Steven Pressfield Quotes

When I am halfway there with a painting, it can occasionally be thrilling... But it happens very rarely; usually it's agony... I go to great pains to mask the agony. But the struggle is there. It's the invisible enemy.

Every work of art is aggressive, Isabella. And every artist's life is a small war or a large one, beginning with oneself and one's limitations. To achieve anything you must first have ambition and then talent, knowledge, and finally the opportunity.

Marvin Gaye said there's a song inside of me and I can't get it out. And I know it's in there, and I can feel that it's in there, and I can't get it out. There's so much that I want to say, and I haven't been able to figure out how to say it in my art. I can only say it in ham-fisted, clumsy, nonpoetic ways, and I'm trying to figure out how to talk about life and talk about love and talk about pain and trials and tribulation in an artistic form.

For the essential thing about the work of art is that it is work, and very hard work too.

...assume that art begins in unhappiness. True, the goal of art is to convey a vision of coherence and peace, but the effort to develop that vision starts in the more common experience of confusion and pain.

Many of us believe that 'real artists' do not experience self-doubt. In truth, artists are people who have learned to live with doubt and do the work anyway.

It was a miserable machine, an inefficient machine, she thought, the human apparatus for painting or for feeling; it always broke down at the critical moment; heroically, one must force it on.

My paintings are only the ashes of my art

For me, the most difficult piece is the one I'm about to make.

Weeks go by, and I don't paint until finally I can't stand it any longer. I get fed up. I almost don't want to talk about it, because I don't want to become self-conscious about it, but perhaps I create these little crises as a kind of a secret strategy to push myself.

It is a mistake for a sculptor or a painter to speak or write very often about his job. It releases tension needed for his work.

People say if you're doing an art project, that's different from a book, but I honestly don't see it. I try and try, and I just don't.

Any art worth its name requires you to be fundamentally lost for a very long time.

I felt I was painting with a Popsicle.

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.

Sometimes, trying to make a work of art can be very difficult and very painful.

My struggle over the years has constantly been, it only takes 10 minutes, or an average shower, to come up with a mini-series or two, but it takes a year to draw them. So for me, it's been just trying to find a way to get all these ideas and all these incidents on paper.

That's the worst and best thing about being in the studio, feeling completely lost and not knowing how to put the final touch on something. But once you find it, there's nothing like that feeling.

All this angst, all this stuff we all feel, is just tied to making art. It's so ancient.

To a writer, madness is a final distillation of self, a final editing down. It's the drowning out of false voices.

Painting is no problem. The problem is what to do when you're not painting.

It's easier and sociabler to talk technique than it is to make art.

It's seldom you make a great picture. you have to milk the cow quite a lot to get plenty of milk to make a little cheese.

The true professional makes art when he is not feeling good, if the studio is too cold or too warm or the walls are falling down. We are painters and we paint. If I were a sculptor, I'd sculpt.

What is drawing? It is working oneself through an invisible iron wall that seems to stand between what one feels and what one can do.