Natalie Clifford Barney Quotes

If life is a blank canvas and all people are artists, the big challenge we all face may be expressed this way: Will we ultimately produce something approaching a masterpiece, an acceptable but not particularly memorable work of art, or a creation that wouldn't even be purchased at a yard sale?

I like the feeling of being able to confront an experience and resolve it as art.

I make art, sometimes I make true art, and sometimes it fills the empty places in my life. Some of them. Not all.

Art is the set of wings to carry you out of your own entanglement.

You are both a work of art and an artist at work.

Art is not escape, but a way of finding order in chaos, a way of confronting life.

I think songwriting is the ultimate form of being able to make anything that happens in your life productive.

Life obliges me to do something, so I paint.

Art enables us to find ourselves and lose ourselves at the same time.

I can't think of anything outside of having the gift yourself and creating yourself. I can't think of the next better thing to do than being able to put it back. Creative expression, I think, is vital to the success of any society.... A society without art will die.

Art has always been my salvation.

We are living in a world where the individual must learn to command the raw materials of expression. He must not be dependent all the time on the ready-made, the finished product. It's the transferring, the changing of the raw into what is the expression of your own self – the whole joy and satisfaction and frustration of life is built into this.

Art = a mad search for individualism.

Art! What a concept! It saved my life! A place where you can do as you please!

Art is a way of survival.

Self-expression is something that you've crafted, something that you've found. You've practiced on that piano for hours, you didn't hang out with your buddies, you didn't go after the girls, you stayed in your own little geeky room or you wrote for hours.

Art is a spiritual practice. We may not, and need not, do it perfectly.

Practice any art, music, singing, dancing, acting, drawing, painting, sculpting, poetry, fiction, essays, reportage, no matter how well or badly, not to get money and fame, but to experience becoming, to find out what's inside you, to make your soul grow.

Art is something you choose to make... it's a bringing together of... of everything around you into something that makes you more human, more khepri, whatever. More of a person.

Music, art, writing - it gives us a sense of who we are, a sense of our history, a sense of our future and it should provide some kind of comfort. It's not just entertainment for entertainment's sake, it's an investment.

The individual - man as a man, man as a brain, if you like - interests me more than what he makes because I've noticed that most artists only repeat themselves.

Modeling isn't boring.

If I walk away from music, I walk away from myself.

I've always used poetry to explain myself to myself. These things just sat in my psyche and then came out.

Art helped give me confidence.