Boris Pasternak Quotes

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

The hallmark of an artist is generosity.

I'm a painter, I'm an artist. I take things too far sometimes. I really need some comfort.

A picture is first of all a product of the artist's imagination, it must never be a copy.

A director is a man, therefore he has ideas; he is also an artist, therefore he has imagination. Whether they are good or bad, it seems to me that I have an abundance of stories to tell. And the things I see, the things that happen to me, continually renew the supply.

From an artist's point of view, I always want to work with the writers I admire.

No great work has ever been produced except after a long interval of still and musing meditation.

Maybe some people, when they sit down to write their great novel or make their great record or paint their great painting, they have it all planned out in their head. But for me, it's never worked that way.

The artist in me welcomes another opportunity to be creative.

All the things an artist must be: poet, explorer of nature, philosopher!

Telling people how to be creative is easy - being creative is difficult.

The artist does not really create; he discovers.

As an aspiring artist, you should strive for originality of vision. Have something to say and a fresh way of saying it. No story is worth the writing, no picture worth the making, if it’s not the work of the imagination.

In every painting a whole is mysteriously enclosed, a whole life of tortures, doubts, of hours of enthusiasm and inspiration.

As an artist, you just want to keep creating, keep finding a place that really inspires you that feels fresh and new and keep it exciting.

Herman Melville said that artists have to take a dive and either you hit your head on a rock and you split your skull and you die … or that blow to the head is so inspiring that you come back and do the best work that you ever did. BUT you have to take the dive and you do not know what the results will be.

To be an artist is a blessing and a privilege. Artists must never betray their true hearts. Artists must look beneath the surface and show that there is more to this world than what meets the eye.

Writers do not find subjects; subjects find them.

An artist is like a pig snouting truffles.

If an artist may say nothing except what he has invented by his own sole efforts, it stands to reason he will be poor in ideas. If he could take what he wants wherever he could find it, as Euripides and Dante and Michelangelo and Shakespeare and Bach were free, his larder would always be full, and his cookery might be worth tasting.

Artists aren't looking for you to write them something; they're looking for you to give them something new.

Jean Renoir once suggested that most true creators have only one idea and spend their lives reworking it, but then very rapidly he added that most people don't have any ideas at all, so one idea is pretty amazing.

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.

I see for others... in order to put on canvas the sudden apparitions which come to me.

I hope I will always have the ability to create art and live in a world where I can speak freely, and I can inspire people. I don't know what form that will take.