Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes

Go and see what others have produced, but never copy anything except nature. You would be trying to enter into a temperament that is not yours and nothing that you would do would have any character.

An artist must find his expression closely linked to his individual experience or else follow in the old grooves resulting in lifeless forms.

A painting is above all a product of the artist's imagination, it must never be a copy. If, at a later stage, he wants to add two or three touches from nature, of course it doesn't spoil anything.

I feel like a slave, and in a way like an artist, because I need to get inspiration everyday, from everything and everyone.

It is not what an artist does that counts...but what he is.

I think in the end there is one ultimate goal with all my careers, and that is, as a performing artist, you want to explore the deepest, most truthful way to express a point of view, or whatever the character is thinking, or whatever emotion you're trying to convey. I think with the different media it's just about what muscles you use to express that.

That's what's great about the arts. Everything inspires you, and you get a chance to grow from watching other people and how they do their work.

A work of art which did not begin in emotion is not art.

I'm always looking at other artists and trying to get inspired by different things.

I don't think I really invented anybody. I have drawn on real life.

The artist in me cries out for design.

If you're always thinking about someone else's work, about the tradition you're working in, how can you possibly make anything good?

Songwriting isn't always something that's directly proportionate to the experience.

So much of what we do as artists is a combination of personal experience and imagination, and how that all creeps into your work is not so linear.

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.

Whatever's going on in my life shows up in the writing room.

Hearing about a visual artist's approach can change the way you think about songwriting.

I think art is much more valuable when it's honest. If it's not honest, it's just propaganda.

I'm a songwriter; it's in my nature to express things openly.

I feel like there are things that inspire the music, and then there's the music itself. I don't feel like I always need to force them together.

What matters is what happens in the soul of an artist when you're playing.

A lot of my songs are inspired by a muse of some sort, whether she's real or not.

I was a painter before I was a writer, so I was always a visual artist. And my writing, to me, was always visual.

I always talk about if you want to be an artist, you have to be authentic because people can tell bullshit a mile away. There is nothing wrong with creating a character, standing behind that character, and that being an authentic performance piece, because that's a piece of art as well. But if you want to be an artist in any form, you have to know to come with it.

I steal from every single movie ever made. I love it - if my work has anything it's that I'm taking this from this and that from that and mixing them together. If people don't like that, then tough titty, don't go and see it, all right? I steal from everything. Great artists steal; they don't do homages.