Walter Gropius Quotes

Whenever I've done jobs, whether it's an acting job or writing job, there's an aspect of it that feels like you help build your piece of it, and then you watch as someone takes it, and they finish building it.

I think the act of condensing months or years of work down to a couple hours of entertainment is pretty wild and extremely rewarding.

I'm always a bit disappointed when I've finished working on a book.

One does not set out with the idea that I've just had a great idea and now I'm going to go and carry it out. Almost all art that's made like that doesn't go anywhere.

I think it's natural for a creative to be sensitive. If I'm in the studio and I write something, I think it's the greatest thing in the world; it's like my baby. I just made something out of thin air that exists now in a tangible form. It's the biggest thrill in my life.

The long path from material through function to creative work has only one goal: to create order out of the desperate confusion of our time.

What the artist owes the world is his work; not a model for living.

I'd rather get back to making art than talk about it.

I don't like watching people work if they're making art.

I want to die painting.

When you have an idea for a work and when you've finished your model for it, for the artist it's almost complete, in a way. But then bringing it to the finish is really something you do for the audience. It is always exciting.

The great composer does not set to work because he is inspired, but becomes inspired because he is working.

There are two men inside the artist, the poet and the craftsman. One is born a poet. One becomes a craftsman.

I can't express how wonderful it is to get feedback when you've been sort of in a bubble working on something and then you release it to the world and hope for the best. It's like the birth of a musical baby.

I want to try it to see what it's like and see what my stuff looks like when I take it from inception to completion.

I just create, that's what I do.

After all, the work isn't the point; the piece is.

The only difference was one of them was trying to make a perfect cake and one of them was trying to write a great book. But if we remove that from the equation, it's the same impulse and they are equally entitled to their ecstasies and their despair.

When you're making something big, whether it's long-form fiction or a big piece of software, whatever that is, you're having a very intimate and extended conversation with the work materials themselves.

Any working composer or painter or sculptor will tell you that inspiration comes at the eighth hour of labour rather than as a bolt out of the blue. We have to get our vanities and our preconceptions out of the way and do the work in the time allotted.

We're all kind of basically involved in the same thing, putting up a blank of some kind and filling it in.

Created stuff is meant to be shared. That’s why the creative person created it. Why else do creative people exist?

To a certain extent, just like my children, I nurture my writing until the point when it has to get out and face the outside world, where it takes on a life of its own. That is a purpose of any artist and their art.

Even though I've been putting out bodies of work for years, 'Beauty Behind the Madness' felt like the beginning.

Obsession remains the price of creation, and the writer who declines that risk will come up with nothing more creative than 'The Foxes of Harrow' or 'Mrs. Parkington.'