Stephen Greenblatt Quotes

All my inspiration comes from life. That's how it never stops, in a way.

Your life can become the background for the art you create.

To me, writing and composing are much more like painting, about colors and brushes; I don't use a computer when I write, and I don't use a piano. I'm at a desk writing, and it's very broad strokes and notes as colors on a palette.

I like characters. I like spirited characters whether they exist in fiction or real life. Whether they're the invention of artistic people or directors, musicians. I think music and art and fashion designers inspire me and I like characters.

When you're an actor or any kind of artist, you use your life as something to draw from in every experience.

I don't want real life necessarily to be seen only as a context to heighten the deepness my work.

The wonderful thing about being a writer is that everything that happens is grist to the mill.

If a poet is anybody, he is somebody to whom things made matter very little - somebody who is obsessed by Making.

I really believe that every character comes from the well of the artist.

Painting is the most magical of mediums. The transcendence is truly amazing to me every time I go to a museum and I see how somebody figured another way to rub colored dirt on a flat surface and make space where there is no space or make you think of a life experience.

If ever Shakespeare rants, it is not when his imagination is hurrying him along, but when he is hurrying his imagination along.

Do not copy nature. Art is an abstraction. Rather, bring your art forth by dreaming in front of her and think more of creation.

I've dedicated a lot of my life as a writer to understanding how to hear the divine voice, or the music of the spheres, or whatever it is that we do when we're making art, making something out of nothing. Figuring out how to do that is much more important than knowing how to execute a good line. I don't think about that anymore, I just write.

Art comes from life, not from the studio

Art is a little bit larger than life - it's an exhalation of life and I think you probably need a little touch of madness.

Art arises when the secret vision of the artist and the manifestation of nature agree to find new shapes.

Art arises from sources other than logic." (p.32)

If you're going to be an artist, real life is your inspiration.

When I start writing, the first line might come from reality, but the second and the third one, I have to write it. So this is the genesis of my creation. If I want to know what happens, if I want to find out the secret, I have to write it.

Sometimes I'm on the pulse of what's happening in Hollywood, but other times, I'm just totally absorbed by what I'm creating on the easel.

I suppose an artist takes the elements of his life and rearranges them and then has them perceived by others as though they were the elements of their lives.

Blank paper has always inspired me.

Art is something you can't teach, but you can inspire it.

What has any poet to trust more than the feel of the thing? Theory concerns him only until he picks up his pen, and it begins to concern him again as soon as he lays it down.

The way I create music is maybe like a painting, to compose in a more visual way. Basically it's the music that I want to hear- that's my inspiration and bottom line. I just try to get ideas from books, movies, paintings.