Ari Shaffir Quotes

I'm very interested to see how this new painting will go - I know I want it big and stark, and as I said, I follow the muse, and that's when it always works perfectly for me.

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.

I dream of painting and then I paint my dream.

Artwork is not like a commercial business; there is no such thing as a schedule for art. You can't hurry art.

The great composer does not set to work because he is inspired, but becomes inspired because he is working.

Like all artists, I go through creative spurts.

The little dissatisfaction which every artist feels at the completion of a work forms the germ of a new work.

In my experience a painting is not made with colors and paint at all. I don't know what a painting is; who knows what sets off even the desire to paint?

For me, the original play becomes an historical document: This is where I was when I wrote it, and I have to move on now to something else.

Even if you're not releasing songs, the act of creativity is important. That's the part I love, when you're in the moment. The rest of it I'm not particularly interested in at all.

I'm about creating a body of work and moving on to the next thing.

How many of you are creative? I don't know, but for me, when you make a bunch of things over time and then you keep them... you forget. I look through my sketchbooks and I'm an audience for myself.

Everything I make starts very personally.

Since age seven, I've been composing and have never stopped composing, yet, the creative process is as elusive to me as it has ever been.

I've gone seventy-nine hours without sleep, creating. When that flow is going, it's almost like a high. You don't want it to stop. You don't want to go to sleep for fear of missing something.

If you are a writer or any kind of artist, if you change something as fundamental as where you live - the way you live - then I think you change the very instrument that is trying to make the art.

The ultimate point of a piece for me is that it drives the next one. Does it open new doors? That's the success of a piece.

For hundreds of years people have talked about artists having inspiration, but often, some persons would say, write us a symphony or write us a song, on commission. The artists would come up with a masterpiece without waiting to have their muse inspire them.

A lot of times, I don't feel responsible for the songs myself. But that's my job or my place in life: to keep my search and catch the ideas before they pass me by.

Being creative is my idea of heaven. I'm just incredibly fortunate that I can do it in artwork. Watercolor is what I started out with. What I love about watercolor is that a lot of happy accidents occur.

I work on words, mostly, toward them being poetry or short stories, and then some of those become songs. They all find their place in the world, but they all start off in the same place. I'm always painting and drawing as well, and it's an ongoing creative assignment.

When I finish a painting, it usually looks as surprising to me as to anyone else.

You cannot just be working in a vast, air-conditioned loft space and think you are going to make a decent painting. Francis Bacon had a special studio built, and he felt completely emasculated in there. I have to be somewhere comfortable.

What an artist learns matters little. What he himself discovers has a real worth for him, and gives him the necessary incitement to work.

Every painting I do is related to the last one: it may be a continuation of a previous painting or it may be a reaction against it.