Ursula K. Le Guin Quotes

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

The true professional makes art when he is not feeling good, if the studio is too cold or too warm or the walls are falling down. We are painters and we paint. If I were a sculptor, I'd sculpt.

It's always nice to have people love the things that you do. But it's a lot of hard work, and people are always passionate, if it's family fare or a drama, it's the same amount of work and people invest everything into that, and when it doesn't come out the way you want it to, of course it's hurtful.

If the artist does not fling himself, without reflecting, into his work, as Curtis flung himself into the yawning gulf, as the soldier flings himself into the enemy's trenches, and if, once in this crater, he does not work like a miner on whom the walls of his gallery have fallen in; if he contemplates difficulties instead of overcoming them one by one ... he is simply looking on at the suicide of his own talent.

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

I love when people are coming up and they're working hard and you can see that they're really focused on the process to their music. I really dig that. As a musician, it's nice to see people who really care about the process.

All of those art-based fields are similar in that they're all hard to make a living in and they all require an intense amount of training and discipline.

You just have to work really hard and throw everything into it. ... It's really hard to be an artist, and even if you do work really hard, there's no guarantee about anything. There's no advice you can give someone that things will somehow work out, but you can talk to people about how they can make art a big part of their life.

I write my novels personally, desperately and non-negligently. When I write my novels, I think about my novels only, and never do other works.

When you decide 'to be a writer,' you don't have the faintest idea of what the work is like. When you begin, you write spontaneously out of your limited experience of both the unwritten world and the written world. You're full of naïve exuberance. 'I am a writer!' Rather like the excitement of 'I have a lover!' But working at it nearly every day for fifty years – whether it is being the writer or being the lover – turns out to be an extremely taxing job and hardly the pleasantest of human activities.

Whoever wishes to devote himself to painting should begin by cutting out his own tongue

There is no way to success in art but to take off your coat, grind paint, and work like a digger on the railroad, all day and every day.

Acting is a grind, just like music is a grind. Sometimes it takes longer than what you can give.

I was in acting classes from the age of 9, dance classes, music classes - my mom put a lot of energy and attention into me, so no matter what happened in my life, I always had this basis of discipline. So I really worked hard for everything I had from a very early age.

An artist's working life is marked by intensive application and intense discipline.

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

By and large I think art is made by people who have discipline married to talent in sufficiently large amounts to work even if they don't feel like it. Anybody can get maudlin and decide to write poetry at 11 at night; the question is, can you do it at 8:30 on a Monday morning..?

He likes a day in the studio to end, he says, "when my knees are all skinned up and my pants are wet and my hair's off to one side and I feel like I've been in the foxhole all day. I don't think comfort is good for music. It's good to come out with skinned knuckles after wrestling with something you can't see. I like it when you come home at the end of the day from recording and someone says, "What happened to your hand?" And you don't even know. When you're in that place, you can dance on a broken ankle.

I don't listen to music for fun. I ain't got enough time for fun! I'm always busy writing my own music. I don't try to compete or see what other people are doing.

People err who think my art comes easily to me. I assure you, dear friend, nobody has devoted so much time and thought to compositions as I. There is not a famous master whose music I have not industriously studied through many times.

I think art must be tough! I think art has to be hard. I don't think it should be easy. I think it should take foot-pounds of energy to produce that art, otherwise we would have more mediocre writers, and we don't have room for any more mediocrity in the world. There's already enough of it being visited on us night and day through the Internet, and through television, and through politics.

I think that acting is no fun unless it's hard. I'm not titillated by acting or being an actor unless I have to work hard.

I believed in myself, and I've always worked very, very hard as an artist, and I am an artist in every sense of the word.

Of course, every artist has 'minor works' that they do, but I don't think I have any 'minor disciplines.' Each discipline I approach as a major undertaking that I put my whole self into.

I've been doing this for seven and a half years. I've been just bustin' it, trying to break in as an artist in this business. For me, it's still just about the work. I get the scripts and I'm all about that. I don't really even have an idea what that's going to be like.