John Huston Quotes

I find myself chatting with my paintings, not deep and meaningful stuff, but things like 'hey there buddy' and 'oh, look what I did to your nose!'

I go through the arc of a relationship with every single painting that I do.

The only thing in life that really gives me any peace is just being lost in the process of creating something, whether it's the film or painting and drawing, which has been a big part of my life, for a long time.

There is always an emotional element to anything that you make.

As a political artist, I think you have to learn how to create art, no matter what your ideology is.

There are some guys out there who make great music who may or may not be super-emotionally attached to their work. To each their own.

I feel just as much a part of 'War Eternal' as I do 'Will to Power.'

The artist who paints the emotions creates an enclosed world... the picture... which, like a book, has the same interest no matter where it happens to be. Such an artist, we may imagine, spends a great deal of time doing nothing but looking, both around him and inside him.

Artists freeze themselves into these weird postures that are meant to be impressive and involving, then they fling them out into the world like Polaroids, and then they move on. And I'm stuck in this intense relationship to the Polaroid.

Your own creations are your own children; you gave life to them, so you'll always have, if not more passion to them, more connections to them.

Every artist makes herself born. You must bring the artist into the world yourself.

Being an artist doesn’t take much, just everything you got. Which means, of course, that as the process is giving you life, it is also bringing you closer to death. But it’s no big deal. They are one in the same and cannot be avoided or denied. So when I totally embrace this process, this life/death, and abandon myself to it, I transcend all this meaningless gibberish and hang out with the gods. It seems to me that that is worth the price of admission.

We are image-makers and image-ridden... We work until we vanish.

What's any artist, but the dregs of his work? the human shambles that follows it around. What's left of the man when the work's done but a shambles of apology.

The truth is, anyone who puts so much of herself and her life into art as you do must naturally fear any failure in that art as a potential threat to your life. And so you protect your art more than you protect your health or the common forms of happiness the rest of us have. And you probably have this in common with every artist you admire.

It's really interesting to observe each filmmaker's approach to filmmaking and I feel very fortunate to have worked with a lot of really interesting filmmakers and they all approach their job in unique ways.

When you've done something, certainly if you create a piece of music, you then hear it with fresh ears when you play it for somebody else.

A garden is a result of an arrangement of natural materials according to aesthetic laws; interwoven throughout are the artist's outlook on life, his past experiences, his affections, his attempts, his mistakes and his successes.

The artist is obliged to invent the self who will paint his pictures.

Photography is a kind of overstatement, a heroic copulation with the material world.

Once you're involved in the work, it's really just you and the characters and the words.

I am working here (in Amsterdam) on my last big triptych, which will be a tremendous story, and which gives me a more intense life and exhilaration. My God, life is worth living!

The character of the artist doesn't enter into the nature of the art. Eliot said that art is the escape from personality, which I think is right. We know that Velázquez embezzled money from the Spanish court and wanted power and so on, but you can't see this in his art.

Art is the path of the creator to his work.

The stuff of which masterpieces are made drifts about the world waiting to be clothed in words.