Philip Glass Quotes

The purpose of technique is to free the unconscious. If you follow the rules ploddingly, they will allow your unconscious to be free.

You can admire people for sure, and they're worth admiring, but you need to find that special thing about yourself. It takes working hard, getting the technique, and learning to sing and all that stuff, but the master class is about bringing yourself to the role.

Technique is really personality. That is the reason why the artist cannot teach it, why the pupil cannot learn it, and why the aesthetic critic can understand it.

It's so difficult to be conscious of a development of a style. You find yourself writing in a certain style, and the analysis of how you came to it can only ever be applied retroactively. You're never conscious of why you're producing it.

......so called “composition” becomes a personal thing, to be developed along with technique, as a personal way of seeing.

Art stands on the shoulders of craft, which means that to get to the art, you must master the craft.

In abandoning the vagueness of the sketch the artist shows more of his personality by revealing the range but also the limitations of his talent.

With practice the craft will come almost of itself, in spite of you and all the more easitly if you think of something besides technique.

I might say that what amateurs call a style is usually only the unavoidable awkwardnesses in first trying to make something that has not heretofore been made. Almost no new classics resemble other previous classics. At first people see only the awkwardness. Then they are not so perceptible. When they show so very awkwardly people think these awkwardnesses are the style and many copy them. This is regrettable.

At first you're doing it for yourself, it's about what sounds good to you. It's about expressing yourself. Then you get comfortable as an artist and you find yourself and people get familiar.

I don't master my craft or my style enough to have any philosophy or dogma to which I feel I belong.

I think you're born with style, but you have to develop it. You can be born with the talent to be an opera star, but you've got to work and practice it.

Nobody had his [Ed Wood's] style. That's something I try to do in my films. You have your own kind of cryptic messages in there - cryptic things that most people wouldn't understand but are important to you. Things that kind of keep you going through the process.

You do not create a style. You work, and develop yourself; your style is an emanation from your own being.

You have to go through the long, painful process of learning techniques to be able to recognize a "good accident" or a "bad accident."

Let us guess that whenever we read a sentence & like it, we unconsciously store it away in our model-chamber; & it goes, with the myriad of its fellows, to the building, brick by brick, of the eventual edifice which we call our style.

I’m so worried that I’m going to perfect [my] technique someday. I have to say its unfortunate how many of my pictures do depend upon some technical error.

I still come closest to success with drawing.

An artist should let his style evolve naturally, spontaneously.

Style is something you can use, and you can be like a magpie, just taking what you want. The idea of the rigid style seemed to me then something you needn't concern yourself with, it would trap you.

Creating art is a habit, one that we practice daily or hourly until we get good at it

Nobody tells people who are beginners - and I really wish somebody had told this to me - that all of us who do creative work... get into it because we have good taste.

I got most of my style from people around me who I knew personally.

Everybody wants to know about my style and how it came about. It's no big secret. It's the way I feel.