Man Ray Quotes

To create is divine, to reproduce is human.

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.

He lives with his creativity in high gear.

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.

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

What an artist learns matters little. What he himself discovers has a real worth for him, and gives him the necessary incitement to work.

I don't really care who gets their inspiration from where, it's the end results that count.

Could Hamlet have been written by a committee, or the Mona Lisa painted by a club? Could the New Testament have been composed as a conference report? Creative ideas do not spring from groups.

I'm always creating. Whether I'm writing a lyric or making a beat, every day I'm doing something.

We're all inspired by what has come before us, but hope to use the inspiration to create our own. That's the artist's journey. It's a pretty amazing path.

The painter will produce pictures of little merit if he takes the works of others as his standard.

A writer is someone who has found a process that will bring about new things.

If you're alive, you're a creative person.

There is no thrill of mortal danger to surpass that of a lone man trying to create something that never existed before.

An artist must find his expression closely linked to his individual experience or else follow in the old grooves resulting in lifeless forms.

If an artist may say nothing except what he has invented by his own sole efforts, it stands to reason he will be poor in ideas. If he could take what he wants wherever he could find it, as Euripides and Dante and Michelangelo and Shakespeare and Bach were free, his larder would always be full, and his cookery might be worth tasting.

While most people in the arts think they have to be constantly looking forward to be edgy and creative....the real secret of creativity is to go back and remember.

You might say that a creative person is a person who simply has a desire to have something, to add something to the world that's not there yet, and goes about arranging fort that to happen. When you desire a work of art and make it, you've added to the stock of art in the world. Artists are one of the people who can do that: add to the stock of things.

Art is not communicative, art is not reflexive. Art, science, philosophy are neither contemplative, neither reflexive, nor communicative. They are creative, that's all.

Any human act that gives rise to something new is referred to as a creative act, regardless of whether what is created is a physical object or some mental or emotional construct that lives within the person who created it and is known only to him.

First thought is best in Art, second in other matters.

No one has been able to define or synthesize that precarious, splendid, and perhaps untidy instant when the creative process begins. This is what the uniqueness of the artist is all about. The transcendent right of the artist is the right to create even though he may not always know what he is doing.

Necessity may be the mother of lucrative invention, but it is the death of poetical invention.

I was meticulously copying other art and then I realized I could just use a camera and put my time into an idea instead.

It is only the unimaginative who ever invents. The true artist is known by the use he makes of what he annexes.