Wallace Stegner Quotes

All you can do is learn the skills of movies. Neither colleges nor anyone else can teach you creativity. They can teach you abilities to work with - you know how to use the gifts you've been born with.

One cannot learn how to be creative by reading Marx. Either one is creative or one is not.

Creating art is a habit, one that we practice daily or hourly until we get good at it

You don't know how much artists go through to make it look so easy. It's all in the practice.

Imagination is not the exclusive appanage of artists, but belongs in varying degrees to all men.

Nothing prepares you for making art except making art. You have to do it to get better.

In art, practice always comes before theory.

They [say] everybody's creative. Well, everybody is. But any real creativity has to rest on a basis of an acquired technique and an acquired knowledge; you can't be creative in a void, or you just get a mess.

Telling people how to be creative is easy - being creative is difficult.

She assumes that skill will guide her fingertips, that shapely lines will uncoil out of the pencil the moment she starts. Surely talent is a thing curled deep inside, just waiting to be exercised, and at the slightest invitation it will stretch, shake itself, make itself known? Talent, it seems, is not so insistent.

It takes skill to bring something you've imagined into the world: to use words to create believable lives, to select the colors and textures of paint to represent a haystack at sunset, to combine ingredients to make a flavorful dish. No one is born with that skill. It is developed through exercise, through repitition, through a blend of learning and reflection that's both painstaking and rewarding. And it takes time. . . . If art is the bridge between what you see in your mind and what the world sees, then skill is how you build that bridge.

Why is it that we understand playing the cello will require work, but we attribute writing to the magic of inspiration?

Confidence is a trait that has to be earned honestly and refreshed constantly; you have to work as hard to protect your skills as you did to develop them. . . The one thing that creative souls around the world have in common is that they all have to practice to maintain their skills. Art is a vast democracy of habit.

Man is driven to create; I know I really love to create things. And while I'm not good at painting, drawing, or music, I can write software.

The creative part, with the writing of it and the vision, and finding the voice of a show and the characters, is much harder to teach somebody. It's like music. You can either play it or you can't. If you can't play music and you really struggle and work hard, you can learn, but you have to have some inner gift to take it to the next level.

Creativity is not a talent. It is a way of operating.

With practice the craft will come almost of itself, in spite of you and all the more easitly if you think of something besides technique.

I do not see in what manner practice alone can be sufficient for the production of correct, excellent, and finished pictures. Works deserving this character never were produced, nor ever will arise, from memory alone.

There is something wonderful about singing and writing music, I think there is something special about creativity and the ability humans have in that area.

I can draw and write, and you'd be foolish not to hire me.

If art is the bridge between what you see in your mind and what the world sees, then skill is how you build that bridge.

Your creativity is waiting for you like a dancing partner.

Good writing isn’t a science. It’s an art, and the horizon is infinite. You can always get better.

When the writer (or the artist in general) says he has worked without giving any thought to the rules of the process, he simply means he was working without realizing he knew the rules.

Sometimes it's an external approach where one can learn the skills required, let's say, learn to play the trumpet and in that process other things happen. It's magical: through the process of practicing four hours a day you start focusing on emotion and when you pick up the trumpet it's filled with feeling.