Stephen Hough Quotes

Everyone wants instant everything, and they want instant success, but I always think you should treat things in the arts like a garden, and let them grow.

I think of my studio as a vegetable garden, where things follow their natural course. They grow, they ripen. You have to graft. You have to water.

Nothing great is created suddenly, any more than a bunch of grapes or a fig. If you tell me that you desire a fig. I answer you that there must be time. Let it first blossom, then bear fruit, then ripen.

Sculpture is like farming. If you just keep at it, you can get quite a lot done.

It's just an unhealthy way to approach something, trying to outdo your last thing. You've gotta trust evolution, you've gotta trust that the bar is moving, that you don't need to force the bar. It'll just happen.

Every new writing project, every new artistic project, needs to be protected so it can grow on its own before it begins to creep out into the world.

I'm not the mixtape guy who's gonna put out a new one every month. I'm gonna allow my albums to marinate and resonate and whatever type of 'ates' they can do. I'm gonna let my music grow on them.

So whenever I had some in-between producing time down in my studio I popped a tape in and started working on it. Working a little bit at a time, it actually took almost four years.

Creating the record is like digging up the earth, planting your seeds and waiting to see what happens.

I remind myself that no one day of writing matters all that much. A story is built somewhat like a stalactite - one little drip of mud and grit at a time.

These days, I find I'm applying a little more patience to my process. If I look back on my work, I can see those songs I bailed on could have been better, that had those great two verses and then I kind of coasted from there. These days, if a song is giving me trouble, I put it aside and pick it up later, and keep doing that, for a year if I have to, until it takes shape.

It does take a long time and a lot of paint to become our own artist.

I'm a sponge, the more I absorb, the more I am able to articulate my vision, as artists do, like Picasso. I'm an artist in that light. I went from being an artist to an artiste.

Maybe I'll have something out by Christmas, maybe not. I don't know, I'm really trying to take my time and do what feels right. (about the next step in her music career)

I don't think that writer's block exists really. I think that when you're trying to do something prematurely, it just won't come. Certain subjects just need time, as I've learned over and over again. You've got to wait before you write about them.

I think that's such an important message, especially for younger women, to know, 'I don't have to come out of the womb painting like Frida Kahlo. My very first thing that I make isn't going to be an around-the-world sensation.' You have to paint a hundred really ugly, barfy, diarrhea paintings before you come up with that one where you start to really get into your groove.

I do not see in what manner practice alone can be sufficient for the production of correct, excellent, and finished pictures. Works deserving this character never were produced, nor ever will arise, from memory alone.

To kill the misconception, I don’t think the songs we wrote before ‘Danger Days’ are bad songs by any means. In fact, I kinda think some of them are among my favorites we have ever written. A lot of them are kinda f—ing rad… they just so happened to have been created in the wrong place, at the wrong time, and we as their parents were not ready to raise them just yet… and so they sat and waited.

The processes of growth are gradual, bearing fruit in a decade, not a day.

It takes a long time to make a painter - even with a good artist's education - but without one it tries the patience of Job; it is a great thing if one does not go backward.

Your first attempt will be terrible.... Remember that everything great you see started out as someone else's bad first draft..... Whenever someone sends me a manuscript and says, 'It just flowed out of me,' I usually think: Let it flow back into you for a while.

Then there are those who plant. they endure storms and all the many vicissitudes of the seasons, and they rarely rest. But, unlike a building, a garden never stops growing. And while it requires the gardener's constant attention, it also allows life for the gardener to be a great adventure.

There are stages in bread-making quite similar to the stages of writing. You begin with something shapeless, which sticks to your fingers, a kind of paste. Gradually that paste becomes more and more firm. Then there comes a point when it turns rubbery. Finally, you sense that the yeast has begun to do its work: the dough is alive. Then all you have to do is let it rest. But in the case of a book the work may take ten years.

It constantly remains a source of disappointment to me that my drawings are not yet what I want them to be. The difficulties are indeed numerous and great, and cannot be overcome at once. To make progress is a kind of miner’s work; it doesn’t advance as quickly as one would like, and as others also expect, but as one stands before such a task, the basic necessities are patience and faithfulness. In fact, I do not think much about the difficulties, because if one thought of them too much one would get stunned or disturbed.

In reality, however, an artist is a product of art