Creative Labor Quotes

Every time we give a musician the advice to give away the music and sell the T-shirt, we're saying, 'Don't make your living in this more elevated way. Instead, reverse this social progress, and choose a more physical way to make a living.' We're sending them to peasanthood, very much like the Maoists have.

It's a lot of work that goes into producing and directing and all those kinds of things. It doesn't just happen. It's a lotta work. It's a lot more work than acting.

Aside from birthing me my first grey hairs and keeping me up at night more times than I'd like to count, 'The Subtle Art' taught me a lot about the nature of work. And a lot of that had to do with how my perception of the work itself evolved over the course of writing the book.

You move on. It's work. Yeah, I'm privileged and paid handsomely and it's not exactly being in a coal mine, but you still work your ass off and you work as hard as you possibly can and you hope that people connect to it and enjoy it.

If I feel the labor and the gruesome process, that helps me appreciate the art.

Writing a novel is not merely going on a shopping expedition across the border to an unreal land: it is hours and years spent in the factories, the streets, the cathedrals of the imagination.

At the end of the day, if you are an actor, you definitely know that you're just work-for-hire.

Writing is the hardest physical work there is.

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 keep going over a sentence. I nag it, gnaw it, pat and flatter it.

I'm very supportive of creative people being paid for the work that they do.

An actor shouldn't have to leave the set and go home and write a bunch of stuff for a bunch of other people, the next day. I found it very unpleasant.

The glory of the farmer is that, in the division of labors, it is his part to create. All trade rests at last on his primitive activity. He stands close to Nature; he obtains from the earth the bread and the meat. The food which was not, he causes to be.

All art is exploitation.

I don't understand blogs. People used to write to make money, no? You didn't give it away. I have nothing against blogs. I don't have a problem with them. But it's like, 'What are you doing? Why aren't you working?

Contrary to what people think, I slave over my books.

It's hard work, writing, you know. Honestly, a fight every day against your own limitations. You have to squeeze books out of your brain, you're constantly trying to solve challenges. I think most writers enjoy the feeling of having written something, rather than the process of writing it.

When I'm making my own record, it's real work for me.

It's tremendously hard work. Yes, I love arranging the words and having them fall on the ear the right way and you know you're not quite there and you're redoing it and redoing it and there's a wonderful thrill to it. But it is hard.

Writing is like going to bed with a beautiful woman and afterwards she gets up, goes to her purse and gives me a handful of money.

[Writers are] the highest paid secretaries in the world.

I take a very long time to write my books - from five to ten years.

Writing is the hardest work in the world not involving heavy lifting.

What can't be said can be written. Because writing is a silent act, a labor from the head to the hand.

She said writting novels was like childbirth: if you truly remembered how awful it got, you'd never do it again.