead of her.'

'Yeah, but that Dexter couldn't shut his piehole either,' Marlon says. 'I mean, Christ. Artists and writers - let them kill each other off in cage matches; let God sort 'em out. ~ Dexter Palmer

It was not cool to be that fun, bubbly kid, so I would just go off on my own and sing and make up songs, and that's how I think I developed into the kind of artist and writer that I am. ~ Elle Varner

The nation that complacently and fearfully allows its artists and writers to become suspected rather than respected is no longer regarded as a nation possessed with humor or depth. ~ James Thurber

Creativity sometimes needs the protection of darkness, of being ignored. That is very obvious in the natural tendency many artists and writers have not to show their paintings or writings before they are finished. ~ Marie-Louise Von Franz

The original series of Watchmen is the complete story that Alan Moore and I wanted to tell. However, I appreciate DC's reasons for this initiative and the wish of the artists and writers involved to pay tribute to our work. May these new additions have the success they desire. ~ Dave Gibbons

People do support themselves as artists and writers, so there's no need to be all doom and gloom about it. You just have to push forward. You have to follow your vision and hope for the best. You have to write for love. ~ Cheryl Strayed

Not only Freud but artists and writers were also interested in the unconscious. It was medicine that made the first steps toward modernity. ~ Eric Kandel

Artists and writers have to understand and live the truth that what we are doing is nourishing the world. ~ Ariel Gore

I'm kind of hooked to the game of art and literature; my heroes are artists and writers. ~ Jim Morrison

I have always noticed that these artists and writers are very unbalanced ~ Agatha Christie

The Tower of Babel" ...
The undersigned citizens, being artists, painters, sculptors, architects, and others devoted to and desirous preserving the amenities of Paris, wish to protest, in the name of our national good taste, against such an erection in the very heart of our city, as the monstrous and useless Eiffel Tower, already christened ... " The Tower of Babel" ...
How much longer is the City of Paris to be a play-ground for these barbarous and sordid imaginations which disfigure and dishonor her? For the Eiffel Tower, which even commercially minded America rejected, is a public dishonor to our city. All our historic buildings, our monuments of rare and appealing beauty, are dwarfed and humiliated by this monstrous apotheosis of the factory chimney whose odious shadow will lie over the city ...
Plea to the Exposition Director in opposition to the Eiffel Tower, signed by artists and writers and published in Le Temps, 1887 ~ Carol McCleary

All those artists and writers who bemoan how hard the work is, and oh, how tedious the creative process, and oh, what a tortured genius they are. Don't buy into it. . . . As if difficulty and struggle and torture somehow confer seriousness upon your chosen work. Doing great work simply because you love it, sounds, in our culture, somehow flimsy, and that's a failing of our culture, not of the choice of work that artists make." This ~ Timothy Ferriss

I'm interested in how artists and writers do this, using art as therapy. Escaping into the worlds we create. We're all victims and few of us are truly free. ~ David Lloyd

The term comics long ago became obsolete and inaccurate. It merely defined the content of the early joke-based comical strips. Sequential Art is a more accurate description of the form. I first suggested it because I believed something needed to be done to correct the feeling of inferiority by artists and writers in this field. ~ Will Eisner

Practically all great artists and writers have had a mental illness of one kind or another. But it's the normal, everyday people who commit almost all of the violence. We should be wary of them. ~ Ryan Blacketter

It was this feeling for a lot of my characters, who are dissidents or banned artists and writers, that they had had to fight living under so much surveillance, and then suddenly they come to America and they're like, I'm not being surveilled - I'm not even being noticed at all. ~ Molly Antopol

That's what he disliked about certain artists and writers. They interfered and pointed to everything as if you couldn't see it or read for yourself. ~ Frank McCourt

But God has the most fun with artists and writers: he inflames them with the desire to rival his own creations, then douses their overheated ambitions with a cold spray from the garden hose of reality. If they persist, he slams them to the ground and tweaks them on the proboscis for good measure. A fortunate few break free and prosper; the others lament the day they didn't become bank clerks. ~ Rick Bayan

Sarajevo was this beautiful city, very cosmopolitan, multiethnic, full of wonderful people, artists and writers and poets and Serbs and Muslims and Croats, and living side by side. And then this medieval siege, and it was a medieval siege, came, and the Bosnian Serbs were on the hills lobbing in rockets and grenades and mortars. ~ Janine Di Giovanni

I had this sense that I was part of, sort of a lineage of artists and writers through history that have had mood disorders. ~ Ellen Forney

We lost so many talented artists and writers from the generations before ours that we're really lacking older figureheads. ~ Christopher Bollen

Artists and writers have to deal with the element that makes the real real and the dream real while you are dreaming it. That's where stories and poems get their power. ~ Ben Okri

