Lawrence Durrell Quotes

I suppose an artist takes the elements of his life and rearranges them and then has them perceived by others as though they were the elements of their lives.

It is the artist's function not to copy but to synthesise: to eliminate from that gross confusion of actuality which is his raw material whatever is accidental, idle, irrelevant, and select for perpetuation that only which is appropriate and immortal.

The artist is the medium between his fantasies and the rest of the world.

Mankind is the grandest and surest artist of all, and history as it clarifies is, in pure fact, an artistic process, a creation in its fullness of the beautiful soul.

The imagination imitates. It is the critical spirit that creates.

An artist observes, selects, guesses, and synthesizes.

All the things an artist must be: poet, explorer of nature, philosopher!

I haven't the slightest idea what art is, but to be a painter is something of which you have to prove.

A writer - and, I believe, generally all persons - must think that whatever happens to him or her is a resource. All things have been given to us for a purpose, and an artist must feel this more intensely. All that happens to us, including our humiliations, our misfortunes, our embarrassments, all is given to us as raw material, as clay, so that we may shape our art.

An artist’s job is to captivate… if we stumble into truth, we got lucky.

The artist is called a creator.

I always wanted to show the world that art is everywhere, except it has to pass through a creative mind.

The artist who paints the emotions creates an enclosed world... the picture... which, like a book, has the same interest no matter where it happens to be. Such an artist, we may imagine, spends a great deal of time doing nothing but looking, both around him and inside him.

Do not copy nature. Art is an abstraction. Rather, bring your art forth by dreaming in front of her and think more of creation.

We are living in a world where the individual must learn to command the raw materials of expression. He must not be dependent all the time on the ready-made, the finished product. It's the transferring, the changing of the raw into what is the expression of your own self – the whole joy and satisfaction and frustration of life is built into this.

Born of the sensibility, art sows and creates life in its turn.

The artist's job? To be a miracle worker: make the blind see, the dull feel, the dead to live.

I pay tribute to the writing always. The writer is a creative artist and the director is an interpretive artist and the actors are interpretive. You take zero and make it into something, that's always amazing to me.

Every single work of art is the fulfillment of a prophecy; for every work of art is the conversion of an idea into an image.

Art is the result of a creative impulse derived out of a consciousness of life.

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.

By the artist's seizing any one object from nature, that object no longer is part of nature. One can go so far as to say that theartist creates the object in that very moment by emphasizing its significant, characteristic, and interesting aspects or, rather, by adding the higher values.

What do artists do? Artists give people something they didn't know they were missing: a dance, a piece of music, a painting, a piece of sculpture. Catering to that need is the best business strategy.

An artist is a person who has invented an artist.

In our fine arts, not imitation, but creation is the aim... The details, the prose of nature, he should omit, and give us only the spirit and splendour.