Creative Secrecy Quotes

I would like to manage to prevent people from ever seeing how a picture of mine has been done. What can it possibly matter? What I want is that the only thing emanating from my pictures should be emotion.

There are many artists that I know exactly where they are born and what their names are and where they live, which are still very, sort of, hidden. Even Nick Cave, who has a film about himself nowadays, is still someone who I would claim to be utterly enigmatic.

I have friends who are writers, but we don't tend to talk about literature very much. It's just not part of my process; I tend to be pretty secretive about what I'm working on.

I love artists like Prince, who hold on to that element of mystery.

The reason modern poetry is difficult is so that the poet's wife cannot understand it.

I don't discuss works in progress.

I'm one of those writers who can't talk about what they're working on. The entire four years I was writing 'House of Sand and Fog,' my wife never saw a word of it. I just have to keep it in the womb, and then everyone can have a crack at it.

I never got close to the creative in AWA; not only was I not close to it, I wasn't allowed to be in a room close to it when they were talking about creative. That is how tightly held Verne Gagne believed in kayfabing people who he didn't believe needed to be in the process.

Artists probably should have some impenetrable aspects of themselves.

writers of novels are so busy being solitary that they haven't time to meet one another. But then, a writer learns nothing from a writer, conversationally. If a writer has anything witty, profound or quotable to say he doesn't say it. He's no fool. He writes it.

When I sit down to write, which is the essential moment in my life, I am completely alone. Whenever I write a book, I accumulate a lot of documentation. That background material is the most intimate part of my private life. It's a little embarrassing - like being seen in your underwear It's like the way magicians never tell others how they make a dove come out of a hat.

I was always very... impatient about showing my paintings to people.

I don't talk about my books while I'm writing them: not even my husband knows what a novel's about until it's done.

I'm famously secretive about my work. Nobody reads my books till they're finished.

I've never shown anybody a draft of anything.

I wrote and recorded a song that I highly doubt I will release. The lyrics are somewhat risque. I may have to create an alter ego, and she can be the 'singer.'

I would like to write you so simply, so simply, so simply. Without having anything ever catch the eye, excepting yours alone, ... so that above all the language remains self-evidently secret, as if it were being invented at every step, and as if it were burning immediately