Creative Endurance Quotes

Authors may be divided into falling stars, planets, and fixed stars: the first have a momentary effect; the second have a much longer duration; but the third are unchangeable, possess their own light, and work for all time.

Remember, we are mortal, but poetry is not.

Painting doesn't freeze time. It circulates and recycles time like a wheel that turns. Those who were first might well be last. Painting is a very slow art. It doesn't travel with the speed of light. That's why dead painters shine so bright.

With my art, it's the one thing that I know will outlive me and outlive my feelings. It will outlive my depressive seasons.

The momentum of production keeps you from giving up, so it's really the editing and writing phases where things can look bleakest.

The hardest thing for everyone, for the writer, for the director and certainly for the actors, is not to panic when they're doing a certain line for the tenth time because everything ceases to be funny after it's been repeated.

The first act is writing, the second act is filming, the third act is releasing. If you have to partake in the third act, it hurts the first act of the next one. It's like a prizefight. You get punched.

Much has been said about Robert, and more will be added. Young men will adopt his gait. Young girls will wear white dresses and mourn his curls. He will be condemned and adored. His excesses damned or romanticized. In the end, truth will be found in his work, the corporeal body of the artist. It will not fall away. Man cannot judge it. For art sings of God, and ultimately belongs to him.

It’s a curious thing. I suppose most people think of artists as impatient but I don’t know of any first-rate artist who hasn’t manifested in his career an appalling patience, a willingness to wait and to do his best now in the expectation that next year he will do better.

No artist knows in his own lifetime whether what he does will be the slightest good, because it takes at least seventy-five to a hundred years before the thing begins to sort itself out.

People ask, "Do you enjoy acting?" But you only have those specific few hours to do a scene, and then you drive home and wait for six months to find out how it went. You can't go back and put in a new idea. Filming is about continuing to be alert and to think, and I find it quite exhausting. Certainly I would say that fear is a part of that.

You look back at people like Elvis and The Beatles and still get their music because it's timeless. That's what I want.

I think there's no creative process that goes without injuries and scratches and punches. You get beat up somehow, and that's part of the commitment. You have to be open to that.

I'm what happens after death, which is writing.

They have written volumes out of which a couplet of verse, a period in prose, may cling to the rock of ages, as a shell that survives a deluge.

Oh, Black known and unknown poets, how often have your auctioned pains sustained us? Who will compute the lonely nights made less lonely by your songs, or by the empty pots made less tragic by your tales? If we were a people much given to revealing secrets, we might raise monuments and sacrifice to the memories of our poets, but slavery cured us of that weakness.

I want to be an artist that grows slowly. If you appear overnight, there's a chance that you will also just disappear overnight.

Yet a real artist, I've noticed, will survive anything. (Even praise, I happily suspect.)

The trick is not becoming a writer. The trick is staying a writer.

I guess if you make quality music then it has a longevity and it will find its place.

Professional creativity requires more than inspiration, talent, and discipline - it requires an endurance that few are aware of and even fewer have.

Writing books takes a long time, and one thing a writer must do is learn to live with his or her project.

In all fields of creativity you see the result of work that has become habit. Where the creative impulse has become flaccid or has died out altogether, and yet because it is our work and our life we continue to do it.

The great thing about a painter is that he or she lives on - I mean, Andrew Wyeth is more in his paintings than he was walking around.