Edward Weston Quotes

Because I'm pure inside, the music that comes out of me is a life-giving thing. Like water.

Energy and art go where they will.

When you ask creative people how they did something, they feel a little guilty because they didn't really do it, they just saw something.

Creation is an act of love and it is perpetual.

Symmetry is pleasing but not as sexy. Einstein is cool but Picasso knows what I'm talking about.

Fancy restrained may be compared to a fountain, which plays highest by diminishing the aperture.

Each truth that a writer acquires is a lantern, which he turns full on what facts and thoughts lay already in his mind, and behold, all the mats and rubbish which had littered his garret become precious. Every trivial fact in his private biography becomes an illustration of this new principle, revisits the day, and delights all men by its piquancy and new charm.

We do not make art. We have unnamable motors and dangerous impulses that occupy our thoughts.

Art is wine and experience is the brandy we distill from it.

Genius, that power which constitutes a poet; that quality without which judgment is cold, and knowledge is inert; that energy which collects, combines, amplifies and animates.

Individuality realized is the supreme attainment of the human soul, the master-master's work of art. Individuality is sacred.

People think once you get famous and rich you move out of the public sphere and you have nothing left to write about. I've heard that - Bruce Springsteen was this real street boy, now he's got this big house. How does that compute? If you don't look at the material side of someone's life, if you look at more the emotional side, there's always a wealth of stuff to write about.

In writing one draws in the rest, the forgotten parts.

Panic is an incredibly catalyzing creative force. And almost out of sheer necessity, I found I had to talk about myself and my real life as it is effectively lived by me.

Do not erase the designs the child makes in the soft wax of his inner life.

No one can quite say what the creative process is. Because I have nothing to do with it of course. It's created in space. It's God's work, not mine.

Artists are the best theologians. They feel things that are true before theologians can jargonize them into obscurity.

I do believe it is possible to create, even without ever writing a word or painting a picture, by simply molding one’s inner life. And that too is a deed.

One of the weaknesses of much abstract painting is the attempt to substitute the inventions of the intellect for a pristine imaginative conception. The inner life of a human being is a vast and varied realm and does not concern itself alone with stimulating arrangements of color, form and design. The term 'life' as used in art is something not to be held in contempt, for it applies all of its existence, and the province of art is to react to it and not to shun it. Painting will have to deal more fully and less obliquely with life and nature's phenomena before it can again be great.

Art flies around truth, but with the definite intention of not getting burnt. Its capacity lies in finding in the dark void a place where the beam of light can be intensely caught, without this having been perceptible before.

do what only a true artist can do ... pounce upon the forgotten butterfly of revelation

We are hardly ever as strong as that which we create.

Art is a self-replicating force.

Art is a kind of innate drive that seizes a human being and makes him its instrument.

If there is any reason to single out artists as being more necessary to our lives than any others, it is because they provide us with light that cannot be extinguished. They go into dark rooms and poke at their souls until the contours of our own are familiar to us.