Rainer Maria Rilke Quotes

I don't know why I paint what I paint. I think it comes out - it's kind of my subconscious or something.

The creative union of the conscious with the unconscious is what one usually calls 'inspiration.'

the unconscious of an artist is her greatest treasure. It is what transmutes the dross of autobiography into the gold of myth.

When the work takes over, then the artist is enabled to get out of the way, not to interfere. When the work takes over, then the artist listens.

In making movies, time is so short-because it is so expensive-that we tend to neglect the place from which the best ideas come, namely that part of ourselves that dreams. The unconscious is our best collaborator.

An artist is like a pig snouting truffles.

The artist's life nourishes itself on the particular, the concrete.

A good artist lets his intuition lead him wherever it wants.

I always say that intuition is the number one tool for an artist.

It was Sophie ( Sophie Arp Tauber, woman artist and later Arp's wife) who, by the example of her work and her life, both of them bathed in clarity, showed me the right way. In her world, the high and the low, the light and the dark, the eternal and the ephemeral, are balanced in prefect equilibrium.

Artists of all disciplines must be willing to go into the dark, let go control, be surprised.

It is the job of artists to open doors and invite in prophesies, the unknown, the unfamiliar; it’s where their work comes from, although its arrival signals the beginning of the long disciplined process of making it their own. Scientists too, as J. Robert Oppenheimer once remarked, ‘live always at the ‘edge of mystery’­—the boundary of the unknown.’ But they transform the unknown into the known, haul it in like fishermen; artists get you out into that dark sea.

I think what we should concentrate on is what it feels like to be a working artist in the day to day. One doesn't imagine what comes down the line.

Intuition is the key to everything, in painting, filmmaking, business - everything.

All artists dream of a silence which they must enter, as some creatures return to the sea to spawn.

In every work of art, the artist himself is present.

Throw away the light, the definitions, and say what you see in the dark.

I stay away from the writing part because I think that if it sticks, it sticks. You just know it. The stuff that doesn't stick, goes away. The stuff that propels you forward, you can see it in your partner's eyes.

I work rather blindly. I have a theory that seems to work with me that some of the best things you ever do sort of come through you. You don't know where you get the impetus and response to what's before your eyes.

Any art that you are playing based on effort, loses something. I think that most of the time it should be something that happens, and you are inspired, and you just feel and follow your instincts. The best chiseled sculptures happen when the sculptor looks at the stone and says "I saw this sculpture in the stone, and I had to get it out." It's not contrived.

Modern conquerors can kill, but do not seem to be able to create. Artists know how to create but cannot really kill. Murderers are only very exceptionally found among artists.

So much of creativity is the feeling that you're either getting a gift from some other dimension or some other part of yourself.

The lives great artists live and the books they write are two very different things.

To be an artist means not to compute or count.

Let passion be your muse. Let her guide and teach you to trust your instincts.