Charles de Lint Quotes

I don't know to what extent someone can BECOME an artist - you either are or you aren't - and if you are you'll HAVE to make your way to some kind of sickly light, no matter how terrible the soil you were seeded in your nature will out somehow.

I have sketched since a young age, so there's always been an artistic side, a visual side to my personality.

Imagination without skill gives us contemporary art.

When I was three or four, I was really good at drawing and painting, and everyone used to say, "You're going to go to art college." I didn't really know what that meant.

When I was a child I could do math and art, so I had left- and right-brain capabilities. But I've seen my children, who are more right-brained, struggling. My son was told he wouldn't make it to college, but he dogged it through and ended up being accepted by 10 major art schools after the high school advisor said, "Please don't apply. You're going to be disappointed." That kid's an artist now.

Children should learn to draw as they learn to write, and such a mystery should not be made of it. They should be encouraged, not flattered... then [later in life] double the effort is required to get the facility which might have been gained insensibly.

An amateur may not be an artist, though an artist should be an amateur.

I feel that if I had not had an art program in my school, I would have failed in a big way. My teachers knew I was intelligent, but they didn't quite know how I was ever going to apply that intelligence. The one or two teachers who knew me well knew that it would be through drawing or acting or whatever means of expression I was allowed.

Artists are born not made. There's nothing you can do for them.

My son's a painter. All through school his teachers tell him he's a genius. I tell him to paint me an apple that looks like an apple before he paints me one that doesn't. Go where you can go, but start from someplace recognizable.

All men are creative but few are artists.

Bement was a very good teacher but he was a very poor painter. I guess he wasn't a painter at all. He had no courage and I believe that to create one's own world in any of the arts takes courage.

As I grew older, I developed a very innate passion for art. I was actually pretty good at it.

There is a satisfactory and available power in every one to learn drawing if he wishes, just as nearly all persons have the power of learning French, Latin or arithmetic, in a decent and useful degree.

Until I began to learn to draw, I was never much interested in looking at art.

I was told I was talented when I applied to Falmouth School of Art and that I should consider skipping the course and proceeding directly to degree level.

I've been taking art lessons since I was little, and I've always drawn. I think in pictures.

Art is something you can't teach, but you can inspire it.

I learned how to draw from being bored in school. I would doodle on the margins of my paper.

I don't think artists are made, I think they're born.

Everyone can draw when they're five. Most of us lose the ability.

The only thing they can't teach you at art school is art.

I think if you're artistic in any way, you're probably born with it. I guess it's a talent that can be learned here and there, but I think the instinct to tell a story or to create something happens maybe in the womb.

Every man is an artist.

I can't draw a straight line to save my life. I just can't draw.