Conversely, high-reactive children may be more likely to develop into artists and writers and scientists and thinkers because their aversion to novelty causes them to spend time inside the familiar - and intellectually fertile - environment of their own heads. ~ Susan Cain

Too many artists and writers have forgotten their roots. I embrace my fans because, in a way, they're family. ~ Jim Steranko

Writers and people who had command of words were respected and feared as people who manipulated magic. In latter times I think that artists and writers have allowed themselves to be sold down the river. They have accepted the prevailing belief that art and writing are merely forms of entertainment. They're not seen as transformative forces that can change a human being; that can change a society. They are seen as simple entertainment; things with which we can fill 20 minutes, half an hour, while we're waiting to die. ~ Alan Moore

That kind of thinking [that writers must alleviate their guilt for leading a creative life] is based on the idea that the creative life is somehow self-indulgent. Artists and writers have to understand and live the truth that what we are doing is nourishing the world. William Carlos Williams said, "It is difficult to get the news from poems yet men die miserably every day for lack of what is found there." You can't eat a book, right, but books have saved my life more often than sandwiches. And they've saved your life ... But we don't say, oh, Maya Angelou should have silenced herself because other people have other destinies. It's interesting, because artists are always encouraged to feel guilty about their work. Why? Why don't we ask predatory bankers how they alleviate their guilt? ~ Ariel Gore

Oh, don't get me started! I love fantasy, I read it for pleasure, even after all these years. Pat McKillip, Ursula Le Guin and John Crowley are probably my favorite writers in the field, in addition to all the writers in the Endicott Studio group - but there are many others I also admire. In children's fantasy, I'm particularly keen on Philip Pullman, Donna Jo Napoli, David Almond and Jane Yolen - though my favorite novels recently were Midori Snyder's Hannah's Garden, Holly Black's Tithe, and Neil Gaiman's Coraline.

I read a lot of mainstream fiction as well - I particularly love Alice Hoffman, A.S. Byatt, Sara Maitland, Sarah Waters, Sebastian Faulks, and Elizabeth Knox. There's also a great deal of magical fiction by Native American authors being published these days - Louise Erdrich's Antelope Wife, Alfredo Vea Jr.'s Maravilla, Linda Hogan's Power, and Susan Power's Grass Dancer are a few recent favorites.

I'm a big fan of Jane Austen, Charlotte Bronte, Charles Dickens, and Anthony Trollope - I re-read Jane Austen's novels in particular every year.Other fantasists say they read Tolkien every year, but for me it's Austen. I adore biographies, particularly biographies of artists and writers (and particularly those written by Michael Holroyd). And I love books that explore the philosophical side of art, such as Lewis Hyde's The Gift, Carolyn Heilbrun's Writing a Woman's Life, or David Abram's Spell of the Sensuous.

(from a 2002 interview) ~ Terri Windling

Are artists and writers the only people entitled to lives of their own? ~ Richard Yates

Petre's commitment to Roman Catholicism combined with her openness to mental and moral subjectivism formed a rare alchemy among early twentieth-century Catholics. Her exposure to thinkers like Nietzsche did not strip her of her faith. She argued that despite Nietzsche's professed atheism, his life and thought offered much for Catholics to admire. His was a 'strenuous,' 'suffering,' 'unselfish' 'life militant' marked by 'purity, integrity, [and] utter unworldliness.' Despite being the sweetheart of libertine artists and writers, Nietzsche criticized the decadence and pessimism of modern aesthetics. Likewise, the goal of his celebration of free will and his critique of sin was not an orgiastic 'self-abandonment, but ... strong self-possession; a mastering of one's own life and conduct' and a recognition that true contrition is not legislated from without but cultivated from within a deep reverence for the 'mysterious laws of our being.' Petre insisted that in Nietzsche, Catholics could find a fellow seeker of moral strenuousness: 'There is to be here no dilettantism, but sheer hard work. ~ Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen

I believe the media pretty much dictates the way relationships are handled, even in the way we handle ourselves. Abuse, cheating, threesomes, it's inspired by music and television. Irresponsible artists and writers with a hidden agenda, just working against the moral fabric that God intended for us to have. ~ Tony Gaskins

This posture of skepticism towards the classics displays a profound misjudg- ment. For the great works of Western culture are remarkable for the dis- tance that they maintained from the norms and orthodoxies that gave birth to them. Only a very shallow reading of Chaucer or Shakespeare would see those writers as endorsing the societies in which they lived, or would over- look the far more important fact that their works hold mankind to the light of moral judgment, and examine, with all the love and all the pity that it calls for, the frailty of human nature. It is precisely the aspiration towards universal truth, towards a God's-eye perspective on the human condition, that is the hallmark of Western culture. ~ Theodore Dalrymple

