Elizabeth Hardwick Quotes

Art is the result of a creative impulse derived out of a consciousness of life.

Art begins when a man wishes to immortalize the most vivid moment he has ever lived.

Art is a kind of innate drive that seizes a human being and makes him its instrument.

It's hard to predict and to say what goes on inside the minds of an artist, but that's what makes them an artist. That sense of creativity. That thing that makes them tick is probably the very thing that pushes them to the extremes that sometimes can cause, you know, fatalities and things that, you know, that end up not being good.

In my experience a painting is not made with colors and paint at all. I don't know what a painting is; who knows what sets off even the desire to paint?

In Spring! In the creation of art it must be as it is in Spring!

To make art you need to be inspired.

A writer - and, I believe, generally all persons - must think that whatever happens to him or her is a resource. All things have been given to us for a purpose, and an artist must feel this more intensely. All that happens to us, including our humiliations, our misfortunes, our embarrassments, all is given to us as raw material, as clay, so that we may shape our art.

In the end nobody knows how it's done — how art is made. It can't be explained. Optical devices are just tools. Understanding a tool doesn't explain the magic of creation. Nothing can.

Picasso says that an artists paints not to ask a question but because he has found something and he wants to share—he cannot help it—what he has found.

Great art can only be created out of love.

Don't think about making art, just get it done.

Art is not delivered like the morning paper; it has to be stolen from Mount Olympus.

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

Take a step, breathe in the world, give it out again in story, poem, song, art.

We do not make art. We have unnamable motors and dangerous impulses that occupy our thoughts.

You paint the way you have to in order to give. That's life itself, and someone will look and say it is the product of knowing, but it has nothing to do with knowing, it has to do with giving.

The only thing one can give an artist is leisure in which to work. To give an artist leisure is actually to take part in his creation.

Art arises from sources other than logic." (p.32)

To feed your Muse, then, you should always have been hungry about life since you were a child. If not, it is a little late to start.

Your life can become the background for the art you create.

I begin my pictures under the effect of a shock which I feel and which makes me escape from reality... I need a point of departure, even if it's only a speck of dust or a flash of light.

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.

That's the difference between the serious artist and the craftsman--the craftsman can take material and because of his abilities do a professional job of it. The serious artist, like Proust, is like an object caught by a wave and swept to shore. He's obsessed by his material; it's like a venom working in his blood and the art is the antidote.

If there is no mystery, for the artist, to solve inside of his art, then there's no point in it....for me, every act of the art of solving a mystery.