Ida Pauline Rolf Quotes

You can't wait for inspiration. You have to go after it with a club.

There are no shortcuts, and you can't wing your way through real hard work. I learned the hard way by not taking auditions seriously when I first came out to L.A. and probably wasted a good seven years.

If you want to write, just believe that you can, because it's about perseverance.

Inspiration is for amateurs.

Don't wait for inspiration. It comes while one is working.

Without the work, the magic won’t come.

Inspiration is for amateurs. The rest of us just show up and get to work. If you wait around for the clouds to part and a bolt of lightning to strike you in the brain, you are not going to make an awful lot of work. All the best ideas come out of the process; they come out of the work itself.

Amateurs sit and wait for inspiration, the rest of us just get up and go to work.

I could spend two years cross-legged on my floor and feel like I was working.

The very essence of success is practice.

Sometimes [genius] is just the thing that emerges after twenty years of working at your kitchen table.

Art doesn't spring from the muses alone, but from hard work.

Sometimes you have to play a long time to be able to play like yourself.

The best restriction I learned was getting into the habit of doing something, even if I didn't feel like it, instead of running away from it. Sometimes good work needs to be earned, and when you can overcome yourself, the muse notices and celebrates.

When I learn martial arts, my master will have me try a punch for a week and he will keep saying, 'No, you don't have it. No, that's not right.' When he finally says, 'Yes, you did it,' it's a wonderful moment. You worked on it. You got it.

You can't write about stuff you don't know about. You have to live it. You have to roll up your sleeves and get your hands dirty. Live life to be a good songwriter.

Well mostly in song writing my experience is that there isn't so much inspiration as hard work. You sit there for hours, days and weeks with a guitar and piano until something good comes.

But what does interest me is the notion that if you do a lot of work it means there's a potential for other people to understand that a lot of things are possible with a sustained effort and that the broadening of experiences is possible and I think that's all art can be.

Creativity comes from trust. Trust your instincts. And never hope more than you work.

Yes, it's absolutely true that anything worth doing is worth doing poorly - until you can learn to do it well.

I have a photograph at home of Fred Astaire from the knees down with his feet crossed. It's kind of inspiring because it reminds me his feet were bleeding at the end of rehearsals. Yet when you watch him, all you see is freedom. It's a reminder of what the job is about in general, not just being in musicals.

Inspiration exists, but it has to find us working.

There's nothing romantic about my work... I don't believe in inspiration. I believe that you get to your desk, you stay there, you work, you think of nothing else. You write and you write, and in the end, you write something good.

Any working composer or painter or sculptor will tell you that inspiration comes at the eighth hour of labour rather than as a bolt out of the blue. We have to get our vanities and our preconceptions out of the way and do the work in the time allotted.