Creative Dedication Quotes

My advice to young people wanting to make music and to be in this industry is to really spend your time making music. Make so much music you have no friends. Make music. Figure out what it is you love, and... because if you're making cool art, then everything else will fall into line.

If anything in your life is more important than writing - anything at all - you should walk away now while you still can. Forewarned is forearmed. For those who cannot or will not walk away, you need only to remember this. Writing is life. Breathe deeply of it.

I want people to appreciate all the time and effort that I put into my art and my music.

When you're doing a movie, you're in and out of there in three months. If you hated the experience, it's all good because you can take the paycheck and leave. But, on a television show, you have to love your character and you have to love the experience because you could be there for awhile, fingers crossed.

There was a price to be paid for being interested in fiction and in writing, pushing my family away. Books and authors became my family.

Whether it's a painter finding his way each morning to the easel, or a medical researcher returning daily to the laboratory, the routine is as much a part of the creative process as the lightning bolt of inspiration, maybe more.

Movies are hard to make, and you have to work toward a common ethic and do your best. You don't want to work with people who don't care or who are acting out some neurotic, crazy thesis on the set.

The only advice anybody can give is, if you wanna be a writer, keep writing. And read all you can, read everything.

I prefer working with artists who are prepared to get down in the dungeons and get the job done.

When you're making an album, it's kind of like having a baby. You have to really put everything into it.

To grasp the full significance of life is the actor's duty; to interpret it his problem; and to express it his dedication.

How do you write? You write, man, you write, that's how, and you do it the way the old English walnut tree puts forth leaf and fruit every year by the thousands. . . . If you practice an art faithfully, it will make you wise, and most writers can use a little wising up.

I couldn't care less about actors' trailers and food on sets and stuff like that - I just want to act.

I'm glad I took that time to work really hard on the music. I feel the effects of that now in a positive way with my connection with the audience.

By and large I think art is made by people who have discipline married to talent in sufficiently large amounts to work even if they don't feel like it. Anybody can get maudlin and decide to write poetry at 11 at night; the question is, can you do it at 8:30 on a Monday morning..?

It's just the risk that I take and the sacrifice that I make: Putting myself, my career, my family's peace of mind on the line just to do right by my fans. It ain't no gray area: You're either with that and willing to go out of your way to make people who contribute to your dreams coming true happy or you aren't.

I work as diligently on my canvases as the laborers do in their fields.

To be a good poet, you must care more about the writing, than the writer.

The true professional makes art when he is not feeling good, if the studio is too cold or too warm or the walls are falling down. We are painters and we paint. If I were a sculptor, I'd sculpt.

I think when you're a director, it's hard to do something unless you're absolutely over-the-moon in love with it. The audience, they spend 90 minutes with it, but for you, it's anywhere between a year and a half to three years of your life, every day, working on it.

One of the best things Henry Miller ever said was that art goes all out. It's all out. It goes full length. . . . A big book is an all-out book in which you limit your life to things that pertain directly to the book.

I wrote 'The Kiss' 12 hours a day for six months.

I absolutely respect and I believe I serve music.

Classical music requires an immense amount of concentration, and I don't know if I would've been that committed to that particular life.

I figure I wrote 37 songs in 20 years, and that's not exactly a full-time job. It wasn't that I was writing and writing and writing and quit.