Artistic Self-Awareness Quotes

I still have a lot of pleasure doing them, but as time goes by I come to appreciate more clearly which paintings are good and which should be discarded.

Art today is a new kind of instrument, an instrument for modifying consciousness and organizing new modes of sensibility . . . . Artists have had to become self-conscious aestheticians: continually challenging their means, their materials and methods.

The bad poet is usually unconscious where he ought to be conscious, and conscious where he ought to be unconscious.

An artist who goes around proclaiming that the art he's making is art is probably making a serious mistake. And that's one mistake I try not to make.

I'm constantly on my toes and re-examining my own music.

Greatly talented performers don't know - often spectacularly - what's best for them, don't know what their talents really are, and don't know what's just plain wrong for them.

I know very well what I am about and that my skies have not been neglected, though they often failed in execution - and often no doubt from over anxiety about them.

As an observer, I'm analysing my reactions, I guess, and my thinking; but about the process of writing... I am not very talented at talking about what I do as a writer.

Poetry should describe itself, and always be simultaneously poetry and the poetry of poetry.

Every artist, writers included, have an ethics and an aesthetics, whether they can formulate them or not. I happen to think that it is good to be able to formulate - it is good to know what you are doing and to be able to talk about it.

I realized I do tragedy better than comedy.

The danger that keeps me just a little frightened with every book I write, however, is that I'll overreach myself once too often and try to write a story that I'm just plain not talented or skilful enough to write. That's the dilemma every storyteller faces. It is painful to fail. But it is far sadder when a storyteller stops wanting to try.

For a poet to depict a poet in poetry is a hazardous experiment; in regarding one's own trade a sense of humour and a little wholesome cynicism are not amiss.

Some filmmakers are great at making complex things and films with a lot of moving parts, and I'm just not that way.

I've never thought of myself as a singer anyway. . . I've been free from those considerations because so many people over the years told me I don't have a voice. I kind of bought that. I never thought that much about it to begin with. I knew I didn't have one of the great voices. As my Damon Runyanesque lawyer used to say, "none of you guys can sing. If I want to hear singing, I'll go to the Metropolitan Opera."

I was feeling privileged and self-conscious about my life as a musician, which feels self-absorbed. I can't help it, I am a musician. This is what I do.

The worst evil which can befall the artist is that his work should appear good in his own eyes.

When I went off to college, I was expecting to be a concert musician. In music school I heard all of these kids who were just unbelievable. And I understand that you can be very, very good, but there's something that separates very, very good from great, and I knew that I wasn't great.

I'm not a very good predictor in any area of art, particularly my own. I don't know how to evaluate that.