Richard P. Feynman Quotes

I was a painter before I was a writer, so I was always a visual artist. And my writing, to me, was always visual.

Anybody who is born in Santa Rosa must turn out to be either an artist or a poet, for the spirit of the hills gets into your blood out there.

The artist injects the spirit of life into a culture.

Any man who can write a page of living prose adds something to our life, and the man who can, as I can, is surely the last to resent someone who can do it even better. An artist cannot deny art, nor would he want to. A lover cannot deny love.

If an artist may say nothing except what he has invented by his own sole efforts, it stands to reason he will be poor in ideas. If he could take what he wants wherever he could find it, as Euripides and Dante and Michelangelo and Shakespeare and Bach were free, his larder would always be full, and his cookery might be worth tasting.

Artists aren't looking for you to write them something; they're looking for you to give them something new.

I like to be in the zone. I like being in the studio with the artists, with the producers, with the musicians, feeling it, and going there. I feel like I have a lot of content to start writing about.

What comes forth from you as an artist cannot be controlled. But you have responsibilities as a global citizen. Your history dictates your duty. And by writing about black people, you are not limiting yourself. The experiences of African-Americans are as wide open as God's closet.

That's just a part of being an artist: you can't write great stuff all the time, because if you did, then you'd be inhuman. The human side of people is that sometimes they fail.

When I go and write with other artists - a lot of the time it's with them - it's like a therapy session almost. I ask them what they're listening to and what they're going through and what their influences are and I try to get inside of their head and step into their shoes for a second.

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

The great artists do not seek their forms in the midst of the past, but take the deepest soundings they can of the genuine, profoundest of their age.

The good writing of any age has always been the product of someone's neurosis, and we'd have a mighty dull literature if all the writers that came along were a bunch of happy chuckleheads.

What is an artist? He's a man who has antennae, who knows how to hook up to the currents which are in atmosphere, in the cosmos.

When the artist is truly the servant of the work, the work is better than the artist; Shakespeare knew how to listen to his work, and so he often wrote better than he could write; Bach composed more deeply, more truly than he knew, Rembrandt's brush put more of the human spirit on canvas than Rembrandt could comprehend. When the work takes over, then the artist is enabled to get out of the way, not to interfere. When the work takes over, then the artist listens.

The lives great artists live and the books they write are two very different things.

My dream is to do exactly what I'm doing. I love writing and directing, and being somebody that can write about an artist I love or make a film about it. That's great. I would leave the other stuff to those who do it much better.

Theatre artists are essentially sort of charlatans and thieves, I mean that's the tradition that we come from, so I have absolutely no, I make no bones about the fact that I steal from here and I take from there, and we all do it, that's perfectly all right, that's the nothing, there's nothing new in the world, there's nothing actually new in the way that you do something, but the point is is how do you take something and use it to articulate what is essentially a core of any given theatrical production.

I think that the song, the song "Stand By Me" is one of those songs that... and someone asked me, what was you thinking about or what was you feeling about? It's something that, songwriters just write songs. It's like an artist that paints. They paint what they feel. It's not, it's not about how many of these painting I'll sell it's just how they feel at the moment. And that's how I wrote "Stand By Me".

With the birth of the artist came the inevitable afterbirth... the critic

Artists and writers have to understand and live the truth that what we are doing is nourishing the world.

Most artists look for something fresh to paint; frankly I find that quite boring. For me it is much more exciting to find fresh meaning in something familiar.

I have so much music that I do. Just like how a visual artist is always sketching something but they might not share it, I'm always writing songs or coming up with melodic lines on piano or guitar. It's therapy. It's always happening.

I think kids need to be allowed to be more creative and learn more about artists these days, so I'm all about that.

A great artist... must be shaken by the naked truths that will not be comforted. This divine discontent, this disequilibrium, this state of inner tension is the source of artistic energy.