William Butler Yeats Quotes

Great art is never produced for its own sake. It is too difficult to be worth the effort.

For the essential thing about the work of art is that it is work, and very hard work too.

I work as diligently on my canvases as the laborers do in their fields.

I think art must be tough! I think art has to be hard. I don't think it should be easy. I think it should take foot-pounds of energy to produce that art, otherwise we would have more mediocre writers, and we don't have room for any more mediocrity in the world. There's already enough of it being visited on us night and day through the Internet, and through television, and through politics.

The little bit (two inches wide) of ivory on which I work with so fine a brush as produces little effect after much labour.

Art begins with resistance - at the point where resistance is overcome. No human masterpiece has ever been created without great labor.

All good poetry is forged slowly and patiently, link by link, with sweat and blood and tears.

Writing poetry is the hard manual labor of the imagination.

As an artist, you have to work really, really hard because you gotta make something that will allow people to even take the chance to even listen to it, you know?

If I feel the labor and the gruesome process, that helps me appreciate the art.

People want to be artists but don't want to do the ground work.

When you decide 'to be a writer,' you don't have the faintest idea of what the work is like. When you begin, you write spontaneously out of your limited experience of both the unwritten world and the written world. You're full of naïve exuberance. 'I am a writer!' Rather like the excitement of 'I have a lover!' But working at it nearly every day for fifty years – whether it is being the writer or being the lover – turns out to be an extremely taxing job and hardly the pleasantest of human activities.

There is no way to success in art but to take off your coat, grind paint, and work like a digger on the railroad, all day and every day.

In literature, there are only oxen. The biggest ones are the geniuses-the ones who toil eighteen hours a day without tiring.

If you don't enjoy making work, then it's bad. It's rough. Artwork is brutal for so many people. They let it happen to them, but it's brutal. I like the idea of an artist as somebody who works. A lot of the artists I like share this understanding.

One is distracted by this notion that there is such an thing as inspiration, that it comes fast and easy. And some people are graced by that style. I'm not. So I have to work as hard as any stiff to come up with my payload

It's tremendously hard work. Yes, I love arranging the words and having them fall on the ear the right way and you know you're not quite there and you're redoing it and redoing it and there's a wonderful thrill to it. But it is hard.

It is no more easy to make a good picture than it is to find a diamond or a pearl. It means trouble and you risk your life for it.

I have never heard a dancer asking for advice about how to stay focused on her footwork, or a painter complaining about the dull day-to-day task of painting. What task worth doing isn't worth daily effort? Do you think Michelangelo was having fun the whole time he was on his back painting the Sistine Chapel's ceiling?

I have some friends who are actors. I've watched them work. And I would say that of all the arts, acting is the most grueling, thankless. Never apologize for your work.

People who aren't artists often feel that artists are inspired. But if you work at your art you don't have time to be inspired.

The artist is not a 'Sunday child' for whom everything immediately succeeds. He does not have the right to live without duty. The task that is assigned to him is painful, it is a heavy cross for him to bear.

A writer must be hard to live with: when not working he is miserable, and when he is working he is obsessed.

I'm glad I took that time to work really hard on the music. I feel the effects of that now in a positive way with my connection with the audience.