Urs Fischer Quotes

For the essential thing about the work of art is that it is work, and very hard work too.

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

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

It is not for nothing that artists have called their works the children of their brains and likened the pains of production to the pains of childbirth.

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

One is distracted by this notion that there is such an thing as inspiration, that it comes fast and easy. And some people are graced by that style. I'm not. So I have to work as hard as any stiff to come up with my payload

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

Know, thou, that the lines that live are turned out of a furrowed brow.

I always think that art is a form of sacrifice.

I have always tried to hide my efforts and wished my works to have a light joyousness of springtime which never lets anyone suspect the labors it has cost me.

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

Maybe an artist's position in society is different today because it's more individualistic. You're not a direct servant anymore to the patron-you're an indirect servant, or a servant with a choice, or maybe you could not even serve. It's the way you make something. You draw it, you carve it out. Later you build it up from a flat surface. There is no other way to do a sculpture - you either add or you subtract. If you don't enjoy making work, then it's bad... artwork is brutal for so many people... I like the idea of an artist as sombody who works.

So many people say painting is fun. I don't find it fun at all. It's hard work for me.

Katagiri Roshi says: "Poor artists. They suffer very much. They finish a masterpiece and they are not satisfied. They want to go on and do another." Yes, but it's better to go on and do another if you have the urge than to start drinking and become alcoholic or eat a pound of good fudge and get fat.

Wholeness is the enemy of the artist. We ought to be broken, ruined in some way.

I have never heard a dancer asking for advice about how to stay focused on her footwork, or a painter complaining about the dull day-to-day task of painting. What task worth doing isn't worth daily effort? Do you think Michelangelo was having fun the whole time he was on his back painting the Sistine Chapel's ceiling?

Artists must be sacrificed to their art.

I am a great artist and I know it. It's because of what I am that I have endured so much suffering, so as to pursue my vocation, otherwise I would consider myself a rogue - which is what many people think I am, for that matter.

People who aren't artists often feel that artists are inspired. But if you work at your art you don't have time to be inspired.

The artist is not a 'Sunday child' for whom everything immediately succeeds. He does not have the right to live without duty. The task that is assigned to him is painful, it is a heavy cross for him to bear.

That's just a part of being an artist: you can't write great stuff all the time, because if you did, then you'd be inhuman. The human side of people is that sometimes they fail.

She said writting novels was like childbirth: if you truly remembered how awful it got, you'd never do it again.

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.

To create a work of art, great or small, is work, hard work, and work requires discipline and order.