Claude Monet Quotes

To a certain extent, just like my children, I nurture my writing until the point when it has to get out and face the outside world, where it takes on a life of its own. That is a purpose of any artist and their art.

I try not to think of myself in any category, and I don't ever really try to imagine myself competing with another actor. I just know I want to do the things that I would want to see, and I know the things that turn me on, whether it's on the stage, or it's a play or a film. I just kind of want to keep doing my own thing.

Artists are political in the sense that they've subtracted themselves from the structure of the marketplace and are contributing something that's not utilitarian. Even though books get sold, and I get advances, I get to look at society and think for a living.

For me, university was a bit of a rebellious streak. I love teachers but I'm inherently a bit of an anarchist and don't trust you because you're my teacher. Somewhere around my second or third year, I realized as an artist that it's up to us to choose our path, and there's nothing wrong with being given many different tools to put in your tool bag.

It took me a long time to get to a position where I can feel that, with my art, I'm capable of saying what I need to say, and once I finish it, I can sit back and say, "It's done, and I'm okay with that. People can judge it good or bad, and it doesn't matter. I'm okay with it because I said something I needed to say." That's a really hard place to get, as an artist.

Out of all of the stuff I have done in my whole 12 years, the Mistress series I and II are the most enjoyable processes I've ever been through and definitely, I'm most proud of that music.

It is precisely those artists and writers who are most inclined to think of their art as the manifestation of their personality who are in fact the most in bondage to public taste.

When you've just done it, you're not sure. But when you've sat with it for a couple of hours and you don't want to do anything more to it, that's a great feeling. It can stand on its own two feet.

I'm not claiming to appeal to the same people that Christina Aguilera or Britney Spears are going to appeal to. I'm not trying to. I'm doing what I want to do.

Every artist of importance creates his own world, with its own laws - creates and shapes it in his own shape and image, and no one else's. This is why it is difficult to fit the artist into a world that has already been created, a seven-day, fixed and solidified world: he will inevitably slip out of the set of laws and paragraphs, he will be a heretic.

Solitude is an unavoidable part of creativity. Self-reliance is a happy by-product.

You really write the books you want to write. You can't take into consideration anything that anybody has said about you in the past, or what they'll say about you in the future.

If you enjoyed making a thing, and you’re proud of the thing you made, that’s enough. Not everyone is going to like it, and that’s okay.

An artist should always bite the hand that feeds him - but not too hard.

Basically, you make another movie, and another, and hopefully you feel good about every picture you make. And you say, 'My name is on that. I did that. It's OK.' But don't get me wrong, I still get excited by it all. That, I hope, will never disappear.

Some positive persisting fops we know, Who, if once wrong, will needs be always so; But you with pleasure own your errors past, And make each day a critique on the last.

Most musicians remain poor. But the music that they make, even if it does not bring them millions, gives millions of people happiness.

I think you have to satisfy yourself first and foremost. There have been records I've been really, really pleased with that haven't connected with people. But I felt good about them. If you're making music, you must want to turn other people on to it, whether you're number one in the charts or number 60. I don't know, that's a commercial thing, but just the fact that other people like you... there's no point in making music, otherwise. Otherwise you might as well make it in your bedroom and leave it there.

For a creative person there's just as much pleasure in writing an eight-line poem as there is in writing a blockbuster play ... of the old '50s type.

There are probably seven persons, in all, who really like my work; and they are enough. I should write even if I were the only patient reader, for my aim is merely self-expression.

The people I admire most are those who are sensitive and want to create something or discover something, and do not see life in terms of power.

At times I come across works of mine which are soundly done and really in my style, and at such moments I find great solace.

The music industry can feel wonderful, but it can also feel very cold.

Hopefully this is going to be a trend, the beginning of a movement to reclaim theater for the artist and not commerce. I think there's a level of fatigue. Artists are tired of having to create work that's then coopted by commercial demands. When you begin souping up the car, the car no longer feels like your own.

So far as I am concerned, poetry and every other art was, is, and forever will be strictly and distinctly a question of individuality.