Julia Cameron Quotes

As artists, we must learn to be self-nourishing. We must become alert enough to consciously replenish our creative resources as we draw on them.

What matters is what happens in the soul of an artist when you're playing.

All artists, they say, are a little mad. This madness is, to a certain extent, a self-created myth designed to keep the generality away from the phenomenally close-knit creative community. Yet, in the world of the artists, the consciously eccentric are always respectful and admiring if those who have the courage to be genuinely a little mad.

The artist's life nourishes itself on the particular, the concrete.

When the artist is alive in any person, whatever his kind of work may be, he becomes an inventive, searching, daring, self-expressing creature.

Even St. Teresa said, "I can pray better when I'm comfortable," and she refused to wear her haircloth shirt or starve herself. I don't think living in cellars and starving is better for an artist than it is for anybody else.

I am a New Yorker, one; I'm an artist, two; I'm a woman, three.

The artist is a spectator, indifferent or impassioned, at the birth of his work, and observes the phases of its development.

I can't say any artist inspired me, because I'm inspired by the things that go on around me.

There is no such thing as an artist: there is only the world lit or unlit as the light allows. When the candle is burning, who looks at the wick? When the candle is out, who needs it?

In order to thrive as artists we need to be available to the universal flow. When we put a stopper on our capacity for joy by anorectically declining the small gifts of life, we turn aside the larger gifts as well.

The best of artists hath no thought to show which the rough stone in its superfluous shell doth not include; to break the marble spell is all the hand that serves the brain can do.

To all appearances the artist acts like a mediumistic being who, from the labyrinth beyond time and space, seeks his way out to a clearing. If we give the attributes of a medium to the artist, we must then deny him the state of consciousness on the aesthetic plane about what he is doing or why he is doing it. All this decisions in the artistic execution of the work rest with pure intuition and cannot be translated into a self-analysis, spoken or written, or even thought out.

An artist is the magician put among men to gratify - capriciously - their urge for immortality.

Writing, acting, music, comedy. A deep love of literature and books. Thank God for all the artists who've helped me.

Simply according artistic works the same protection as nonartistic works may not be sufficient to protect creativity. After all, the very essence of artistic expression is invention and artists necessarily draw on their own experience. But if the rules of liability are unclear, artists will not be able to know how much disguise is sufficient to protect their claims from the claims of those who may see themselves in the portrayals.

Poet's food is love and fame.

All artists dream of a silence which they must enter, as some creatures return to the sea to spawn.

In every work of art, the artist himself is present.

All artists are of necessity in some measure contemplative.

Those moments when you don't feel self-conscious, when you escape that, are when you produce something meaningful.

Modern conquerors can kill, but do not seem to be able to create. Artists know how to create but cannot really kill. Murderers are only very exceptionally found among artists.

The great artist takes what he needs.

To be an artist means not to compute or count.

If evil means to be self-motivated, to be the center of one’s own universe, to live on one’s own terms, then every artist, every thinker, every original mind, is evil.