Tom Bissell Quotes

That's what art is. You don't make up stories. You live your life.

Take a step, breathe in the world, give it out again in story, poem, song, art.

Art is the path of the creator to his work.

I have always found writing pleasant and don't understand what people mean by 'throes of creation.'

I feel mushy these days when I think about art and artists and the work that lies ahead for us. There's good work to be done and there's joy to be found in it, I think.

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

I think attempting to make art is a utopian process in itself, definitely. Nothing I do is ever equal to the ideas in my head. You do the best you can, you do it with patience and love, and then you give up. The moment you give up is when you know the book is done.

It's easy to attack and destroy an act of creation. It's a lot more difficult to perform one.

The discipline of creation, be it to paint, compose, write, is an effort towards wholeness.

It may sound affected - but it is the act of creation itself, and it is equally exhilarating whether one is working on a teaspoon or a national bank.

We have our brush and colors - paint Paradise and in we go.

Art is right reason in the doing of work.

I personally just love movies about the creative process.

We work in the dark - we do what we can - we give what we have. Our doubt is our passion and our passion is our task. The rest is the madness of art.

Art is that which comes to a man, and stands between himself and an implacable witness: the work.

We all start in this medium because of the magic and the challenge is to keep it going.

You can only generate ideas when you put pencil to paper, brush to canvas... when you actually do something physical.

Art is never finished, only abandoned.

Art is action. The way I live my life to its highest degree is by writing, the practice of art.

All works of art should begin... at the end.

Writing is the starting point from which all goodness (and crappiness) flows.

I haven't the slightest idea what art is, but to be a painter is something of which you have to prove.

Without electricity, there can be no art.

A writer - and, I believe, generally all persons - must think that whatever happens to him or her is a resource. All things have been given to us for a purpose, and an artist must feel this more intensely. All that happens to us, including our humiliations, our misfortunes, our embarrassments, all is given to us as raw material, as clay, so that we may shape our art.

I think the mystery of art lies in this, that artists’ relationship is essentially with their work — not with power, not with profit, not with themselves, not even with their audience.