Vladimir Nabokov Quotes

You don't get inspiration sitting at a drawing board or in front of your computer.

Inspiration is an awakening, a quickening of all man's faculties, and it is manifested in all high artistic achievements.

As soon as I start reading, drawing comes to me more easily. I find I work in my sketchbooks more. But if I'm working on a new show, my reading completely stops except when I'm on a plane. I take a stack of New Yorkers with me. I feel awful about those stacks of New Yorkers.

When you're an actor or any kind of artist, you use your life as something to draw from in every experience.

I've never been able to understand where great artists come from.

I like to find an artist who inspires me and get into their world and challenge them.

Artists have always been my biggest source of inspiration.

Inspiration more often comes during the work than before it, because the largest part of the job of an artist is to listen to the work.

I can only write songs when somebody gives me some water to swim in. Otherwise, I'm a fish on the beach.

My drawings are the result of my sculpture.

I've dedicated a lot of my life as a writer to understanding how to hear the divine voice, or the music of the spheres, or whatever it is that we do when we're making art, making something out of nothing. Figuring out how to do that is much more important than knowing how to execute a good line. I don't think about that anymore, I just write.

Sometimes it could be just during the day, when I'm riding in the car or on the plane. I'll hear somebody say something that strikes a chord and I write it down and write bars at a time, and then when I'm in the studio I go to those bars and I'm like, "Maybe I should make a song about this."

I get my inspiration from books, pictures, art. I might find a vintage scarf and say, "I think this should be our color palette."

That's how I work, whether with stories or novels - they start with an image that comes to me in a daydream, and a lot of times I'm walking around with these pictures in my head for awhile before I start writing.

Music’s the soundtrack of my life and has been since I was a teenager. There’s always music. If I’m not playing it, I’m listening to it. With my writing... sometimes it inspires a story, sometimes it highlights something I’m working on, sometimes it simply helps me stay in the narrative mood.

The things I see every day inspire my sound and lyrics, like certain people and situations that stick out in my mind. There are also certain musicians I love whose music and styles inspire me.

Just slap something on it when you see a blank canvas staring at you with a sort of imbecility.

Usually when I start to work and to prepare the movie, some inspirations, different kind of human beings, it can be someone I know, someone I don't, a girl, a boy. So usually when I start, quite right away, some inspirations come.

Angel and Muse approach from without; the Angel sheds light and the Muse gives form (Hesiod learned of them). Gold leaf or chiton-folds: the poet finds his models in his laurel coppice. But the Duende, on the other hand, must come to life in the nethermost recesses of the blood.

We're creators by permission, by grace as it were. No one creates alone, of and by himself. An artist is an instrument that registers something already existent, something which belongs to the whole world, and which, if he is an artist, he is compelled to give back to the world.

I begin my pictures under the effect of a shock which I feel and which makes me escape from reality... I need a point of departure, even if it's only a speck of dust or a flash of light.

I don't base my books on my life (thank goodness) and I don't pick the topic first. In fact, the topic picks me - via a question I can't answer as a mom, a wife, a woman, an American. I find myself wondering "What if..." and it blossoms into a whole novel.

Try drawing or painting a scene you're working on. Often this will help free up you imagination.

Art is a kind of innate drive that seizes a human being and makes him its instrument.

And every good artist knows that the gift comes from somewhere else, and it's there for a reason, and that's to make the world a better place.