Artistic Toil Quotes

I am sorry, but recording an album is just hard work; tedious, repetitive, and not very fun at all. Mixing is a bit better, but still pretty boring.

I spend my days kneeling in the muck of language, feeling around for gooey verbs, nouns, and modifiers that I can squash together to make a blob of a sentence that bears some likeness to reason and sense.

Writing is a combination of intangible creative fantasy and appallingly hard work.

In 'Dark Skye,' I rewrote every one of the Pandemonia scenes over and over before I was happy with them - hundreds of pages are now sitting in a folder called 'Cuttings,' never to be read. Ouch!

So many people say painting is fun. I don't find it fun at all. It's hard work for me.

For the essential thing about the work of art is that it is work, and very hard work too.

How hard, how desperately hard, is the way of the experimenter in art!

Writing is hard work: it is like doing homework for the rest of your life. You are always chipping away at it.

Plays, gentlemen, are to their authors what children are to women: they cost more pain than they give pleasure.

When Earth's last picture is painted and the tubes are twisted and dried, When the oldest colours have faded, and the youngest critic has died, We shall rest, and, faith, we shall need it lie down for an aeon or two, Till the Master of All Good Workmen shall put us to work anew!

The artist is not a 'Sunday child' for whom everything immediately succeeds. He does not have the right to live without duty. The task that is assigned to him is painful, it is a heavy cross for him to bear.

Art is the stored honey of the human soul, gathered on wings of misery and travail.

If you don't enjoy making work, then it's bad. It's rough. Artwork is brutal for so many people. They let it happen to them, but it's brutal. I like the idea of an artist as somebody who works. A lot of the artists I like share this understanding.

Poet and sculptor, do the work, / Nor let the modish painter shirk

I think that you just understand, as any creative person, that there's a beast that you have to beat, and it never goes away. I've resigned myself to that, and it's kind of what keeps you going. Writing is the worst and the best.