Steven Pressfield Quotes

I make pictures and someone comes in and calls it art.

Picasso says that an artists paints not to ask a question but because he has found something and he wants to share—he cannot help it—what he has found.

I do not know who sings my songs / Before they are sung by me.

I feel like a slave, and in a way like an artist, because I need to get inspiration everyday, from everything and everyone.

A good artist lets his intuition lead him wherever it wants.

I always say that intuition is the number one tool for an artist.

I'm a sponge, the more I absorb, the more I am able to articulate my vision, as artists do, like Picasso. I'm an artist in that light. I went from being an artist to an artiste.

That's what's great about the arts. Everything inspires you, and you get a chance to grow from watching other people and how they do their work.

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

If you're not observing the world around you, in some sense you're not really an artist because then that means you're just replicating other people's stuff, or, I don't even know what you're doing.

The artist is the medium between his fantasies and the rest of the world.

So much of what we do as artists is a combination of personal experience and imagination, and how that all creeps into your work is not so linear.

I want the power that comes from expressing myself creatively and putting something back into the world. Being someone's muse would be flattering, but it could get old fast.

As an artist, you want to entertain people.

It's intimidating any time to have a piece of art that someone else created, and that person says, 'Let's see what you created based on what I created.'

Hearing about a visual artist's approach can change the way you think about songwriting.

What matters is what happens in the soul of an artist when you're playing.

If I saw the art around me that I liked, then I wouldn't do art.

All the things an artist must be: poet, explorer of nature, philosopher!

The 'Women' had to do with the female painted through all ages, all those idols, and maybe I was stuck to a certain extent; I couldn't go on. It did one thing for me: it eliminated composition, arrangement, relationships, light - all this silly talk about line, colour and form - because that was the thing I wanted to get hold of.

Music breeds its own inspiration. You can only do it by doing it. You may not feel like it, but you push yourself. It's a work process. Or just improvise. Something will come.

Art is embedded in nature and they who can extract it, have it.

In the end nobody knows how it's done — how art is made. It can't be explained. Optical devices are just tools. Understanding a tool doesn't explain the magic of creation. Nothing can.

I really admire songwriters or any kind of writer, painter or artist that says, "I'm going to get up at 8 o'clock in the morning and spend this time to this time creating." I do that sometimes, but the songs I like the best come as gifts from somewhere. It's almost like you didn't do anything, like you can't take credit for it because you sat down and the melody and words came out.

I believe that the source of your inspiration is very important. I sometimes see this problem with photographers, even very good ones, who have drawn too much inspiration from photography and who, over time, have a problem forming their own identity.