Moby Quotes

I'm very interested to see how this new painting will go - I know I want it big and stark, and as I said, I follow the muse, and that's when it always works perfectly for me.

If you're an artist, you want to draw from real life; you want to draw from experiences, emotion, and it's something that a lot of musicians juggle with. I've always found it so fascinating.

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.

Any art worth its name requires you to be fundamentally lost for a very long time.

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?

I don't even think about maintaining a relevance. I just think about what do I want to paint, what am I gonna do now, what am I gonna do later.

With art and the work you do, it has to be constantly dictated by what you're feeling and where you want to go with it.

I love art so much because of curiosity. At the start of a painting, I know 10 percent of what the painting will be, and then I have to improvise the whole thing.

That's the worst and best thing about being in the studio, feeling completely lost and not knowing how to put the final touch on something. But once you find it, there's nothing like that feeling.

If I knew where the good songs came from, I’d go there more often. It’s a mysterious condition. It’s much like the life of a Catholic nun. You’re married to a mystery.

I don't really know where I got my artists idea. The scraps of what I remember do not explain to me where it came from. I only know that by this time it was definitely settled in my mind.

Painting is a magical process that I like, where you conjure something out of nothing; you get a little idea that leads you through ... You can go into a trance while you're doing it, so it's a nice contrast to real life.

I think half the point of painting a picture is that you don't know what will happen... that if painters did know what was going to happen they wouldn't bother to do it.

There are, it seems, two muses: The Muse of Inspiration, who gives us inarticulate visions and desires, and the Muse of Realization, who returns again and again to say, 'It is yet more difficult than you thought.' It may be that when we no longer know what to do, we have come to our real work and when we no longer know which way to go, we have begun our real journey.

When I stand before a canvas, I never know what I'll do, and I am the first one surprised at what comes out.

I get a sentence, an idea, an image, and I start. I don't know anything beyond it. I follow it.

You don't know what inspires you. You like to think you know what inspires you, but in the final analysis I don't think you really do. It's great to look at a blank sheet of paper, you know, and walk up to an instrument and not know what's gonna happen. It's the most challenging thing I do.

I dream of painting and then I paint my dream.

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

I never know what I'm going to put on the canvas. The canvas paints itself. I'm just the middleman.

For hundreds of years people have talked about artists having inspiration, but often, some persons would say, write us a symphony or write us a song, on commission. The artists would come up with a masterpiece without waiting to have their muse inspire them.

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.

A work of art which did not begin in emotion is not art.

In general, I don't know when inspiration will pop up.

I can obviously relate to a character who is an artist, because the creative process is a big part of my life.