I think there's an element to this business that writers especially are overlooked in many ways and this made everybody kind of look at us differently. I do think that an interesting thing happened during it, which was being on these picket lines and looking at the huge amount of executives coming and going that you realize don't really add much to the equation. ~ Edward Allen Bernero

A writer writes for writers, a non-writer writes for his next-door neighbor or for the manager of the local bank branch, and he fears (often mistakenly) that they would not understand or, in any case, would not forgive his boldness. ~ Umberto Eco

The unlucky hand dealt to clear and precise writers is that people assume they are superficial and so do not go to any trouble inreading them: and the lucky hand dealt to unclear ones is that the reader does go to some trouble and then attributes the pleasure he experiences in his own zeal to them. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche

For most of us, fanfiction is a non-issue. Even for midlist writers. We will never be popular enough for people to play in our worlds with any frequency. The problem for us is getting people to read and care about our books that much in the first place. ~ Catherynne M Valente

Don't seek to emulate other writers. Don't pay heed to how others say your tales should be written. And don't ever change your writing on account of anything or anyone. Your stories are your own, so write them your way. ~ Morgan Wright

I am obsessed by the idea of silence. I went through an entire library studying art, artists and their critics, philosophers, too, on the meaning and significance of the color white. I dreamed of white birds and white bears. I thought about the white pages of my mother's journals. I became enthralled with John Cage and his work, 4'33, his masterpiece of ambient sound. Rauschenberg, too. And then at some point I let go. What sticks to the soul is what gets placed on the page. Maybe that's the unknown part, the mystery, the power of the empty page. ~ Terry Tempest Williams

Peter is still amazed at the degree to which a certain widening gyre of accolades can change an artist's work, literally change it, not just the new stuff but the old as well, the pieces that have been around for a while, that have seemed "interesting" or "promising" but minor, until (not often, just once in a while) an artist is by some obscure consensus declared to have been neglected, misrepresented, ahead of his time. What's astonishing to Peter is the way the work itself seems to change, more or less in the way of a reasonably pretty girl who is suddenly treated as a beauty. Peculiar, clever Victoria Hwang is going to be in Artforum next month, and probably in the collections of the Whitney and the Guggenheim; Renee Zellweger - moonfaced, squinty-eyed, a character actress if ever there was one - was just on the cover of Vogue, looking ravishing in a silver gown. It is, of course, a trick of perception - the understanding that that funny little artist or that quirky-looking girl must be taken with new seriousness - but Peter suspects there's a deeper change at work. Being the focus of that much attention (and, yes, of that much money) seems to differently excite the molecules of the art or the actress or the politician. It's not just a phenomenon of altered expectations, it's a genuine transubstantiation, brought about by altered expectations. Renée Zellweger becomes a beauty, and would look like a beauty to someone who had never heard of her. Victoria Hwang's videos and ~ Michael Cunningham

Every young artist has to do it one way, his [or her] way, and the hell with patterns. Remember who you are and where you are and what you are doing ... And never take advice, including this. ~ Katherine Anne Porter

Why not fall in love with an artist? Otherwise there are no letters, pictures, paintings and songs for you when you wake up. ~ Darnell Lamont Walker

As a thinker, and most writers would consider themselves thinkers, your competition is not only the whole world, but it's also the people of the past, and the people of the future. And the people of the future are the dangerous ones, because you'll never know how good they are. ~ Jarod Kintz

I know that many writers have had to write under censorship and yet produced good novels; for instance, Cervantes wrote Don Quixote under Catholic censorship. ~ Guillermo Cabrera Infante

Most artists have contracts directly with the record company, and when they do music, all of their music is owned by the record company. But I did mine through a production company. ~ Roy Ayers

Maine likes to call itself 'America's Vacationland.' For many artists, though, it's the office. Since the 19th century, painters from all over the country - including Edward Hopper, Alex Katz, John Marin, Fairfield Porter, Neil Welliver and Andrew Wyeth - have spent large chunks of time there. ~ Terry Teachout

I'm not a big believer in disciplined writers. What does discipline mean? The writer who forces himself to sit down and write for seven hours every day might be wasting those seven hours if he's not in the mood and doesn't feel the juice. I don't think discipline equals creativity. ~ Bret Easton Ellis

An ebook is like having a photo of a dead loved one. It's convenient to look at and it will stir the mind, but it doesn't breathe. ~ Brandt Legg

I love those moments on stage, on screen and in life when you dispense with language, when you sort of transcend it in a way, and certainly the experience of falling in love, I think, defies words, which is why poets, painters, musicians, actors have tried to describe that feeling, writers have just tried to put words to that. ~ Cate Blanchett

