Walker Percy Quotes

Artists have a sensibility that others don't have. They have a way of reading into the future.

Artists recognize other artists as soon as the pencil begins to move.

Artists are the antennae of the race, but the bullet-headed many will never learn to trust the great artists.

There's just some dysfunctionalism with artists. There are good things and bad things about being an artist, and the good thing is, sometimes you get an inside line on what's really happening. You develop these strange antennae that clue you in to what's really going on.

The artist is not a man who describes, but a man who feels.

It's often the case that great artists - people like Bruce Springsteen - tend to pick up the subterranean rumblings of profound social change long before the economic statisticians notice them. Changes start long before they become statistics.

All of a sudden there's a song - there in your hotel room playing your guitar - and you write it, and two or three years later it will come true. It keeps you on your toes.

Working with younger artists kind of tests your judgment. You're not always right, but when you are, it's exciting.

When a painting is finished, it's like a new born child, and the artist himself must have time for understanding. How then do you expect an amateur to understand that which the artist dos not yet comprehend.

It isn't a hunch but the subconscious mind, which is the creative mind, at work. That is the mind which makes artists do things without their knowing how they came to do them. Perhaps with me it was the cumulative effect of a lot of little things individually insignificant but collectively powerful.

The artist must yield himself to his own inspiraton, and if he has a true talent, no one knows and feels better than he what suits him.

The composer reveals the innermost nature of the world, and expresses the profoundest wisdom in a language that his reasoning faculty does not understand, just as a magnetic somnambulist gives information about things of which she has no conception when she is awake. Therefore in the composer, more than in any other artist, the man is entirely separate and distinct from the artist.

I always say that intuition is the number one tool for an artist.

Artists are mystics rather than rationalists. They leap to conclusions that logic cannot reach.

An artist is a prophet and seer, not a paint craftsman or design maker, or reporter or entertainer... the artist has the superiorly searching perception with which that world outside of man's contamination can be penetrated and the truth drawn out from it.

Every true artist does feel, consciously or unconsciously, that he is touching transcendental truths; that his images are shadows of things seen through the veil. In other words, the natural mystic does know that there is something there, something behind the clouds or within the trees; but he believes that the pursuit of beauty is the way to find it; that imagination is a sort of incantation that can call it up.

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.

If sometimes our great artists have been the most critical of our society, it is because their sensitivity and their concern for justice, which must motivate any true artist, makes him aware that our nation falls short of its highest potential. I see little of more importance to the future of our country and our civilization than full recognition of the place of the artist.

I have heard it very often said that an artist does not need intelligence, that his is the province of the soul

We wouldn't be artists, writers, painters, musicians, if we weren't sensitive.

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

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.

Sometimes being an artist means knowing when to let someone see something in you that is there that you can't hear or see.

Just as the pious man prays without speaking a word and the Almighty hearkens unto him, so the artist with true feelings paints and the sensitive man understands and recognizes it.

What is an artist? He's a man who has antennae, who knows how to hook up to the currents which are in atmosphere, in the cosmos.