David Tudor Quotes

Very rarely is there any confusion as to when a painting or a song is finished. You just know when it's done.

The creative habit is like a drug. The particular obsession changes, but the excitement, the thrill of your creation lasts.

I've gone seventy-nine hours without sleep, creating. When that flow is going, it's almost like a high. You don't want it to stop. You don't want to go to sleep for fear of missing something.

Books and movies are never finished, only surrendered.

Even if you're not releasing songs, the act of creativity is important. That's the part I love, when you're in the moment. The rest of it I'm not particularly interested in at all.

I think good artists know when they're on a roll, and they recognize when lightning is striking. It's a very fortunate thing to have that inspiration and not to overanalyze it or mess with it; you just follow it if you love what you do.

Being at the genesis of the creative process is definitely something I want to keep doing. It's just such a great buzz.

The great composer does not set to work because he is inspired, but becomes inspired because he is working.

Like all artists, I go through creative spurts.

I started producing work with an ecstatic addiction.

The little dissatisfaction which every artist feels at the completion of a work forms the germ of a new work.

I think it's bad to talk about one's present work, for it spoils something at the root of the creative act. It discharges the tension.

I just create, that's what I do.

Any working composer or painter or sculptor will tell you that inspiration comes at the eighth hour of labour rather than as a bolt out of the blue. We have to get our vanities and our preconceptions out of the way and do the work in the time allotted.

Most of the time one is discouraged by the work, but now and again by some grace something stands out and invites you to work on it, to elaborate it or animate it in some way. It's a mysterious process.

Art is never finished, only abandoned.

I'm really happy when I'm actively creating things. When I'm frustrated and not excited, it's because I haven't written anything in a month or so.

Art is not the kind of thing where you get what you put into it all the time. So I learned to not expect anything other than the sort of joy of having a poem in front of me.

That's the worst and best thing about being in the studio, feeling completely lost and not knowing how to put the final touch on something. But once you find it, there's nothing like that feeling.

As a composer, every project begins with either a blank sequence or a blank manuscript and for the first couple of days you cover and experience every emotion under the sun. Fear being the main one.

Nobody will stop you from creating. Do it tonight. Do it tomorrow. That is the way to make your soul grow… The kick of creation is the act of creating, not anything that happens afterward

The ideas come afterwards, when the picture is finished.

If you've worked over all of your drawing, it should finish itself - often when you least expect it.

Perhaps I might be satisfied, momentarily, with a work finished at one sitting, but I would soon get bored looking at it; therefore, I prefer to continue working on it so that later I may recognize it as a work of my mind.

Another thing about creation is that every day it is like it gave birth, and it's always kind of an innocent and refreshing. So it's always virginal to me, and it's always a surprise. ... Each piece seems to have a life of its own. Every little piece or every big piece that I make becomes a very living thing to me, very living. I could make a million pieces; the next piece gives me a whole new thing. It is a new center. Life is total at that particular time. And that's why it's right. That reaffirms my life.