Seth Godin Quotes

Everything around a writer, or musician in the record business, probably everything in all the United States or in all of western civilization, is about competition.

The secret to life is to put yourself in the right lighting. For some, it's a Broadway spotlight; for others, a lamplit desk. Use your natural powers -- of persistence, concentration, and insight -- to do work you love and work that matters. Solve problems. make art, think deeply.

Steve Jobs is perhaps the most competitive human being I have ever met in my life, and yet I would argue one of the most artistic human beings I have ever met in my life. You can trash the movies all you want, but they do have an artistic component. And yet brutal competition knows no peers when it comes to Hollywood.

If you want to really hurt you parents, and you don't have the nerve to be gay, the least you can do is go into the arts. I'm not kidding. The arts are not a way to make a living. They are a very human way of making life more bearable. Practicing an art, no matter how well or badly, is a way to make your soul grow, for heaven's sake. Sing in the shower. Dance to the radio. Tell stories. Write a poem to a friend, even a lousy poem. Do it as well as you possible can. You will get an enormous reward. You will have created something.

Poetry is not truth, it is the resurrection of presences.

A work of art can only come from the interior of man. Art is the form of the image formed upon the nerves, heart, brain and eye of man.

The art of making art, is putting it together.

Art is the act of doing work that matters while dancing with the voice in your head that screams for you to stop.

One writes out of one thing only - one's own experience. Everything depends on how relentlessly one forces from this experience the last drop, sweet or bitter, it can possibly give. This is the only real concern of the artist, to recreate out of the disorder of life that order which is art.

The great end of art is to strike the imagination with the power of a soul that refuses to admit defeat even in the midst of a collapsing world.

Nothing so bolsters our self-confidence and reconciles us with ourselves as the continuous ability to create; to see things grow and develop under our hand, day in, day out.

When I create art, it's like holding hands with God.

Art for me is like breathing. When I stop breathing, what happens?

The misuse of extrinsic rewards, so common in business, impedes creativity, stifles personal satisfaction and turns play into work.

I've always cared more about taking pictures than about the art market.

The winner is the chef who takes the same ingredients as everyone else and produces the best results.

Art is not the spiritual side of business.

The 10 or 12 artists I have known really well all my life are at least as competitive as professional athletes. They may express it in slightly different terms, but you look at the Jackson Pollocks et al., and they are as interested in wall space in the galleries as Joe Montana is in the percentage of completed passes. So the notion that symphonic conducting, or stage play, or pure art, is not a competitive business is real bullshit.

Own what you are, and I mean whether that's art, or whether that's fashion, or whether that's music, or whether that's acting, or whether that's politics, or whether that's literature; it's own what you are, and grab it, and, you know, be as prolific as possible.

What is great about art and artists is that we get to ask the questions, even though we may never know the answers.

All art is a form of artifice.For in art there can be no prejudices.

When things get tough... Make good art.

The most joyous painting is not done for the art world, it is done for the inner world.

I suspect that the word (art) was invented by second-rate intelligences to describe the incomprehensible activities of their betters.

For art is order, but it is born out of the chaos of life.