Leontyne Price Quotes

You don't know how much artists go through to make it look so easy. It's all in the practice.

Art is a by-product of an honest and successful attempt to do something well.

Art doesn't spring from the muses alone, but from hard work.

Creating anything is hard.

Where the spirit does not work with the hand, there is no art.

If I can feel that actual people made the thing, and that they have deeply felt opinions about it, and care about this, and don't care about that and so on and so on - then I think it falls into the 'independent' file.

A work of art which did not begin in emotion is not art.

I take a great deal of value in things that are done by hand or executed by hand.

I work really hard on every character and do everything in order to make it look authentic.

You might think the word "homemade" is just a word we use as a marketing ploy. But what you don't realize is that the staff sleeps here at night. If your tablecloth is wrinkled, that's why.

I only do what I do. For me, it is a craft. It's got to be my own thing - otherwise, I would never be successful. I could easily go to the archives and pull 1987 or 1991 collection by Calvin Klein. But when you look in there, you realize that it was never about one piece. It was about the collections as bodies of work.

Even after you've won fame and fortune, every time you write you've got to write, there's no shortcut, you have to start your career all over again.

Industry in art is a necessity - not a virtue - and any evidence of the same, in the production, is a blemish, not a quality; a proof, not of achievement, but of absolutely insufficient work, for work alone will efface the footsteps of work.

I love the process of cutting everything out with a scalpel yourself: I don't want to have my stencils drawn up in Illustrator, then laser-cut. I like the fact that it's slightly wrong; I think it gives it a beauty. The individual and handmade will always be worth more than what a computer can do, at least until computers can learn how to make mistakes.

I try to paint what I have found and not what I look for. In art, intentions are of little importance.

Art is rare and sacred and hard work, and there ought to be a wall of fire around it.

No man who values originality will ever be original. But try to tell the truth as you see it, try to do any bit of work as well as it can be done for the work's sake, and what men call originality will come unsought.

I work as diligently on my canvases as the laborers do in their fields.

The moment you cheat for the sake of beauty, you know you're an artist.

Sculpture is like farming. If you just keep at it, you can get quite a lot done.

Writing music is not so much inspiration as hard work.

If I'm painting, I paint every day. I'll be up in the studio from 8:00 in the morning to 8:00 at night.

The creative act amazes me. Whether it's poetry, whether it's music, it's an amazing process, and it has something to do with bringing forth the old out into the world to create and to bring forth that which will rejuvenate.

Trying to force creativity is never good.

Painting and music were the only things I worked at industriously and faithfully.