A time comes, after years in the trenches, when the artist begins to fathom what his career has looked like so far and what it will look like if he continues as he's proceeded.
The artist must reckon with his own character flaws, which do not disappear just because he has been called to be an artist.
An ability to choose is a necessity for the artist.
To decide to reach for this blue and not that one, to switch styles or subject matter, to move, in the middle of a sentence, in one direction or another, to commit to this book when that one is also calling, are the sorts of choices that artists must make if they are to function.
The artist, busy and unsettled, can find a moment's peace - and even whole-being rejuvenation - by quietly attuning to a red sky, a gray sky, a black sky, a blue sky.
Who knows how many artists fail because the light that shines through them is defracted in a thousand directions and not concentrated in a single beam?
Do I doubt the painting I've just painted because it is not right or because I can never like what I do?
The growth that an artist seeks is a fine combination of mastering craft, garnering an audience, maintaining one's mental health, and working mightily from a ever-expanding base of experience.
While it may feel natural to devote yourself to your creative work and succumb to feelings of separation and alienation, it nevertheless isn't a terrific idea in terms of your overall happiness and health.
Abstraction is itself an abstract word and has no single meaning ... Every word in our language is abstract, because it represents something else.
A key to a long, productive writing life is finding ways to support that life, emotionally and existentially.
The writer loves the fog as it pours in; he loves the sun when the fog pours out. The rest of California is Beach Boys country, but San Francisco has that moody thing going on, those blues notes wrapped in moisture, an atmosphere that tempers California dreaming and makes life more real. The fog brings reality, but it is still a California reality, one spent outdoors the whole year round.
It is the artist's job to revere beauty without being enchanted by it, to aim for it but also to aim for truth and goodness - just in case they, and not beauty, are the real things of value.
The strange, unbeautiful face beautiful in its ugliness; the perfect, beautiful face ugly in its perfection.
Boredom is the thing that regularly arrives between excitements and episodes of meaning: it is as natural as the tides, and in it an artist can drown.
Art and business may be strange bedfellows, but an artist must make room in her bed for both.
Chaos is everywhere - and artists, to fashion art and live truthfully, have no choice but to invite this unwanted guest right into the studio.
A composition is an arrangement, built out of parts, that aims at seamlessness.
Revealing secrets can bring us pain or get us into trouble, but worse pain and worse trouble await us if we keep silent...Revealing secrets can bring us pain or get us into trouble, but worse pain and worse trouble await us if we keep silent we become habitually untruthful. The door to our creativity closes. gr we become habitually untruthful. The door to our creativity closes.
The artist must possess at least as much conviction as does his enemy, the dogmatic, mealy-mouthed, anti-art bigot.
Creativity is the gift that keeps on giving.
Hurray for criticism, if it means that an artist's voice is heard. Let the wise artist invite criticism and survive it when it comes.
Artists have wild desires and a terrible hunger to achieve... Without it they haven't the juice for striving or loving. But desire also can make them greedy and turn dreams into unrealizable obsessions.
An artist's fine goal is to manifest a well-nigh heroic self-discipline, carefully attending to all that concerns him.
Artists are often poignantly careless about making and keeping friends.
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