Julia Cameron Quotes

How did I come to be an artist ? Endless curiosity, observation, research - and a great amount of joy in the thing

How many artists subscribe to the notion that creative success depends on input from the fickle muse or her modern avatar, mental illness? Probably very few.

All real works of art look as though they were done in joy.

Writing is the starting point from which all goodness (and crappiness) flows.

It is the painting that makes me so happy these days.

One of the springs of poetry is joy.

I really admire songwriters or any kind of writer, painter or artist that says, "I'm going to get up at 8 o'clock in the morning and spend this time to this time creating." I do that sometimes, but the songs I like the best come as gifts from somewhere. It's almost like you didn't do anything, like you can't take credit for it because you sat down and the melody and words came out.

I used to tell everyone I met to be an artist..... I don't do that any more.

Picasso says that an artists paints not to ask a question but because he has found something and he wants to share—he cannot help it—what he has found.

When the work takes over, then the artist is enabled to get out of the way, not to interfere. When the work takes over, then the artist listens.

Artists are modest. They know they're not doing the work; they're just taking dictation.

As to the artists, do we not know that he only of them whom love inspires has the light of fame?-he whom love touches not walks in darkness.

Artists are most themselves when they are out of their minds, transcending the ego skirmishes of conceptual thought, and intuitively relinquishing control to the greater Creator

Artists aren't looking for you to write them something; they're looking for you to give them something new.

I'm a sponge, the more I absorb, the more I am able to articulate my vision, as artists do, like Picasso. I'm an artist in that light. I went from being an artist to an artiste.

If I get ideas independently of the act of writing, they never really fit. So for me, there's no hanging out, waiting for inspiration.

Any artist is an instrument-and that's exactly why you can't do it all the time. You can only do it when it's happening, when it's coming through. No matter how much you may want to do it, if it's not happening then it's simply not happening.

You are the song of every bird, you are the poet's every word, every artist's picture, every writer's play.

My responsibility as an artist is to turn up at the page or the piano or the microphone. The rest is up to God.

Art comes from joy and pain...But mostly from pain.

If you're an artist, you try to keep an ear to the ground and an ear to your heart.

I think the thing that I lost in myself when I stopped writing fiction and the thing that I rediscovered and started mining again is, for lack of a better word, magic. It's the way you can brush up against the inexplicable and the mystical.

Poet's food is love and fame.

I stay away from the writing part because I think that if it sticks, it sticks. You just know it. The stuff that doesn't stick, goes away. The stuff that propels you forward, you can see it in your partner's eyes.

The artists who want to be writers, read the reviews; the artists who want to write, don't.