Harold Prince Quotes

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

Inspiration is an awakening, a quickening of all man's faculties, and it is manifested in all high artistic achievements.

Angel and Muse approach from without; the Angel sheds light and the Muse gives form (Hesiod learned of them). Gold leaf or chiton-folds: the poet finds his models in his laurel coppice. But the Duende, on the other hand, must come to life in the nethermost recesses of the blood.

Picasso is still influencing me. Of course, I haven't got that kind of energy, or skill.

Every artist preserves deep within him a single source from which, throughout his lifetime, he draws what he is, and what he says. When the source dries up, the work withers and crumbles.

The model should only serve the very private function for the painter of providing the starting point for his excitement.

Great art inspires great art.

I think a lot of times our culture has an attitude toward art and the production of art that separates artists from the rest of us, like making art or music or painting or whatever is some magical thing that you have to be inspired to do, and special people do it.

The thing I wonder about is where does Brian's creative spark come from? Not his subjects or anything, but his spark. What makes it so great for me is that I really don't know. There's a mystery behind Brian, even to me.

Great classic music that I've been turned on to has not only inspired and influenced me, but it has had an effect on my songwriting.

There is no scientific discoverer, no poet, no painter, no musician, who will not tell you that he found ready made his discovery or poem or picture - that it came to him from outside, and that he did not consciously create it from within.

When you deal with Alan Ball, you're dealing with a person who is a genius in terms of how art imitates life.

Sometimes you do know where the ideas are coming from and sometimes you don't. You might get a song coming through that you just don't know about.

I really admire songwriters or any kind of writer, painter or artist that says, "I'm going to get up at 8 o'clock in the morning and spend this time to this time creating." I do that sometimes, but the songs I like the best come as gifts from somewhere. It's almost like you didn't do anything, like you can't take credit for it because you sat down and the melody and words came out.

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.

A true artist is not one who is inspired, but one who inspires others.

One type of concentration is immediate and complete, as it was with Mozart. The other is plodding and only completed in stages, as with Beethoven. Thus genius works in different ways to achieve its ends.

At moments we are all artists.

Normal people do not create art.

You can't really do anything creative without a source of inspiration.

A writer writes with his genius; an artist paints with hers; everyone who creates operates from this sacramental center.

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

I do sculpting sometimes when I have the time, and the first thing I sculpted was a bust of [Albert] Einstein. It still sits on my table and still inspires me. He was a person who triggered my imagination and my ideas.

I think the material that inspires artists is the fabric of the soul of civilization.

The artist does not exist except as a personification, a figure of speech that represents the sum total of art itself. It is painting that is the genius of the painter, poetry of the poet, and a person is a creative artist to the extent that he participates in that genius.