Terri Windling Quotes

You have to be willing to be afraid if you're going to be an artist.

Maybe I could have been good as a drawer if I had done it as much as I did writing, but it's more scary to draw. It's more revealing. You can't disguise yourself in drawing.

You're demonstrating your own skills in a vulnerable way when you draw.

It takes more talent to write music, but it takes more courage to write lyrics.

Being onstage is a way of harnessing your vulnerability and using the adrenaline to be creative. It's a very vulnerable place to be - technically, emotionally, and physically - but I love it.

An artist reveals his naked soul in his work.

The most difficult thing in the world is to reveal yourself, to express what you have to. As an artist, I feel that we must try many things - but above all we must dare to fail. You must be willing to risk everything to really express it all.

To create one's world in any of the arts takes courage.

Sarah Vaughan is one of my greatest heroes. She personifies what an artist is all about, taking risks, daring to go beyond the boundaries of safety and convention. It takes courage to share your vulnerability.

When I write, what I long for is not more realism or fiction but more courage. That's what I always find myself short on and what I have to struggle to achieve in order that the work might live.

Art, it seems to me, doesn't need freedom so much as it needs courage and love - some would call it 'soul' or 'Eros.'

Writers are not just people who sit down and write. They hazard themselves. Every time you compose a book your composition of yourself is at stake.

I think if you are writing an instrumental you are dealing with more of an aesthetic in a sense but a lyric is more of a putting yourself on the line and a much more expensive exercise.

I'm always looking for something that's real and that's got meat on it. I think it's artistic suicide if you're too vain, or if you're afraid to play ugly. I would never fall for that.

With music, you're really showing someone a piece of your soul. You're saying, 'This is mine. I wrote this, I made this, I'm performing this. This is how I'm presenting it to you.' There's something really scary about that, but there's also something next-worldly about it, too.

To write something, you have to risk making a fool of yourself.

A true artist, in my mind, is willing to fail sometimes, because if you're not brave enough to say yes and follow your gut, it's never going to be good.

Songwriting is the most terrifying thing to me, because you are really laying your heart out there.

A true artist, in my mind, is willing to fail sometimes, because if you're not brave enough to say yes and follow your gut, it's never going to be good.

Being a painter is the only profession where you have to stand there with all your shortcomings on the wall.

I think I'm actually much too shy to do any performance art. I admire the big swings those guys take, but I'm not a one-man band.

Everyone sort of has that voice of self-doubt in their head, but as an artist, you relinquish your right to have that voice.

To make music that means something, you kind of have to drop the cool. You have to be prepared and willing to be uncool.

I always look for projects that are risky and ones that want to do something unique. If audiences don't like it, you feel good knowing that you were brave enough to do something original. If they do like it, you feel like everyone is rewarded, because we all got to see something new.

It's always been a mantra to me, when making music or creating art, that you have to be vulnerable.