Eva Zeisel Quotes

The picture that looks as if it were done without an effort may have been a perfect battlefield in its making.

A line will take us hours maybe; Yet if it does not seem a moment's thought, our stitching and unstitching has been naught.

Making it look easy is the hardest thing in the world to do.

To paint is to know how to put nothing on canvas, and have it look like something when you stand back.

Art revolves around creating something that isn't there.

When I start writing songs and it turns into an overly belabored intellectual process, I just throw it out.

The songs come along at their own pace when they are ready.

I try not to intellectualise what I do.

The want of logic annoys. Too much logic bores. Life eludes logic, and everything that logic alone constructs remains artificial and forced.

I don't have a process; I just feel it. My book on acting would be very short.

Somebody once asked me what my theory of life was, and I said, 'Don't try.' That fits the writing, too. I don't try; I just type.

Don't overthink it, and don't let technicalities stop you from creating.

All the films that I did, I didn't plan them. They just came to me.

There are some projects where you have to just start doing it, and, after a while, the show starts telling you what it wants to be. You put your spirit in and, after a while, something bigger takes over, and it turns out to be much more fun and creative than what it was at the beginning.

I don’t have a philosophy. I have a camera. I look into the camera and take pictures. My photographs are the tiniest part of what I see that could be photographed. They are fragments of endless possibilities.

In building a statue, a sculptor doesn't keep adding clay to his subject. Actually, he keeps chiseling away at the nonessentials until the truth of his creation is revealed without obstruction.

Architecture is like writing. You have to edit it over and over so it looks effortless

I imagine that when I am creating a song or a project or an album or putting some clothing together or cooking a meal, whatever it is, I don't really have a recipe. The fun part is to throw that big piece of clay in the middle of the table as hard as I can, and whatever shape it takes, that's what shape it takes, and then I start to carve away.

Sometimes I scrape off a lot. You have on the floor, like cow dung in the field, this big glob of paint... and it's just a lot of inert matter, inert paint. Then I look back at the canvas, and it's not inert - it's active, moving and living.

Poetry is a counterfeit creation, and makes things that are not, as though they were

It is art to conceal art. -Ars est celare artem

I am a fan of rehearsal. I like doing it [scene] over and over and over and over until it looks like you never did it before.

Master technique and then forget about it and be natural.

I try to paint what I have found and not what I look for. In art, intentions are of little importance.