Lauren Groff Quotes

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.

I feel mushy these days when I think about art and artists and the work that lies ahead for us. There's good work to be done and there's joy to be found in it, I think.

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

To create anything — whether a short story or a magazine profile or a film or a sitcom — is to believe, if only momentarily, you are capable of magic. These essays are about that magic — which is sometimes perilous, sometimes infectious, sometimes fragile, sometimes failed, sometimes infuriating, sometimes triumphant, and sometimes tragic. I went up there. I wrote. I tried to see.

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

I have always found writing pleasant and don't understand what people mean by 'throes of creation.'

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.

In terms of art, the only real answer that I know of is to do it. If you don't do it, you don't know what might happen.

We have our brush and colors - paint Paradise and in we go.

Whatever I was writing at the time, I knew there was no market for it and never would be, because there’s never a market for true art, so my main concern was always to have a job that didn’t require me to write or think.

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.

Art is right reason in the doing of work.

I don't think there is room for 'artistic temperament.' Professional artists understand art is a business. If businesses ran their companies like many artists do their careers, they would not stay open a year.

The poems ... are moments when I had the intensity to see, and the energy to build, some careful analog that completed the seeing. ... All I have been left is the exhausting habit of trying to tack up the slack in my life with words.

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

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

But where there is no art show, I would still be painting.

I think a lot of times our culture has an attitude toward art and the production of art that separates artists from the rest of us, like making art or music or painting or whatever is some magical thing that you have to be inspired to do, and special people do it.

The true artist is not proud: he unfortunately sees that art has no limits; he feels darkly how far he is from the goal, and though he may be admired by others, he is sad not to have reached that point to which his better genius only appears as a distant, guiding sun.

If you are afflicted with an artistic feeling, it's just perfecting something.

I'm focused on creating art and whichever outlet it can get out in.

For every artist, experience is never complete until it has been reproduced in creative work.

All works of art should begin... at the end.

Writing is a combination of intangible creative fantasy and appallingly hard work.