William Faulkner Quotes

Strictly speaking, there are no holidays for art; art pursues you everywhere, and that's just fine with the artist.

It is not the act of making art that is painful. It is the desire to make something and not acting on it that causes pain....A day when I don't write is less happy. This is not discipline. It is affection, enthusiasm, adventure-any number of other words besides discipline.

Our responsibility as artists is to challenge ourselves.

Having caught a glimpse of what I might be able to do with my talent, I feel a tremendous obligation to try to fulfill it.

I decided that what I really wanted to do was go off and paint.

The things I do outside of playing the piano are done out of an inner necessity, not just because I want to try my hand at different things.

How can I stop acting? I don't think there is a full stop. Maybe the only time I will stop will be when acting stops fascinating me. I will have to find something that fascinates me more.

I feel like it's my responsibility to be the greatest I can be. If I go out there and start making terrible music, I don't expect people to like me. If I'm making great music and there's no reason for people to not like me, that's when it's going to make me upset. People just need to take a chance and listen.

There were decades I didn't play sober. I thought, Who would want to? But at some point, I decided that if it was important enough to me to keep doing it as art, I should do it with all my tools.

Art is vice. One does not wed it, one rapes it.

Art is a tyrant. It demands heart, brain, soul, body. The entireness of the votary. Nothing less will win its highest favor. I wed art. It is my husband, my world, my life dream, the air I breathe. I know nothing else, feel nothing else, think nothing else.

The writer's only responsibility is to his art.

When I am creating art, I have absolutely no social responsibility. It's like dreaming.

And here in my isolation I can grow stronger. Poetry seems to come of itself, without effort, and I need only let myself dream a little while painting to suggest it.

Art can be very political but that can't be the purpose of art, it can't be the driving force. It isn't with any of the books that I love, anyway.

Most of the books that I've adapted I'm doing because I love the book and I feel like it's a great work of art in itself, and when it's a great book I feel as a director or a writer that I have a responsibility to rise to the level of the original. It makes me try to reach higher.

Art is vice. You don't marry it legitimately, you rape it.

Art is a kind of innate drive that seizes a human being and makes him its instrument.

Art for art's sake is an empty phrase. Art for the sake of truth, art for the sake of the good and the beautiful, that is the faith I am searching for.

I think that my responsibility to my art is to try to get it right or to push the boundaries of what I'm able to do in any way.

I went to South Africa - Durban, Cape Town, Johannesburg - and those were definitely the "I've arrived" shows. Outside of the money, the success, the accolades ... This is a place that we, in urban communities, never dream of. We never dream of Africa. Like, "Damn, this is the motherland." You feel it as soon as you touch down. That moment changed my whole perspective on how to convey my art.

That's the difference between the serious artist and the craftsman--the craftsman can take material and because of his abilities do a professional job of it. The serious artist, like Proust, is like an object caught by a wave and swept to shore. He's obsessed by his material; it's like a venom working in his blood and the art is the antidote.

As an artist you have to find something that deeply interests you. It's not enough to make art that is about art, to look at Matisse and Picasso and say, how can I paint like them? You have to be obsessed by something that can't come out in any other way, then the other things - the skill and technique - will follow.

I don't think there is room for 'artistic temperament.' Professional artists understand art is a business. If businesses ran their companies like many artists do their careers, they would not stay open a year.

I've learned a lot about the limits of what I can do, as an artist, or what I'm willing to do. It's a lot of responsibility to carry a show and to speak to people on different levels.