Dave Hickey Quotes

Art is very mysterious. I wonder if you can really do any damage to art. I think that when we're writing, something comes through or should come through, in spite of our theories. So theories are not really important.

Drawing is more fun to me than writing. I think it's interesting to talk to different cartoonists about how those activities work for them. I'm a very writerly cartoonist. I certainly spend more time on the writing than I do on the drawing, even though the drawing, of course, is very time-consuming.

I think that artists don't make art - the art makes itself through us. I'm not the doer. I'm just along for the ride. Acting really reminds me of that because I don't write the words; I don't make the decisions. That's the director. Narcissism is a tragic condition. It must be so miserable to live trapped in a reflection that only includes the smallest version of our identities. Our true identities should have no bounds and no limits.

Any art that you are playing based on effort, loses something. I think that most of the time it should be something that happens, and you are inspired, and you just feel and follow your instincts. The best chiseled sculptures happen when the sculptor looks at the stone and says "I saw this sculpture in the stone, and I had to get it out." It's not contrived.

don’t write out of what I know; I write out of what I wonder. I think most artists create art in order to explore, not to give the answers. Poetry and art are not about answers to me; they are about questions.

I was a fine arts major in college, and a painter for many years. And I found that, like writing, art is very similar.

Art is man's nature; nature is God's art.

Art is the right hand of Nature. The latter has only given us being, the former has made us men.

My greatest joy comes from creativity: from feeling that I have been able to identify a certain aspect of human nature and crystallise a phenomenon in words.

One of the pleasant things those of us who write or paint do is to have the daily miracle. It does come.

The act of writing surprises me all the time. A miraculous thing happens when you have an idea and you want to convert it into words... and then you start to create a work of art, and that's another miracle, and it remains mysterious to the writer, or to this writer anyway.

Making music and writing kind of come from the same creative place.

When you compose, it's like writing. You're like a writer. You just think all the time.

I write all the time and I try to think of ideas all the time.

Art is action. The way I live my life to its highest degree is by writing, the practice of art.

I think there are a lot of similarities between writing and music. Music is much more direct and much more emotional and that's the level I want to be at when I'm writing. Writing is much more intellectual and indirect and abstract, in a way.

In the experience of art, time seems not to exist. When I'm writing and think, "I've been working for two hours," I've actually been working for seven.

I don't think that writers or painters or filmmakers function because they have something they particularly want to say. They have something that they feel. And they like the art form; they like words, or the smell of paint, or celluloid and photographic images and working with actors. I don't think that any genuine artist has ever been oriented by some didactic point of view, even if he thought he was.

Lena Dunham or Miranda July, those people are sort of thinking about their work in a slightly different way than I do, where their whole body is a seed of what they're creating. I can't imagine watching Miranda's movies with anybody else playing her role, she's so integral. But for me, it feels more like every story is really individual. If I thought of something else, or thought it should be my body representing it, I'd fold my body into it. But most of the time I'm writing to get something out of my body.

I have never been able to write with anything more than the left hand of my mind; the right hand has always been engaged in something to do with personal relationships. I don't complain, because I think my left hand's power, as much as it has, is due to its knowledge of what my right hand is doing.

I think about art a lot only in two contexts. One is narrative... The other thing that I'm interested in, which is tangential, but not unrelated... All art to me is about problem solving.

A writer - and, I believe, generally all persons - must think that whatever happens to him or her is a resource. All things have been given to us for a purpose, and an artist must feel this more intensely. All that happens to us, including our humiliations, our misfortunes, our embarrassments, all is given to us as raw material, as clay, so that we may shape our art.

I think all of my songs are either based on personal experience or will be based on personal experience, because I do write a lot of songs prophetically.

If you're writing, you're a writer. If you're talking about it or thinking about it, I'm not so sure. Writing is ninety-eight percent work and two percent magic.

Domesticity is the enemy of art. I don't know if that's true. You can write good happy songs. So, I don't think it's necessarily happiness. But I think self-satisfaction is maybe the enemy. It's kind of better to think, "Tomorrow night I'm gonna sing it better." There is this forward effort. It feels to me right, it feels human.