#artists

I will admit that I wanted to shout for standing on the top of a scaffold in front of a good new wall always goes to my head. It is a sensation something between that of an angel let out of his cage into a new sky and a drunkard turned loose in a royal cellar. And after all, what nobler elevation could you find in this world than the scaffold of a wall painter? No admiral on the bridge of a new battleship designed by the old navy, could feel more pleased with himself than Gulley, on two planks, forty feet above dirt level, with his palette table beside him, his brush in his hand, and the draught blowing up his trousers; cleared for action. ↗

— Joyce Cary

#artists #new-beginnings #paint-brush #palette #art

Orpheus never liked words. He had his music. He would get a funny look on his face and I would say what are you thinking about and he would always be thinking about music. If we were in a restaurant sometimes Orpheus would look sullen and wouldn't talk to me and I thought people felt sorry for me. I should have realized that women envied me. Their husbands talked too much. But I wanted to talk to him about my notions. I was working on a new philosophical system. It involved hats. This is what it is to love an artist: The moon is always rising above your house. The houses of your neighbors look dull and lacking in moonlight. But he is always going away from you. Inside his head there is always something more beautiful. Orpheus said the mind is a slide ruler. It can fit around anything. Show me your body, he said. It only means one thing. ↗

— Sarah Ruhl

#loneliness #love #marriage #philosophy #plays

I do strongly feel that among the greatest pieces of luck for high achievement is ordeal. Certain great artists can make out without it, Titian and others, but mostly you need ordeal. My idea is this: the artist is extremely lucky who is presented with the worst possible ordeal which will not actually kill him. At that point, he's in business: Beethoven's deafness, Goya's deafness, Milton's blindness, that kind of thing. ↗

— John Berryman

#artists #beethoven #goya #literature #luck

You want to know, companions of my youth, How much has changed the wild but shy young poet Forever writing last poem after last poem; You hear he’s dark as earth, barefoot, A turban round his head, a bolo at his side, His ballpen blown up to a long-barreled gun: Deeper still the struggling change inside. ↗

— Emmanuel F. Lacaba

#change

The artist lives to have stories to tell and to learn to tell them well. ↗

— Criss Jami

#artists #artists-life #creative #creativity #experiences

I don't believe in art. I believe in artists. ↗

— Marcel Duchamp

#artists #believe #i #i believe #i believe in

Artists who seek perfection in everything are those who cannot attain it in anything. ↗

— Gustave Flaubert

#anything #artists #attain #cannot #everything

An artist should create beautiful things, but should put nothing of his own life into them. ↗

— Oscar Wilde

#artists #art

I do not deny that I have made drawings and watercolors of an erotic nature. But they are always works of art. Are there no artists who have done erotic pictures? ↗

— Egon Schiele

#art #artists #deny #done #drawings

The task of the artist at any time is uncompromisingly simple — to discover what has not yet been done, and to do it. ↗

— Craig Raine

#inspirational #writers-on-writing #writing #inspirational