George Bernard Shaw Quotes

It's seldom you make a great picture. you have to milk the cow quite a lot to get plenty of milk to make a little cheese.

I'd rather get back to making art than talk about it.

Any working composer or painter or sculptor will tell you that inspiration comes at the eighth hour of labour rather than as a bolt out of the blue. We have to get our vanities and our preconceptions out of the way and do the work in the time allotted.

I believe in creative failing - to contine to write poems that fail and fail and fail until a day comes when you've got a thousand poems behind you and you're relaxed and you finally write a good poem.

because talent alone doesn't make an artist

Those who are waiting for an epiphany to strike may wait forever. The artist simply goes to work, making art, both good and not so good.

Writing or making anything-a poem, a bird feeder, a chocolate cake-has self-respect in it. You're working. You're trying. You're not lying down on the ground, having given up.

I have never produced anything good except by a long succession of slight efforts.

By being willing to be a bad artist, you have a chance to be an artist, and perhaps, over time, a very good one.

The great composer does not set to work because he is inspired, but becomes inspired because he is working.

I've always developed all my own pieces, and they're time-consumers.

I can't imagine anybody who ends up being an artist who didn't pass through a time of geekiness.

Sometimes you can do a million songs, and if they're not good, you're just wasting your time.

You just gotta record stuff and move on and make new material. Painters don't wait until they're in some specific gallery before they move on to the next painting.

Making art has taught me that the tiniest smidgen of progress is something to be cherished.

If I spend 100 days in a row making music there’s a chance nothing will come of it. But if I spend 100 days not making music it’s guaranteed that nothing will come of it. So keep working.

These days, I find I'm applying a little more patience to my process. If I look back on my work, I can see those songs I bailed on could have been better, that had those great two verses and then I kind of coasted from there. These days, if a song is giving me trouble, I put it aside and pick it up later, and keep doing that, for a year if I have to, until it takes shape.

I actually believe that a lot of what people call originality has to do with persistence in the craft.

Writers have to keep on writing if they want to mature, like caterpillars endlessly chewing on leaves.

The secret to a masterpiece is 10 percent inspiration and 90 percent perspiration.

In reality, however, an artist is a product of art

Don't loaf and invite inspiration; light out after it with a club, and if you don't get it you will nonetheless get something that looks remarkably like it.

People may think that because I have illustrated and written all these books it must be easy for me, but it's not really easy for me. The drawing part is easy - I love doing it. But continuing to move forward is hard.

To be a writer is to sit down at one's desk in the chill portion of every day, and to write; not waiting for the little jet of the blue flame of genius to start from the breastbone - just plain going at it, in pain and delight. To be a writer is to throw away a great deal, not to be satisfied, to type again, and then again, and once more, and over and over...

I long so much to make beautiful things. But beautiful things require effort and disappointment and perseverance.