David Rakoff Quotes

The primary distinction of the artist is that he must actively cultivate that state which most men, necessarily, must avoid; the state of being alone.

I suspect you've noticed that making art can be lonely.

An artist is always alone - if he is an artist. No, what the artist needs is loneliness.

You have to remember that writing itself is so solitary. You start writing because you're lonely.

To create a work of art, great or small, is work, hard work, and work requires discipline and order.

We work in the dark - we do what we can - we give what we have. Our doubt is our passion and our passion is our task. The rest is the madness of art.

A creation of importance can only be produced when its author isolates himself, it is a child of solitude.

Art is that which comes to a man, and stands between himself and an implacable witness: the work.

Composition has almost always been solitary.

Composing demands a degree of isolation.

Creating is a lonely thing in a lot of ways.

Anyone who writes knows that ultimately the majority of your time is spent alone in a room with a piano or a guitar, no matter what the project is.

Songwriting, I have to take myself away from everybody to do. It's an unsightly act.

Writing a book is a very lonely business. You are totally cut off from the rest of the world, submerged in your obsessions and memories.

I am isolated as an artist, not as a person.

All good writing comes out of aloneness.

I suppose I consider my work a kind of picture making.

Painting is a lonely, mostly solitary act.

When I'm by myself - composing or writing film scores - it's very lonely. I'm just sitting by myself in the studio.

Art was as much in the activity as in the results. Works of art were not just the finished product, but the thought, the action, the process that created them.

It's easier and sociabler to talk technique than it is to make art.

Writing, at its best, is a lonely life.

The solitude of writing is a solitude without which writing could not be produced, or would crumble, drained bloodless by the search for something else to write.

In terms of art, the only real answer that I know of is to do it. If you don't do it, you don't know what might happen.

Making art is an act of courage. Do you know who said that?