William Dean Howells Quotes

Every human is an artist. The dream of your life is to make beautiful art.

Find a beautiful piece of art. If you fall in love with Van Gogh or Matisse or John Oliver Killens, or if you fall love with the music of Coltrane, the music of Aretha Franklin, or the music of Chopin - find some beautiful art and admire it, and realize that that was created by human beings just like you, no more human, no less.

At moments we are all artists.

All men are creative but few are artists.

And if they haven't got poetry in them, there's nothing you can do that will produce it.

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.

Young people can create beautiful things.

An artist is only an ordinary man with a greater potentiality.

Nature is my main source of inspiration - I will never stop taking hints from what I call 'the greatest artist'

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

Those who create beauty are also they who possess it.

I could never live without artwork. It's a constant inspiration.

There's this idea that artists are free and that means that we can do whatever we want to do. And it's very important to engage with this idea, just as human beings, that we are free to do what we wanna do. So the real question becomes, then, what do we wanna do? And as one gets to know oneself, one finds that there are things that return again and again that you wanna do.

The essential thing is to spring forth, to express the bolt of lightning one senses upon contact with a thing. The function of the artist is not to translate an observation but to express the shock of the object on his nature; the shock, with the original reaction.

What a Beethoven, Shakespeare or Picasso has done is not create something, so much as they have accessed that place within themselves from which they could express that which has been created by God.

Genius gives birth, talent delivers. What Rembrandt or Van Gogh saw in the night can never be seen again.

There’s a great expression in Twelve Step programs: Act as if. Act as if you’re a writer. Sit down and begin. Act as if you might just create something beautiful, and by beautiful I mean something authentic and universal. Don’t wait for anybody to tell you it’s okay. Take that shimmer and show us our humanity. That’s your job.

There is something wonderful about singing and writing music, I think there is something special about creativity and the ability humans have in that area.

There is an ocean of creativity within every human being.

Every human being is an artist

My responsibility as an artist is to turn up at the page or the piano or the microphone. The rest is up to God.

Your creativity is waiting for you like a dancing partner.

The hallmark of an artist is generosity.

Talent seduces us into interpretation. My sister could draw wonderfully, but she would never have hit upon the idea of becoming a painter. I never had that extreme talent.

an artist is always seeking revelation.