Agnes de Mille Quotes

Two sittings a day of my models and I'm totally exhausted.

I know I'm not going to write as well as I used to. I no longer have the stamina to endure the frustration. Writing is frustration - it's daily frustration, not to mention humiliation.

Unlike a lot of choreographers, I don't always start with the music. I often start with a visual artist, and then find music that fits the world of that visual artist.

I know that when I think of myself as being utterly worn out, when I think that somehow I have nothing more to write, then something is happening within me. And, in due course, it bubbles up; it comes to the surface, and then I do my best to listen. But there's nothing mystical about all this. I suppose all writers do the same.

The process of writing, any form of creativity, is a power intensifying life.

Writing I think, out of what all of us do, writing is the hardest. You're the only who start with nothing except what's up here. You do that. It's really hard I think, acting is not.

I seldom know what I'm going to write when I sit down. There isn't much agony and sweat of the human spirit involved in doing it. The writing's easy, it's the living that is sometimes difficult.

The little bit (two inches wide) of ivory on which I work with so fine a brush as produces little effect after much labour.

It does seem that a fantasy, working out in its own terms, stretching you beyond the normal concerns of your own life, gains you a peculiar charge of energy which inexplicably enriches you. At least, this is my ideal of a fantasy, and I am always trying to write it.

So many people seem to imagine that because the actual tools of writing are easily accessible, it is less difficult than the other arts. This is entirely an illusion.

In matters like writing and painting, a man does what he has to do - if he has to write, why then, he writes; and if he doesn't feel the urgent need of writing, there are dozens of professions in which it is easier to earn a comfortable living.

The sensation of writing a book is the sensation of spinning, blinded by love and daring.

You always want to write the perfect song. But no one will ever write the perfect song, I guess. I would just like to write on that has all the elements of what I'm tring to do. And I'm working on it. I'm always working on it.

There's very little of the intentional about the business of writing poetry, as least as far as I can see.

A work-in-progress generates its own energy field. You, the artist or entrepreneur, are pouring love into the work; you are suffusing it with passion and intention and hope.

The focus of my playing is the groove, and every time I find a new rhythm, I find I can write a bunch of new songs. Learning how to dance, or drum, or to swing my body in a new way is the fundamental way I find a new riff. Because when you learn to swing your body in a new way, you begin to swing with your instrument differently.

If I get ideas independently of the act of writing, they never really fit. So for me, there's no hanging out, waiting for inspiration.

Everything becomes agitated. Ideas quick-march into motion like battalions of a grand army to its legendary fighting ground, and the battle rages. Memories charge in, bright flags on high; the cavalry of metaphor deploys with a magnificent gallop; the artillery of logic rushes up with clattering wagons and cartridges; on imagination's orders, sharpshooters sight and fire; forms and shapes and characters rear up; the paper is spread with ink - for the nightly labor begins and ends with torrents of this black water, as a battle opens and concludes with black powder.

Writing a long novel is like survival training. Physical strength is as necessary as artistic sensitivity.

Songwriting is never one thing. I've spent as long as three months writing a song. Other times I've done it in twenty minutes.

It's just hard when you've spent so much time on something, writing and recording, laying the vocals, getting the hook right, getting the beat right, making everything sound right - you spent a freaking week trying to make it sound perfect, and someone comes along and shoots it down.

Writing is the act of discovery.

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

I like that feeling when you’re making art, that you’re taking the energy out of your body and putting it into a physical object. I like things that are labor-intensive : you make a little thing and another little thing and another little thing, and eventually you see a possibility.

Novel-writing is a highly skilled and laborious trade. One does not just sit behind a screen jotting down other people's conversation. One has for one's raw material every single thing one has ever seen or heard or felt, and one has to go over that vast, smoldering rubbish-heap of experience, half stifled by fumes and dust, scraping and delving until one finds a few discarded valuables. Then one has to assemble these tarnished and dented fragments, polish them, set them in order, and try to make a coherent and significant arrangement of them.