Effortless Art Quotes

It takes a lot of people hours to make music because they focus so much on one thing. I just do it, and I make something you can just vibe to.

For me, songwriting is something like breathing: I just do it. But that doesn't mean you're fantastic.

Great books write themselves, only bad books have to be written.

Singing songs like 'The Man I Love' or 'Porgy' is no more work than sitting down and eating Chinese roast duck, and I love roast duck.

A Train was born without any effort - if was like writing a letter to a friend.

In his comic scenes, Shakespeare seems to produce, without labor, what no labor can improve.

Making lyrics feel natural, sit on music in such a way that you don't feel the effort of the author, so that they shine and bubble and rise and fall, is very, very hard to do. Whereas you can sit at the piano and just play and feel you're making art.

I usually try to make my images look like they just exist, like no effort was put into it.

A really good picture looks as if it's happened at once. It's an immediate image. For my own work, when a picture looks labored and overworked, and you can read in it as well - she did this and then she did that; there is something in it that has not got to do with beautiful art to me. And I usually throw these out, though I think very often it takes ten of those over-labored efforts to produce one really beautiful wrist motion that is synchronized with your head and heart, and you have it, and therefore it looks as if it were born in a minute.