Ali Akbar Khan Quotes

I'll need my whole lifetime to polish my craft.

Don't only practise your art, but force your way into its secrets.

It’s a curious thing. I suppose most people think of artists as impatient but I don’t know of any first-rate artist who hasn’t manifested in his career an appalling patience, a willingness to wait and to do his best now in the expectation that next year he will do better.

It takes ten years, usually, to make a dancer. It takes ten years of handling the instrument, handling the material with which you are dealing, for you to know it completely.

It's only when an artist becomes a master that they are fully able to express themselves.

You just want to hone your craft, whatever it may be.

The more you draw, the better you get.

You have to continue to hone your craft.

All I've done since I was young was hone my craft.

Great art is created only through diligent and painstaking effort to perfect and polish oneself.

It took me twenty years study and practice to work up to what I wanted to play in this performance. How can she expect to listen five minutes and understand it?

I am just beginning to understand what it is to paint. A painter should have two lives, one in which to learn, and one in which to practice his art.

If a person will spend one hour a day on the same subject for five years, that person will be an expert on that subject.

I do not see in what manner practice alone can be sufficient for the production of correct, excellent, and finished pictures. Works deserving this character never were produced, nor ever will arise, from memory alone.

Practice is the hardest part of learning, and training is the essence of transformation.

The great piano virtuoso Paderewski was once playing before an audience of the rich and the royal. After a brilliant performance, an elegant lady waxed ecstatic over the great artist. She said, "Ah Maestro, you are a genius!" Paderewski tartly replied, "Ah yes, madam, but before I was a genius I was a clod!" What he was saying was that his present acclaim was not handed to him on a silver platter. He, too, was once a little boy laboriously practicing his scales. And even at his peak, behind every brilliant performance there were countless hours of practice and preparation.

To focus on technique is like cramming your way through school. You sometimes get by, perhaps even get good grades, but if you don't pay the price day in and day out, you'll never achieve true mastery of the subjects you study or develop an educated mind.

No one has mastery, Before he is at the end, Of his art and his life.

It turns out that the distance from head to hand, from wafting butterfly to entomological specimen, is achieved through regular practice. What begins as something like a dream will in fact stay a dream forever unless you have the tools and the discipline to bring it out.

Almost nothing worthwhile is easy, and it's hard to just jump in and be good at something difficult right off the bat... The only reliable way to succeed at anything is to actually do it, repeatedly, with concentrated effort. True for individuals, and true for organizations. Athletes, artists, businesses.

It takes a long time to make a painter - even with a good artist's education - but without one it tries the patience of Job; it is a great thing if one does not go backward.

To become an expert achiever in any human activity, it takes practice... practice... practice.

If modern painters feel qualms about applying the term "masterpiece" to describe a work of capital importance, this is because it has come to convey a notion of perfection: a notion that leads to much confusion when applied to artists other than those who made perfection their ideal.

The saying, "Practice is everything," is Periander's.

I shall become a master in this art only after a great deal of practice.