Gustave Flaubert Quotes

I've spent so long on some paintings that I no longer know what to think of them, and I am definitely getting harder to please; nothing satisfies me.

No; for instead of delivering myself up to the full enjoyment of the as others do, I am always troubling my head about how I could produce the same effect upon canvas; and as that can never be done, it is mere vanity and vexation of spirit.

Painting is like having a bad mistress who spends and spends and it's never enough ... I tell myself that even if a tolerable study comes out of it from time to time, it would have been cheaper to buy it from somebody else.

Lots of artists who paint have the experience to one degree or another... where their thinking doesn't precede their doing... It's a funny thing, what I really hate yet I have to go through with it, is the preparation.

Just dash something down if you see a blank canvas staring at you with a certain imbecility. You do not know how paralyzing it is, that staring of a blank canvas which says to the painter: you don't know anything.

For me, the most difficult piece is the one I'm about to make.

My process is messy and non-linear, full of false starts, fidgets, and errands that I suddenly need to run now; it is a battle to get something - anything - down on paper. I doodle in sketchbooks: bits of ideas, fragments of sentences, character names, single lines of dialogue with no context.

We know that creative people have all sorts of demons.

I can't cut off an ear everyday. Do the Van Gogh here and the Mozart there. Anyway it's exhausting enough always having to check up on what one is really doing!.

I know what it's like to have a bunch of material that's working that you don't care about. You want to die.

I really have to be in a specific headspace to even begin to illuminate an idea that would create another Bon Iver record, and I'm just not there.

If only someone else could paint what I see, it would be marvellous, because then I wouldn't have to paint at all.

People say if you're doing an art project, that's different from a book, but I honestly don't see it. I try and try, and I just don't.

Each work seems to give me the most trouble at the time I'm working on it.

I think that's just part of how it is with making art. Sometimes you're just flooded with ideas, and then other times you're questioning all the ideas you ever had before, and everything is just... lame.

That terrible mood of depression of whether it's any good or not is what is known as The Artist's Reward.

I'm envious of writers and musicians. I think it must be so difficult. Not just the frustration, but the discipline.

Creative output, you know, is just pain. I'm going to be cliche for a minute and say that great art comes from pain.

Marvin Gaye said there's a song inside of me and I can't get it out. And I know it's in there, and I can feel that it's in there, and I can't get it out. There's so much that I want to say, and I haven't been able to figure out how to say it in my art. I can only say it in ham-fisted, clumsy, nonpoetic ways, and I'm trying to figure out how to talk about life and talk about love and talk about pain and trials and tribulation in an artistic form.

Doing fine, thank you, I would say, never knowing how to talk about what I do. If I could talk about it, I would not have to do it. I make art, sometimes I make true art, and sometimes it fills the empty places in my heart. Some of them. Not all.

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

Writing is something that you don't know how to do. You sit down and it's something that happens, or it may not happen. So, how can you teach anybody how to write? It's beyond me, because you yourself don't even know if you're going to be able to. I'm always worried, well, you know, every time I go upstairs with my wine bottle. Sometimes I'll sit at that typewriter for fifteen minutes, you know. I don't go up there to write. The typewriter's up there. If it doesn't start moving, I say, well this could be the night that I hit the dust.

I'm sitting in my office trying to squeeze a story from my head. It is that kind of morning when you feel like melting the typewriter into a bar of steel and clubbing yourself to death with it. (“Advance Notice”)

I have a very dear friend, a great painter, called me up very upset, the work wasn’t going well… He asked me to come to his studio -- which I did -- I looked around at the work, dozens of sketches, drawings, large pictures, and I was very close to his work, intensely involved with his work, and he asked me, ‘What’s wrong?’ And I said, ‘Simple – it’s a loss of nerve.

My routine is fly, play, sleep, record. My center is the music I am making; when I see people together wherever it is on the planet, that we connect, that's what keeps my heart beating.