Lillian Hellman Quotes

As an artist, the most important thing and the most special thing is when your intention shines through on the work.

I think it was Roger Fry who first coined what he took to be a final definition of a work of art, whether it was a painting, building, poem or Hepplewhite chair. He said that the best works of art are finished products that preserve 'a valuable state of mind'.

I tend to get very suspicious of anything that thinks it's art while it's being created.

I didn't set out to write certain kinds of songs - I just set out to write good songs.

If I thought that what I'm doing when I write is expressing myself, I'd junk the typewriter. Writing is a much more complicated activity that that.

Keep me up till five because all your stars are out, and for no other reason…Oh dare to do it Buddy! Trust your heart. You’re a deserving craftsman. It would never betray you. Good night. I’m feeling very much over-excited now, and a little dramatic, but I think I’d give almost anything on earth to see you writing a something, an anything, a poem, a tree, that was really and truly after your own heart.

The measure of artistic merit is the length to which a writer is willing to go in following his own compulsions.

If you want to say something profound, writing from your heartbeat is different than writing from the loud voices you get from music. If they're rapping from noise, it's about robbing people. It's that simple.

I like films to have something inside, I don't mean a message, I mean something from the soul.

Effort and result are never simultaneous. In art, only the result counts.

That's what George wrote! He wrote it. Why change it? There was this European company that I was speaking about awhile ago - course, didn't nobody know what Porgy was.

Every dramatist will tell you that they know deep down what happened in the course of making that film and to what degree they took steps that were convenient and to what degree they took steps in telling their story that were dishonest. You know in your heart of hearts.

Whether it's a huge hit or sold five copies, as long artistically and creatively I can stand by what I did, then I'll feel successful.

As an artist, when you make something, you want the world to see it in its totality, especially when the intention is not to titillate.

Whether I'm writing scripts or prose, the goal is identical. To give pleasure. Now whether I succeed or not is up for debate, and, mostly, I fail. But I try. I like to make things. It's a way to stay busy during one's ephemeral and confusing life.

What a writer wants to do is not what he does.

I'm finding that writing poetry is strengthening my songwriting, because you're learning to make a piece of writing work on a page with nothing else. I was also finding within poetry I felt a lot more free to write about very different matters, to write about social issues or things that are going on around me.

I don't think comedians make an active decision to be a certain "persona." Comedians write the way they're going to write.

Yet poetry, though the last and finest result, is a natural fruit. As naturally as the oak bears an acorn, and the vine a gourd, man bears a poem, either spoken or done. It is the chief and most memorable success, for history is but a prose narrative of poetic deeds.

In literary art, as in the art of the architect, the painter, the musician, signs that the artist is thinking of his own achievement more than of his subject always offend me.

The frame is the reward of the artist.

To write that essential book, a great writer does not need to invent it but merely to translate it, since it already exists in each one of us. The duty and task of a writer are those of translator.

Aesthetic value is often the by-product of the artist striving to do something else.

Do not set out to write with your eyes on the box office. It can't be done.

I'm one dude that writes his adlibs. I don't just go in there and say "Gimme a track." I say what I'ma say here [then] I put effects on my voice. Why not? I wrote it. Why not show the talent? Why be scared? That's why I hate certain fans who hate cause it's not like raw hip-hop, like boom bap.