Ivan Turgenev Quotes

The advice I like to give young artists, or really anybody who’ll listen to me, is not to wait around for inspiration. Inspiration is for amateurs; the rest of us just show up and get to work.

Too often in the past, we have thought of the artist as an idler and dilettante and of the lover of arts as somehow sissy and effete. We have done both an injustice. The life of the artist is, in relation to his work, stern and lonely. He has labored hard, often amid deprivation, to perfect his skill. He has turned aside from quick success in order to strip his vision of everything secondary or cheapening. His working life is marked by intense application and intense discipline.

All great artists and thinkers are great workers.

There is a great deal that either has to be given up or be taken away from you if you are going to succeed in writing a body of work.

There is no way to success in art but to take off your coat, grind paint, and work like a digger on the railroad, all day and every day.

Don't wait for inspiration. It comes while one is working.

What I try to do is write. I may write for two weeks ‘the cat sat on the mat, that is that, not a rat,’.... And it might be just the most boring and awful stuff. But I try. When I’m writing, I write. And then it’s as if the muse is convinced that I’m serious and says, ‘Okay. Okay. I’ll come.

Writing a novel is like building a wall brick by brick; only amateurs believe in inspiration.

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

If you believe in yourself and have dedication and pride - and never quit, you'll be a winner. The price of victory is high but so are the rewards.

At Pixar, 'Wall-E' was our ninth film, and they've all been successes - more than that, they've all really touched people. Everybody wonders, 'How do you do it?' Well, how do you not do it? You just work hard.

I hated every minute of training, but I said, 'Don't quit. Suffer now and live the rest of your life as a champion.'

The artist is nothing without the gift, but the gift is nothing without work.

There's nothing romantic about my work... I don't believe in inspiration. I believe that you get to your desk, you stay there, you work, you think of nothing else. You write and you write, and in the end, you write something good.

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.

I'm always trying. Between every book, I think, 'Well now, it's time to get down to the serious stuff.'

It was incredible being on tour with Taylor Swift: she was the epitome of a professional, and she works so hard. For someone as successful as her to work that hard every night - truly inspirational.

Professional creativity requires more than inspiration, talent, and discipline - it requires an endurance that few are aware of and even fewer have.

Watching my family work so hard has been so inspirational, and I think I really got their work ethic.

Becoming an artist is not empirical; it's not about hard work. You have to put the work in, but that doesn't mean you're going to make it.

The will to work must dominate, for art is long and time is brief.

Success is the good fortune that comes from aspiration, desperation, perspiration,and inspiration.

Effort is grossly underrated.

In writing novels, you have to believe in yourself or there would be no way to sustain it. But you also have to give good evidence regularly for having that faith in self-either with quality goods or with, at least, "good efforts." Working hard will do when inspiration is not forthcoming.