Ursula K. Le Guin Quotes

The business of every art is to bring something into existence, and the practice of an art involves the study of how to bring into existence something which is capable of having such an existence and has its efficient cause in the maker and not in itself.

Great art is never produced for its own sake. It is too difficult to be worth the effort.

My primary thing is to make a painting, not necessarily to make a painting to sell for gazillions of dollars, but just to make a painting.

Art doesn't transform. It just plain forms.

The task of art today is to bring chaos into order.

Great art is never produced for its own sake. It is too difficult to be worth the effort.

Even a true artist does not always produce art.

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

The saying "the business of art is different than the purpose of art" makes sense, and what are you going to do about that? You have some obligation to get the work out there, you believe in it enough that it should be out in the public, but of course it goes through a system that takes it pretty far away from the reasons you made them.

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

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

For the essential thing about the work of art is that it is work, and very hard work too.

The productions of all arts are kinds of poetry and their craftsmen are all poets.

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.

The artist begins with a vision - a creative operation requiring an effort.

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 like the concentration, the crush; I like working with language, as others like working with clay, or notes.

In terms of art, the only real answer that I know of is to do it. If you don't do it, you don't know what might happen.

No. Not yet. A craftsman only. But I dream to be an artist. I pray that someday, if I work with enough care, if I am very very lucky, I will make a weapon that is a work of art. Call me an artist then, and I will answer.

Industry in art is a necessity - not a virtue - and any evidence of the same, in the production, is a blemish, not a quality; a proof, not of achievement, but of absolutely insufficient work, for work alone will efface the footsteps of work.

Whatever I was writing at the time, I knew there was no market for it and never would be, because there’s never a market for true art, so my main concern was always to have a job that didn’t require me to write or think.

Art is right reason in the doing of work.

The word 'art' interests me very much. If it comes from Sanskrit, as I've heard, it signifies 'making.

You cannot create a piece of art merely for money. Doing it as part of commerce so denudes art of wonder that it ceases to be art.

The art of making art, is putting it together.