Johannes Brahms Quotes

Don't try to be original. Be simple. Be good technically, and if there is something in you, it will come out.

I've only wanted paper and beautiful colors. It was my dream, and it still is my dream. And books. They're all I need, and the rest I can do without.

Someone who copies a Van Gogh does not therefore become Van Gogh, and the same would go for Mozart or anyone else who contributed something that was original. Certainly in the way that I described visualizing numbers in abstract, meaningful shapes.

I do not have much patience with a thing of beauty that must be explained to be understood. If it does need additional interpretation by someone other than the creator, then I question whether it has fulfilled its purpose.

A painting has to be beautiful. Even in its grotesqueness.

I'm committed to the purity of my art form.

Art is the exclusion of the unnecessary.

I write for no other purpose than to add to the beauty that now belongs to me.

First of all I think that poetry is very noble and I always have with me the sense of the nobility of poetry.

Everybody's out trying to be commercial. I'm not trying to be anything, really.

I try to be aware of what I'm concerned about, aware of how I feel about myself in the world, aware of how I feel about the issues of the day, but I guess I don't want to write essays in my head about my craft and maybe it's because I teach and talk about craft of other writers as a reader. I feel the moment I start doing that is when it's going to kill me.

Literature is invention. Fiction is fiction. To call a story a true story is an insult to both art and truth.

If you write beautifully, you write beautifully, that's all.

I have spent 20 years writing these books. Had I wanted to say men are beasts and scream, that takes 30 seconds.

I am sure that there is no place in the world where your message would not be enhanced by your making the place (whether tiny or large, a hut or a palace) orderly, artistic and beautiful with some form of creativity, some form of ‘art’ (p. 213).

All I'm about is just the pen.

If I begin writing a poem that means I'm intrigued in some way by whatever it's about and that if I'm not trying to find something new and pushing the envelope in the poem I can't expect my reader to be particularly excited about it either.

It kills your writing if you try to manipulate it with crude politics.

Write even when the world is chaotic. You don’t need a cigarette, silence, music, a comfortable chair, or inner peace to write. You just need ten minutes and a writing implement.

Creative expression, whether that means writing, dancing, bird-watching, or cooking, can give a person almost everything that he or she has been searching for: enlivenment, peace, meaning, and the incalculable wealth of time spent quietly in beauty.

Writing takes a combination of sophistication and innocence; it takes conscience, our belief that something is beautiful because it is right.

I just like writing lyrics. I find a little satisfaction in performing live, making records. But primarily, I just try to write every day.

If you just write the kinds of stories you think others will want to read, you'll be competing with cartoonists who are far more enthusiastic for that kind of comic than you are, and they'll kick your ass every time.

I write not for your farthing, but to try. How I your farthing writers, may outvie.

Mozart's music is constantly escaping from its frame, because it cannot be contained in it.