William Faulkner Quotes

That's what's great about the arts. Everything inspires you, and you get a chance to grow from watching other people and how they do their work.

The big artist keeps an eye on nature and steals her tools.

So much of what we do as artists is a combination of personal experience and imagination, and how that all creeps into your work is not so linear.

I think if you speak to any creative person, there's something so powerful - so intoxicating, if you will - about discovering another voice, another instrument, another way of looking at things, another way of perceiving things.

Nothing really came, everything was like inspired by something.

I wrote 'She's a Lady' on the back of a TWA menu, flying back from London after doing Tom Jones's TV show. Jones's manager wanted me to write him a song. If I have an idea and I don't have a pad of paper, I'll write on whatever is available. What's the difference? Paper is paper.

I'm a writer who likes to be influenced.

You'd have to be completely crazy not to be influenced by and take from other artists. It's completely impossible not to.

If you are a writer or any kind of artist, if you change something as fundamental as where you live - the way you live - then I think you change the very instrument that is trying to make the art.

Creativity requires input, and that's what research is. You're gathering material with which to build.

Quite often, little germs of ideas have come from something that I've observed or someone's told me. The process of it becoming fiction is expanding and extending it: stretching the rubber band of reality.

It's hard to predict and to say what goes on inside the minds of an artist, but that's what makes them an artist. That sense of creativity. That thing that makes them tick is probably the very thing that pushes them to the extremes that sometimes can cause, you know, fatalities and things that, you know, that end up not being good.

Music is the doorway that has led me to drawing, photography, and writing.

I take stuff because I'm inspired by it.

If you're a creative person, what inspires you is always changing; it's always shifting.

Good artists copy, great artists steal.

Most of us don't invent ideas. We take the best ideas from someone else.

A lot of times, I don't feel responsible for the songs myself. But that's my job or my place in life: to keep my search and catch the ideas before they pass me by.

I genuinely find the most meaningful thing I do is to make music, but also to absorb some sort of creativity.

I'm always looking at other artists and trying to get inspired by different things.

I don't think I really invented anybody. I have drawn on real life.

I'm not a sponge exactly, but I find that something I look at is a great opportunity for ideas.

If you're not observing the world around you, in some sense you're not really an artist because then that means you're just replicating other people's stuff, or, I don't even know what you're doing.

Being creative is my idea of heaven. I'm just incredibly fortunate that I can do it in artwork. Watercolor is what I started out with. What I love about watercolor is that a lot of happy accidents occur.

You cannot possibly invent painting all by yourself.