W. H. Auden Quotes

All the things an artist must be: poet, explorer of nature, philosopher!

I wonder if the artist ever lives his life--he is so busy recreating it.

A distinction is made between artists who work directly from nature and those who work purely from imagination. Neither if these methods should be preferred to the exclusion of the other. Often both are used in turn by the same man.

An artist must have imagination. An artist who does not use his imagination is a mechanic.

A director is a man, therefore he has ideas; he is also an artist, therefore he has imagination. Whether they are good or bad, it seems to me that I have an abundance of stories to tell. And the things I see, the things that happen to me, continually renew the supply.

I looked at Rembrandt and Superman, Matisse and Bugs Bunny, and began to make my own pictures.

The way I create music is maybe like a painting, to compose in a more visual way. Basically it's the music that I want to hear- that's my inspiration and bottom line. I just try to get ideas from books, movies, paintings.

When a designer creates, he looks at the world around him.

Every picture has its own demands, and every picture stimulates something within you to tell it a certain way. I don't know what that is; I don't think too much about that.

I guess artists are living inspiration. There's something very pure about a person that fantasizes. I like hearing their stories, watching them work. Their take on the world interests me. It's not unified.

I have to take it as a given that I have got a certain ability to do something. I can be an artist, which is take something and transform it into another thing. I can just see something, and I can see my painting.

The artist is the medium between his fantasies and the rest of the world.

The best of artists has no conception that the marble alone does not contain within itself.

Painting is the most magical of mediums. The transcendence is truly amazing to me every time I go to a museum and I see how somebody figured another way to rub colored dirt on a flat surface and make space where there is no space or make you think of a life experience.

Someone who is an artist can say, 'I can create and can make what I create disappear.'

That's what art is. You don't make up stories. You live your life.

I haven't the slightest idea what art is, but to be a painter is something of which you have to prove.

The artist is called a creator.

I do not know myself how I paint it. I sit down with a white board before the spot that strikes me. I look at what is before my eyes, and say to myself, that white board must become something.

So is fighting incompleteness the source of artistic neurosis? I doubt it. At most, this would apply to artists who deal with particular kinds of problems. I don't think we should think of Haydn or Mozart or Dickens or George Eliot in these terms.

As an artist, you have the job of working out whatever is given you to work out.

Do not copy nature. Art is an abstraction. Rather, bring your art forth by dreaming in front of her and think more of creation.

My mom is an artist and my own fiction is deeply visual.

You know a trillion times more about art than me. But I’ve learned that it isn’t necessary to know all that much. You just make what you wanna see, right? It’s a game, right? It’s like being paid for dreaming.

Born of the sensibility, art sows and creates life in its turn.