Mark Twain Quotes

I don't want ever to be guilty of what my critics claim: doing formula without original elements.

Sometimes it works. Sometimes I feel like playing 'Hospital'. Sometimes I feel like playing 'Pablo Picasso'. I've been playing a lot lately. I do it as long as I feel like it.

It's really easy to project this whole ideology of what being an artiste is, and I'm just not down with intellectualizing it. I just think, if you feel like doing something, then do it.

We can use techniques in modifying things, in controlling things, but the first impulse has to be something that you simply cannot make just out of technique, or else it becomes perfectly evident that it is nothing but technique that you're exercising.

Being creative is my idea of heaven. I'm just incredibly fortunate that I can do it in artwork. Watercolor is what I started out with. What I love about watercolor is that a lot of happy accidents occur.

Art requires neither complaisance nor politeness; nothing but faith, faith and freedom.

My favorite thing is being able to follow my inspiration, and the freedom of being a writer is hard to beat.

Art is not predictable. Art is not golf, as great as that may be. There are 360 degrees of choice to make.

Chaos can be incredibly creative.

I love art so much because of curiosity. At the start of a painting, I know 10 percent of what the painting will be, and then I have to improvise the whole thing.

When you work at a magazine, you have to tell the truth. When you're not working in that format, it's fun to see where your mind takes you when the dictates have nothing to do with anyone but yourself.

I love being with artists because I'm always open to getting into something.

Writing is magic, as much the water of life as any other creative art. The water is free. So drink. Drink and be filled up.

... We have quite a large area, and that makes it more fun for us - certainly more satisfying, because it doesn't restrict us to one particular idea or one particular style. The result, I think, is pretty interesting ... we don't expect to make a fortune at it or ever be popular or famous or worshipped or hit The Ed Sullivan Show or the circuses or the big top. As long as we can play, we'll play, regardless of what it's for, who it's for or anything. It's fun for us - that's the important thing.

What is natural does not have to be a representation of something. I'm now working on a thing that is a reconstruction of a starry sky, and yet I'm making it without a given from nature. Someone who says he uses a theme from nature can be right, but also someone who says he uses nothing at all.

Of the truly creative no one is ever master; it must be left to go its own way.

Imagination is like a lofty building reared to meet the sky; whereas fancy is a balloon that soars at the wind's will.

To be an artist means not to compute or count.

Writing for me, even what you call serious writing, is play.

A reason I became a writer was to escape the hopelessness and despair of the real world and enter the world of hope I could create with my imagination.

Above all, we are coming to understand that the arts incarnate the creativity of a free people. When the creative impulse cannot flourish, when it cannot freely select its methods and objects, when it is deprived of spontaneity, then society severs the root of art.

When you create something you're free to explore it however you want to do it.

To create one must be willing to be stone stupid, to sit upon a throne on top of a jackass and spill rubies from one’s mouth. Then the river will flow, then we can stand in the stream of it raining down.

[Great artists] do not copy what they see, but what they desire.

Few sensible authors are happy discussing the creative process--it is, after all, black magic.