QuoteLog

“Chaos can be a positive thing. Chaos is inherently part of the creative act. To embrace creativity means you must also embrace chaos. Things don’t happen when everything is neat and ‘just so’. Creativity is all about disruption. The people who tell you that creativity is pain-free are liars. The people who tell you they’ve got a plan are liars. There is no plan. There’s just you, God and the need to invent.”

“Lack of skill dictates economy of style.”

“The crux of the biscuit is: If it entertains you, fine. Enjoy it. If it doesn’t, then blow it out your ass. I do it to amuse myself. If I like it, I release it. If somebody else likes it, that’s a bonus.”

“A committee is a cul-de-sac down which ideas are lured and then quietly strangled.”

“You can’t have a light without a dark to stick it in.”

“Skill without imagination is craftsmanship and gives us many useful objects such as wickerwork picnic baskets. Imagination without skill gives us modern art.”

“When we are unable to find tranquility within ourselves, it is useless to seek it elsewhere.”

“Lying in bed would be an altogether perfect and supreme experience if only one had a colored pencil long enough to draw on the ceiling.”

“Doing creative work is like running a marathon, you’ve got to do it really regularly.”

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

“You have to know how to accept rejection and reject acceptance.”

“The really good idea is always traceable back quite a long way, often to a not very good idea which sparked off another idea that was only slightly better, which somebody else misunderstood in such a way that they then said something which was really rather interesting.”

“You’re never too old to do goofy stuff.”

“I do this because the need to create is woven into the fabric of who I am. I have expressed myself artistically in some form or another since I was five. Today, with computers and digital technology available, I feel like a kid with their first box of crayons and a freshly painted wall. The combinations of what I can create seem endless.”

“The first prerogative of an artist in any medium is to make a fool of himself.”

“There will be days when working on your project will be as appealing as curdled milk. Nothing I can think of short of childbirth (for which I often thank the gender-gods I won’t experience first hand) puts an individual through so much pain for so great a reward. It’s like eating chocolate-covered broken glass.”

“Simplicity for its own sake is not a design solution.”

“A work grows as it will and sometimes confronts its author as an independent, even an alien, creation.”

“The line between failure and success is so fine that we scarcely know when we pass it - so fine that we often are on the line and do not know it.”

“What could be more interesting, or in the end, more ecstatic, than in those rare moments when you see another person look at something you’ve made, and realize that they got it exactly, that your heart jumped to their heart with nothing in between.”

“You’re never too old to create refrigerator art.”

“As an artist you may spend years searching for expression. When you find the medium you truly love, expression finds you.”

“People need trouble -- a little frustration to sharpen the spirit on, toughen it. Artists do; I don’t mean you need to live in a rat hole or gutter, but you have to learn fortitude, endurance. Only vegetables are happy.”

“The mind of the people is like mud, from which arise strange and beautiful things.”

“I don’t think of myself as making art. I do what I do because I want to, because painting is the best way I’ve found to get along with myself.”

“In my studio I’m as happy as a cow in her stall. That’s the only place where everything is all right”

“There was never a genius without a tincture of insanity.”

“Art is the only way to run away without leaving home.”

“I have come to an unalterable decision -- to go and live forever in Polynesia. Then I can end my days in peace and freedom, without thoughts of tomorrow and this eternal struggle against idiots.”

“You cannot govern the creative impulse; all you can do is to eliminate obstacles and smooth the way for it.”

“The artist’s world is limitless. It can be found anywhere, far from where he lives or a few feet away. It is always on his doorstep.”

“I’ll play it first and tell you what it is later.”

“I am very depressed and deeply disgusted with painting. It is really a continual torture.”

“The creative person finds himself in a state of turmoil, restlessness, emptiness, and unbearable frustration unless he expresses his inner life in some creative way.”

“Life is a great big canvas; throw all the paint on it you can.”

“You’ve got to keep the child alive; you can’t create without it.”

“A creative block is the wall we erect to ward off the anxiety we suppose we’ll experience if we sit down to work.”

“Trousers with two legs are not a design cliche.”

“If you hear a voice within you saying, ‘You are not a painter’, then by all means paint, boy, and that voice will be silenced.”

“I do not know myself how I paint it. I sit down with a white board before the spot that strikes me. I look at what is before my eyes, and say to myself, that white board must become something.”

“The object, which is back of every true work of art, is the attainment of a state of being, a state of high functioning, a more than ordinary moment of existence. In such moments activity is inevitable, and whether this activity is with brush, pen, chisel, or tongue, its result is but a by-product of the state, a trace, the footprint of the state.”

“Be a good craftsman; it won’t stop you being a genius.”

“You should often amuse yourself when you take a walk for recreation, in watching and taking note of the attitudes and actions of men as they talk and dispute, or laugh or come to blows with one another… noting these down with rapid strokes, in a little pocket-book which you ought always to carry with you.”

“I feel that there is an angel inside me whom I am constantly shocking.”

“I choose a block of marble and chop off whatever I don’t need.”

“We are most nearly ourselves when we achieve the seriousness of the child at play.”

“Songwriting is about getting the demon out of me. It’s like being posessed. You try to go to sleep, but the song won’t let you. So you have to get up and make it into something, and then you’re allowed to sleep. It’s always in the middle of the night, or you’re half-awake or tired, when your critical faculties are switched off. So letting go is what the whole game is. Every time you try to put your finger on it, it slips away. You turn on the lights and the cockroaches run away. You can never grasp them.”

“Your photography is a record of your living - for anyone who really sees. You may see and be affected by other people’s ways, you may even use them to find your own, but you will have eventually to free yourself of them. That is what Nietzche meant when he said, ‘I have just read Schopenhauer, now I have to get rid of him.’ He knew how insidious other people’s ways could be, particularly those which have the forcefulness of profound experience, if you let them get between you and your own personal vision.”

“Have no fear of perfection - you’ll never reach it.”