Greg Graffin Quotes

For me, drawing is a question of death and life. Every day I draw, I write, I do something.

Artwork is not like a commercial business; there is no such thing as a schedule for art. You can't hurry art.

For me, drawing is a way of navigating the imagination, and it remains the fundamental vehicle of my practice. Drawing allows me to be at my most inventive.

Make good art.

In all fields of creativity you see the result of work that has become habit. Where the creative impulse has become flaccid or has died out altogether, and yet because it is our work and our life we continue to do it.

For novelists or musicians, if they really want to create something, they need to go downstairs and find a passage to get into the second basement. What I want to do is go down there, but still stay sane.

Every time that I wanted to give up, if I saw an interesting textile, print what ever, suddenly I would see a collection.

Like all artists, I go through creative spurts.

The important thing for me as an artist is to keep going back to the page and doing what I do.

Being creative is my idea of heaven. I'm just incredibly fortunate that I can do it in artwork. Watercolor is what I started out with. What I love about watercolor is that a lot of happy accidents occur.

There's this element of surprise when you're writing songs, like it's something outside of you that you get to be part of. And it's just exciting. And that's why I keep writing - because I like that feeling.

My whole life, I've always had to be surrounded by creative things. I find it relaxing to be in touch with creations by other people.

Coming to Nashville has been so motivating and inspirational. Just watching people live and breathe their music and create something that they can feel from start to finish.

So much of what we do as artists is a combination of personal experience and imagination, and how that all creeps into your work is not so linear.

Even at your best, the creative moments are still kind of fleeting.

In my experience a painting is not made with colors and paint at all. I don't know what a painting is; who knows what sets off even the desire to paint?

Artists today think of everything they do as a work of art. It is important to forget about what you are doing - then a work of art may happen.

All that I've done in my life thus far, all the poems and all the pictures, are not so much an intermingling of my life with art but a divine accident.

I like to stay in the space of creativity, and I want to go towards that all the time.

The artist in me welcomes another opportunity to be creative.

What is important is satiating my creativity as an artiste.

I would say any creative person has that: you can't just force a topic. Whether you're a painter, you want to do a cartoon. Anything. Something may come up that's not your style or suited to what you are working on at the moment. So you file it away and hopefully find a place for it.

I've said, for a long time, my favorite part of my career is when I'm creating a new thing where I'm pulling from a new place.

You just gotta record stuff and move on and make new material. Painters don't wait until they're in some specific gallery before they move on to the next painting.

I think we have a creative impulse where suffering can magnify our work, but so can joy. You can be in love and write the greatest love song ever. Sometimes I think too much suffering makes it difficult to do one's work.