William Ames Quotes

The ultimate aim of all creative activity is the building!

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

An original is a creation motivated by desire. Any reproduction of an originals motivated be necessity. It is marvelous that we are the only species that creates gratuitous forms. To create is divine, to reproduce is human.

I don't like watching people work if they're making art.

For hundreds of years people have talked about artists having inspiration, but often, some persons would say, write us a symphony or write us a song, on commission. The artists would come up with a masterpiece without waiting to have their muse inspire them.

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

After 'Where The Wild Things Are,' which was this big, long five-year project, I spent a year making small things.

I'm always a bit disappointed when I've finished working on a book.

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

I'm not about either entertaining or instructing. The entertaining and instructing are secondary fallout from the fundamental thing, which is basically to create an aesthetic object.

When you're making something big, whether it's long-form fiction or a big piece of software, whatever that is, you're having a very intimate and extended conversation with the work materials themselves.

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.

Writing is not what you start. It's not even what you finish. It's what you start, finish, and put out there for the world to see.

Even when the poet seems most himself . . . he is never the bundle of accident and incoherence that sits down to breakfast; he has been reborn as an idea, something intended, complete.

It's easy to attack and destroy an act of creation. It's a lot more difficult to perform one.

A photographer is like a cod, which produces a million eggs in order that one may reach maturity.

That's the real endeavor: to try to create that direct conduit from the pure consciousness of your creative voice to the person who's a craftsman who can go into the world and consistently deliver new things worth paying attention to.

The more I produce, the less I am certain. On the road along which the artist walks, night falls ever more densely. Finally, he dies blind.

You think you're writing one historical novel and it turns into three, and I'm quite used to a short story turning into a novel - that's happened through my whole career.

I am living a new and exalted life of late. It steeps me in a sacred rapture to see a portrait develop and take soul under my hand. First, I throw off a study - just a mere study, a few apparently random lines - and to look at it you would hardly ever suspect who it was going to be; even I cannot tell, myself.

With such a deep rooted interest you can withstand the setbacks and failures, the days of drudgery, and the hard work that are always a part of any creative action. You can ignore the doubters and critics. You will then feel personally committed to solving the problem and will not rest until you do so.

Great directors turn in mediocre work and first-time directors turn in exceptional work. No matter how good a person can talk about what he wants, you never know.

We are authors, all of us, concerned with beginning, with making, with sources and substance.

I don't have any regrets about the album [Veedon Fleece]. But it's the same old story - an album is basically 35 or 40 minutes of what you do. It's 'part' of what you do.

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