Joyce Cary Quotes

To create a work of art, great or small, is work, hard work, and work requires discipline and order.

Painting is like having a bad mistress who spends and spends and it's never enough ... I tell myself that even if a tolerable study comes out of it from time to time, it would have been cheaper to buy it from somebody else.

Writing is a combination of intangible creative fantasy and appallingly hard work.

I once asked a distinguished artist what place he gave to labor in art. "Labor," he in effect said, "is the beginning, the middle, and the end of art." Turning then to another--"And you," I inquired, "what do you consider as the great force in art?" "Love," he replied. In their two answers I found but one truth.

If you don't enjoy making work, then it's bad. It's rough. Artwork is brutal for so many people. They let it happen to them, but it's brutal. I like the idea of an artist as somebody who works. A lot of the artists I like share this understanding.

An artist might be attracted to hedonism, but of course an artist is not a hedonist. He's a worker, always.

Industry in art is a necessity - not a virtue - and any evidence of the same, in the production, is a blemish, not a quality; a proof, not of achievement, but of absolutely insufficient work, for work alone will efface the footsteps of work.

There is nothing harder to learn than painting and nothing which most people take less trouble about learning. An art school is a place where about three people work with feverish energy and everybody else idles to a degree that I should have conceived unattainable by human nature.

I work as diligently on my canvases as the laborers do in their fields.

I have always tried to hide my efforts and wished my works to have a light joyousness of springtime which never lets anyone suspect the labors it has cost me.

People want to be artists but don't want to do the ground work.

It's easier and sociabler to talk technique than it is to make art.

There are so many filmmakers who are so talented, and actors and writers who work so hard, and it's really hard to let your work enter the world.

So many people say painting is fun. I don't find it fun at all. It's hard work for me.

We need writers who know the difference between the production of a commodity and the practice of an art.

It is not for nothing that artists have called their works the children of their brains and likened the pains of production to the pains of childbirth.

When I am halfway there with a painting, it can occasionally be thrilling... But it happens very rarely; usually it's agony... I go to great pains to mask the agony. But the struggle is there. It's the invisible enemy.

Art is one of the dirtiest words in our language; it's mucked up with all kinds of meanings. There's the art of plumbing; there's the art of almost anything that you can say.

Art is right reason in the doing of work.

One is distracted by this notion that there is such an thing as inspiration, that it comes fast and easy. And some people are graced by that style. I'm not. So I have to work as hard as any stiff to come up with my payload

The word 'art' interests me very much. If it comes from Sanskrit, as I've heard, it signifies 'making.

Art is unthinkable without risk and spiritual self-sacrifice.

Great art is never produced for its own sake. It is too difficult to be worth the effort.

Don't think of it as art, think of it as work.

The only sensible way to regard the art life is that it is a privilege you are willing to pay for... You may cite honors and attentions and even money paid, but I would have you note that these were paid a long time after the creator had gone through his struggles.