Walter Mosley Quotes

Art stands on the shoulders of craft, which means that to get to the art, you must master the craft.

The important thing is to keep on drawing when you start to paint. Never graduate from drawing.

My sister-in-law is a painter, and I'll say, how long did it take you to paint that painting. She'll say, It took me maybe three days, but it took me all my life to get the skills to paint that painting.

Nothing prepares you for making art except making art. You have to do it to get better.

In art, practice always comes before theory.

You're only kidding yourself if you put creativity before craft.

I always want to be growing in my craft. Any artist should - whether you paint, whether you do music or film - always grow and study.

I do not see in what manner practice alone can be sufficient for the production of correct, excellent, and finished pictures. Works deserving this character never were produced, nor ever will arise, from memory alone.

Creating art is a habit, one that we practice daily or hourly until we get good at it

Self-expression without craft is for toddlers.

I thought maybe I could become like the next Van Gogh. I bought a sunflower and painted it, and it looked like the work of a 6-year-old.

Writing requires a great deal of skill, just like painting does. People don't want to learn those skills.

I enjoyed art in school. I've always done little drawings and stuff like that. I don't really know what I'm doing with the painting, but I experiment.

I maintain that if you're a novelist and you go into an art museum, you'll come out a better novelist. And if you paint a picture for an hour you're a better actor at the end of it.

Painting, sculpture and architecture are finished, but the art habit continues.

I tried to teach myself to draw anime, but I was so bad.

People can see you on TV sloshing paint around with big four-inch brushes, and I learned to talk to camera in a friendly voice, not talking down to people, just explaining what I was doing. People like Picasso, Van Gogh, and Rembrandt did not have a weekly TV programme where people could see them painting.

The thing I love about music is, if you do it long enough, you get better and better at translating what's in your head to a medium. That's why I keep doing it.

Art does not begin with imitation, but with discipline.

An amateur may not be an artist, though an artist should be an amateur.

It takes skill to bring something you've imagined into the world: to use words to create believable lives, to select the colors and textures of paint to represent a haystack at sunset, to combine ingredients to make a flavorful dish. No one is born with that skill. It is developed through exercise, through repitition, through a blend of learning and reflection that's both painstaking and rewarding. And it takes time. . . . If art is the bridge between what you see in your mind and what the world sees, then skill is how you build that bridge.

Why is it that we understand playing the cello will require work, but we attribute writing to the magic of inspiration?

I do not repudiate any of my paintings but there isn't one of them that I would not redo differently, if I had it to redo. My destination is always the same but I work out a different route to get there.

Many young painters would never have taken their pencils in hand if they could have felt, known, and understood, early enough, what really produced a master like Raphael.

...in the business of writing what one accumulates is not expertise but uncertainties. Which is but another name for craft.