Creative Devotion Quotes

I think it's harder than ever to be an artist. I think that you end up, especially as a middle-aged person, you pay such big consequences for saying, 'I'm just going to devote my life to making art,' or 'I'm going to devote my life to writing novels.' You end up with no resources.

Films are all I know. I wouldn't know what to do with a day off.

An artist is born like a priest is born. If they are born an artist, I would tell them art is not a game: it is something very serious which completely requires everything you have to give.

Being an artist doesn’t take much, just everything you got. Which means, of course, that as the process is giving you life, it is also bringing you closer to death. But it’s no big deal. They are one in the same and cannot be avoided or denied. So when I totally embrace this process, this life/death, and abandon myself to it, I transcend all this meaningless gibberish and hang out with the gods. It seems to me that that is worth the price of admission.

I'd given up Catholicism in my teens but something of it stays with me. I try to create the perfect sentence - that's as close to godliness as I can get.

I'm always 100% committed to a character, a story and a director, and with Michael Mann it was 1,000%. I don't know how to explain this.

I built up these lumber piles of love, and with fourteen boards each I built little houses, so that your eyes, which I adore and sing to, might live in them. Now that I have declared the foundations of my love, I surrender this century to you: wooden sonnets that rise only because you gave them life.

My goal in life is to give to the world what I was lucky to receive: the ecstasy of divine union through my music and my dance.

An artist's working life is marked by intensive application and intense discipline.

I think people who truly can live a life in music are telling the world, ‘You can have my love, you can have my smiles. Forget the bad parts, you don’t need them. Just take the music, the goodness, because it’s the very best, and it’s the part I give most willingly

A writer, or any artist, can’t expect to be embraced by the people [but] you just keep doing your work - because you have to, because it’s your calling.

Poetry was the maiden I loved, but politics was the harridan I married.

An artist's career doesn't happen in the cycle of one week of news. An artist's career happens in a lifetime, and if you're a true artist you're willing to die for what you believe in.

As a writer who has collaborated on projects, you give your life over to that project.

I have all but killed myself for Photography. My passion for it is greater than ever. It's forty years that I have fought its fight... I am not fighting to make a 'name' for myself. Maybe you have some feeling for what the fight is for. It's a world's fight... All that's born of spirit seems mad in these days of materialism run riot.

I will probably die singing.

Broad paths are open to every endeavour, and a sympathetic recognition is assured to every one who consecrates his art to the divine services of a conviction of a consciousness.

The creator must be a world for himself and must find everything in himself and in Nature, to whom his whole life is devoted.

There are scripts when you fall so much in love with your character. And if you are lucky and offered this part, you should not tempt your fate and go to the greatest extent to be/to play this character. If you have an opportunity to do that and you do not, it's shameful.

When you devote yourself to being an artist, you have to stay on your craft and always try to get better and better.

The painting cannot be laid aside even for a day; for it takes constant work to keep 'flowing,' but above that it takes concentration, which in our language is consecration.

It doesn't take much to be a successful artist-all you need to do is dedicate your entire life to it.

What you want is for music to love you back. That's why you pay your dues. You want to feel like you belong and are part of this symbiosis, metamorphosis, whatever you want to call it.

He who has learned to love an art or science has wisely laid up riches against the day of riches.