Madchen Amick Quotes

I look at people like Picasso and Da Vinci and Escher and Miles Davis, and they'll write or paint that one definitive masterpiece of maybe 50 that they have that's really trying to go outside the box, trying to do something that's tough. And then when you accomplish it, you look back and go, 'Yeeaaaah - masterpiece.'

Human nature is not amenable to prediction based on the trends or tendencies prevailing at the time. It is amenable to startling creativity of the kind practiced by great artists, directors, writers, musicians, actors, who know how to touch a chord in humans everywhere.

He is the greatest artist who has embodied, in the sum of his works, the greatest number of the greatest ideas.

I hate artists who are not of their time.

My advice to new artists is to embrace a broader concept of timelessness than vintage or retro.

A great artist is always before his time or behind it.

If you're a creative person, what inspires you is always changing; it's always shifting.

Good artists copy, great artists steal.

No artist is ahead of his time. He is his time; it is just that others are behind the times.

Picasso is what is going to happen and what is happening; he is posterity and archaic time, the distant ancestor and our next-door neighbor. Speed permits him to be two places at once, to belong to all the centuries without letting go of the here and now.

What moves those of genius, what inspires their work is not new ideas, but their obsession with the idea that what has already been said is still not enough.

I think if you speak to any creative person, there's something so powerful - so intoxicating, if you will - about discovering another voice, another instrument, another way of looking at things, another way of perceiving things.

Anyone in the arts has had an experience of seeing someone who they related to doing something and thinking, 'I could do that.' If you have one generation where you force its hand a bit, then the next one fills in the gaps, because it's seen an example of what can be done.

When you see the best of the best - when you see a Matisse or a Picasso - what interests you is the creativity and harmony.

When you're a kid, and someone's an artist, you think of Leonardo da Vinci. You don't think that's a job; you just think of a man with a beard, painting the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel.

We're all inspired by what has come before us, but hope to use the inspiration to create our own. That's the artist's journey. It's a pretty amazing path.

Creativity is a fact of your spiritual body

Artists are people with a genius for finding a new answer, a new connection, or a new way of getting things done.

Creativity is the power to act.

Everything we think of as great has come to us from neurotics. It is they and they alone who found religions and create great works of art. The world will never realize how much it owes to them and what they have suffered in order to bestow their gifts on it.

The great artist, whether he be musician, painter, or poet, is known for this absolute unexpectedness.

You can't really do anything creative without a source of inspiration.

A writer writes with his genius; an artist paints with hers; everyone who creates operates from this sacramental center.

I was meticulously copying other art and then I realized I could just use a camera and put my time into an idea instead.

Creativity begins with an affinity for something. It's like falling in love.