Quotes on Creative Artists

Ideas are like rabbits. You get a couple and learn how to handle them, and pretty soon you have a dozen.

You can't try to do things; you simply must do them.

The scariest moment is always just before you start.

The criminal is the creative artist; the detective only the critic.

Imagine a life-form whose brainpower is to ours as ours is to a chimpanzee’s. To such a species, our highest mental achievements would be trivial. Their toddlers, instead of learning their ABCs on Sesame Street, would learn multivariable calculus on Boolean Boulevard. Our most complex theorems, our deepest philosophies, the cherished works of our most creative artists, would be projects their schoolkids bring home for Mom and Dad to display on the refrigerator door.

This world is but a canvas to our imagination.

Those who do not want to imitate anything, produce nothing.

Learn the rules like a pro, so you can break them like an artist.

Can anything be sadder than work left unfinished? Yes, work never begun.

To draw you must close your eyes and sing.

Art enables us to find ourselves and lose ourselves at the same time.

It is one of the primary motives of modern art that it wants to abolish the distance which the viewer, the consumer, the audience maintain vis-a-vis a work of art. There is no doubt that the leaders of the creative artists of the last 50 years concentrated their efforts mainly on eliminating that distance.

Their task [creative artists], therefore, is to communicate directly from one inward world to another, in such a way that an actual shock of experience will have been rendered: not a mere statement for the information or persuasion of a brain, but an effective communication across the void of space and time from one center of consciousness to another.

For great things do not done just happen by impulse but are a succession of small things linked together.

Creativity is allowing yourself to make mistakes. Art is knowing which ones to keep.

They always say time changes things, but you actually have to change them yourself.

You can't wait for inspiration. You have to go after it with a club.

The job of the artist is always to deepen the mystery.

There are painters who transform the sun to a yellow spot, but there are others who with the help of their art and their intelligence, transform a yellow spot into sun

you can, you should, and if you’re brave enough to start, you will.

Poets do not go mad; but chess-players do. Mathematicians go mad, and cashiers; but creative artists very seldom. I am not, as will be seen, in any sense attacking logic: I only say that this danger does lie in logic, not in imagination.