Write, write, write! Get your you-know-what in the chair and write more books: write the books of your heart and don't let stress steal your joy. ~ Sarra Cannon

Putting thoughts into words is vastly different from putting truth into words. For words are not truth. As ardently as writers sort and select and polish their words, at the end of the day they are still words. They are not, in themselves, truth. However carefully we choose our words, no matter how eloquently we compile and conjoin and convey them, they remain just words, merely signposts that point to the truth, as Eckhart Tolle put it. Just as preachers, politicians, PR spin masters and the media can't create truth by writing or speaking words they say are true, authors can't validate truth by putting it into print. And the rest of us can't know it by simply hearing or reading the words. We can only find our way to truth by following the signposts and ultimately believing. It all comes down to believing, to faith, for there is no proof this side of the big dirt nap. ~ Lionel Fisher

Sometimes when one cannot stand the story or novel one
is working on, it helps to write something else - a different
story or novel, or essays venting one's favorite peeves, or exercises
aimed at passing the time and incidentally polishing up
one's craft. The best way in the world for breaking a writer's
block is to write a lot. Jabbering away on paper, one gets
tricked into feeling interested, all at once, in something one is
saying, and behold, the magic waters are flowing again. Often
it helps to work on a journal, since that allows the writer to
write about those things that most interest him, yet frees him
of the pressure of achievement and encourages him to develop
a more natural, more personal style. ~ John Gardner

The very first hit factory was T.B. Harms, a Tin Pan Alley publishing company overseen by Max Dreyfus. With staff writers like Jerome Kern, George and Ira Gershwin, Cole Porter, and Richard Rodgers, T.B. Harms was the dominant publisher of popular music in the early twentieth century. Dreyfus called his writers "the boys" and installed pianos for them to compose on around the office on West Twenty-Eighth, the street that gave Tin Pan Alley its name, allegedly for the tinny-sounding pianos passersby heard from the upper-story windows of the row houses. The sheet-music sellers also employed piano players in their street-level stores, who would perform the Top 40 of the 1920s for browsing customers. ~ John Seabrook

There are no guidelines for what happens when you get successful as an artist. My heroes were artists like Acconci, and he didn't make any money. That's what I thought success was. ~ Robert Longo

If you saw me without concealer, you would see that I have raccoon eyes. And I think my forehead is too small. I am not quintessentially beautiful. I am photogenic, but that's only because I have learned how to make the best of what I've got from the make-up artists I have worked with. ~ Shilpa Shetty

I fear horror became so inextricably related to splatter punk in the late 1980s that a large segment of the audience turned away from it. And thriller became the more comfortable, cozier label because it promised a resolution, a happy ending. Horror came to mean, I'm going to leave your ass out here in the dark with no way to get home. And one of your legs is missing. ~ Christopher Rice

I am passionate about finding undiscovered and talented artists. I want to help those artists get to the next level and provide existing artists with a new way to reach fans. I wanted to partner with the Cutting Edge Group because they share my vision and have a proven track record in innovation in the music business. ~ Michelle Phan

The writer's role is to menace the public's conscience. He must have a position, a point of view. He must see the arts as a vehicle of social criticism and he must focus on the issues of his time. ~ Rod Serling

The painter knew the mirror lied. And the canvas told the truth. ~ Thomas Lloyd Qualls

Young children are developing more of an artistic orientation, and the orientation they develop is so naturally graceful and lively that many great artists have said that they constantly try to recapture it. ~ William Crain

The difference between a fairly interesting writer and a fascinating writer is that the fascinating writer has a better nose for what genuinely excites him, he is hotter on the trail, he has a better instinct for what is truly alive in him. The worse writer may seem to be more sensible in many ways, but he is less sensible in this vital matter: he cannot distinguish what is full of life from what is only half full or empty of it. And so his writing is less alive, and as a writer he is less alive, and in writing, as in everything else, nothing matters but life. ~ Ted Hughes

I'm ... getting there. I'm beginning to think that maybe it's okay to be a blank canvas. Maybe it's okay that my future is unknown. And maybe," I say with another smile, "it's okay to be inspired by the people who do know their future." "It goes both ways, you know." I link his icicle fingers through mine. "What does?" "Artists are inspired by blank canvases." My smile grows wider. ~ Stephanie Perkins

There's a lot of other artists doing things outside of that depth that I enjoy - that music that I can actually have fun to, and not be in depth and think about, then I appreciate that. ~ Kendrick Lamar

The whole genius of an author consists in describing well, and delineating character well. Homer, Plato, Virgil, Horace only excel other writers by their expressions and images; we must indicate what is true if we mean to write naturally, forcibly and delicately. ~ Jean De La Bruyere