George Bernard Shaw Quotes

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

Art should not be an easy thing.

I think attempting to make art is a utopian process in itself, definitely. Nothing I do is ever equal to the ideas in my head. You do the best you can, you do it with patience and love, and then you give up. The moment you give up is when you know the book is done.

The artist begins with a vision - a creative operation requiring an effort.

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

A moment of complete happiness never occurs in the creation of a work of art. The promise of it is felt in the act of creation but disappears towards the completion of the work. For it is then the painter realises that it is only a picture he is painting. Until then he had almost dared to hope the picture might spring to life.

What is art if not a concentrated and impassioned effort to make something with the little we have, the little we see?

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

For the essential thing about the work of art is that it is work, and very hard work too.

ART Art is that thing having to do only with itself—the product of a successful attempt to make a work of art. Unfortunately, there are no expamples of art, nor good reasons to think that it will ever exist. (Everything that has been made has been made with a purpose, teverything with an end exists outside of that thing, i.e., "I want to sell this", or "I want this to make me famous and loved", or "I want this to make me whole", or worse, "I want this to make others whole.") And yet we continue to write, paint, sculpt and compose. Is this foolish of us?

I paint for myself. I don't know how to do anything else, anyway. Also I have to earn my living, and occupy myself.

Great art can only be created out of love.

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.

All artforms are in the service of the greatest of all arts: the art of living.

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.

There's obviously always danger in making music or art for art's sake. Even as Christians we can be guilty of that, being more about the art than the Artist who gave us this gift.

A life lived for art, is never a life wasted.

The artistic impulse seems not to wish to produce finished work. It certainly deserts us half-way, after the idea is born; and if we go on, it is labor.

I long so much to make beautiful things. But beautiful things require effort and disappointment and perseverance.

How certain human beings are able to create works of art is a mystery, and why they should wish to do so, at a great cost to themselves usually, is another mystery. Works are not created by one's life; every life is rich in material.

My primary thing is to make a painting, not necessarily to make a painting to sell for gazillions of dollars, but just to make a painting.

Art is difficult. It's not entertainment.

Art is that which comes to a man, and stands between himself and an implacable witness: the work.

I never thought about doing anything other than making art.

I don't believe that artists really are interested in money. That's not the motivation for art.