Mark Van Doren Quotes

These days, I find I'm applying a little more patience to my process. If I look back on my work, I can see those songs I bailed on could have been better, that had those great two verses and then I kind of coasted from there. These days, if a song is giving me trouble, I put it aside and pick it up later, and keep doing that, for a year if I have to, until it takes shape.

If you practice for ten years, you may begin to please yourself, after 20 years you may become a performer and please the audience, after 30 years you may please even your guru, but you must practice for many more years before you finally become a true artist-then you may please even God.

Professional creativity requires more than inspiration, talent, and discipline - it requires an endurance that few are aware of and even fewer have.

I think there's no truer and more pure purpose than to be able to refine your art to a point where you feel it's as possible as it can be.

Great art is created only through diligent and painstaking effort to perfect and polish oneself.

Pretty much the only goal I've had since the beginning, which I still have, is just to get better, work hard, focus, and everything else will just be a bonus. As long as I'm satisfied, and I think we're getting better with every song compared to the last, then I'm satisfied and that's all I want. If we don't achieve that, then I'll be disappointed.

I'm still an artist who's searching, trying to evolve, an artist who - nine times out of ten - is dissatisfied with her work, and beats herself, and goes out there and tries again and again, and falls on her face and looks for new challenges.

I think the biggest thing that motivates me when I'm choosing a part is a role that will help me continue to grow as a person and as an artist, and a role that will deepen my understanding of humanity, and my connection to it.

An artist has got to be careful never really to arrive at a place where he thinks he's AT somewhere. You always have to realize that you're constantly in a state of becoming. And, as long as you can stay in that realm you'll sort of be alright.

One of the lessons I learned in all those years practicing karate is that progress only comes in small incremental portions.

I think that new artistic challenges help you grow both as a person, as an artist, and then they feed back into your other work, and tend to magnify it.

I was 14 years old when I started rapping and I was terrible. I fell in love with it though and when that happens with me I become super passionate and go all the way with it.

College had a great deal to do with my development as a person. I don't know if I'd be the artist I was if it wasn't for goin' to school like that. School is a good place - it ain't for everybody, but I think it's for most people.

I don't think there's anything to be afraid of. Failure brings great rewards - in the life of an artist.

It takes a long time to make a painter - even with a good artist's education - but without one it tries the patience of Job; it is a great thing if one does not go backward.

I think we had to push forward to make sure it was different, do something that we had never done before and yet still have the consistency to stay in the same world. This was our chance to do all the things we didn't get a chance to do before. We've been working on these movies [Kung Fu Panda] for twelve years and we have to keep things exciting for us in order for us to devote that many years of our lives to do this.

I don't teach writing. I teach patience. Toughness. Stubbornness. The willingness to fail. I teach the life. The odd thing is most of the things that stop an inexperienced writer are so far from the truth as to be nearly beside the point. When you feel glosbal doubt about your talent, that is your talent. People who have no talent don't have any doubt.

Any artist must expect to work amid the total, rational indifference of everybody else to their work, for years, perhaps for life.

Even if I weren't learning new roles and getting the opportunity to be coached by incredible people, I still think I would be so excited to have an opportunity to continue to push myself and grow, as an artist.

Going to the office of some stranger and waiting in a line, in a hallway, with five other guys who look just like you, waiting your turn to go in and embarrass yourself, and then waiting around for feedback, which never comes. I really like that. For a young artist, it seems like the perfect thing to be doing, humiliation, over and over and over and over. Which I'm sure can't be the way that some people look at it, but I thought that was so great. The point of it is if you make your own stuff you don't have to deal with other people's bullshit.

I know for me as an artist, I think I do myself and my listeners a disservice, if I don't listen to some of the best music out there. If I was an architect or a carpenter, I'm going to want to study the best architects and carpenters and I'm going to appreciate their work, because they're going to inspire me to do well. And I just look at them as great architects and I just appreciate the gift that God gave them.

I want to be a mature artist with a different kind of thinking.

An artist's career doesn't happen in the cycle of one week of news. An artist's career happens in a lifetime, and if you're a true artist you're willing to die for what you believe in.

In my view, a writer is a writer because even when there is no hope, even when nothing you do shows any sign of promise, you keep writing anyway.