W. Somerset Maugham Quotes

Very few people possess true artistic ability. It is therefore both unseemly and unproductive to irritate the situation by making an effort. If you have a burning, restless urge to write or paint, simply eat something sweet and the feeling will pass.

In all the arts abundance seems to be one of the surest signs of vocation.

I started painting as a hobby when I was little. I didn't know I had any talent. I believe talent is just a pursued interest. Anybody can do what I do.

A man is a critic when he cannot be an artist, in the same way that a man becomes an informer when he cannot be a soldier.

There is nothing new in art except talent.

I don't really like the term 'artist.' I'm not sure what it means. It's a bit like 'love.'

I could develop a picture by the time I was 12.

I have had an interest in art since childhood. I loved to draw as a child and still do.

I do think that I'm not good at making pretty things. It doesn't come so naturally for me.

I never had the dream to be a great designer. My focus was just to do beautiful things.

Many are they who have a taste and love for drawing, but no talent; and this will be discernible in boys who are not diligent and never finish their drawings with shading.

Acting, producing, writing, directing - it's all part of something that I believe I was born to be part of.

Even a true artist does not always produce art.

I really want to continue doing art. I would love to go back to doing paintings one day.

Art is a gift and if nobody hears it, that doesn't make it any less of a gift.

I dreamed of being an artist.

I have sketched since a young age, so there's always been an artistic side, a visual side to my personality.

You know, Hitler wanted to be an artist. At eighteen he took his inheritance, seven hundred kronen, and moved to Vienna to live and study... Ever see one of his paintings? Neither have I. Resistance beat him. Call it overstatement but I'll say it anyway: it was easier for Hitler to start World War II than it was for him to face a blank square of canvas.

Art was always my thing. I had an art scholarship before I had a football scholarship. I'm a left-handed, right-brained, painting-drawing guy. That was always my skill.

A moment of complete happiness never occurs in the creation of a work of art. The promise of it is felt in the act of creation but disappears towards the completion of the work. For it is then the painter realises that it is only a picture he is painting. Until then he had almost dared to hope the picture might spring to life.

I must say that the first person to realise that I was talented in art was my mother.

All men are creative but few are artists.

It is so much worse to be a mediocre artist than to be a mediocre post-office clerk.

If you study a great work of art, you'll probably find the artist was a kind of genius. And geniuses are different to you and me. So let's have no talk of temperamental, self-absorbed and petulant babies. Being a good artist is the toughest job you could pick, and you have to be a little nuts to take it on. I love them all.

I gave my genius to my life, but my talent to my art.