"The world always seems brighter when you've just made something that wasn't there before."
- Neil Gaiman

Jennet plays as she speaks and as she dances and as she makes love, each note picked carefully out of her memory and placed precisely beside all the others, rising without warning into passionate and fortuitous art, like the making of blue in the air.   -  from The Iceweaver by Margaret Lawrence

A piece of cloth is a living thing… If you draw in correctly, every thread has a life of its own. When you weave it, it answers the pattern. When you touch it, it sings.   -  Hester to Jennet, from The Iceweaver by Margaret Lawrence

True art is characterized by an irresistible urge in the creative artist. - Albert Einstein

All our talents increase in the using, and every faculty both good and bad, strengthens by exercise.   - Anne Bronte

"Art without emotion is like chocolate cake without sugar. It makes you gag."
- Mr. Freeman, from Speak by Laurie Halse Anderson

'So much has already been done and there's not much that's new,' he concludes. 'You can't let that stop you though, because the actual exercise of just poking around the debris is worthwhile. Even if you produce stuff that's interesting to nobody but yourself, the activity justifies itself. Making things is a way of finding out.'

Viggo Mortensen
( Read more... )

A written word is the choicest of relics.  It is something at once more intimate with us and more universal than any other work of art.  It is the work of art nearest to life itself.  It may be translated into every language, and not only be read but actually breathed from all human lips;--not be represented on canvas or in marble only, but be ( Read more... )

To live a creative life, We must lose our fear of being wrong.

-  Joseph Chilton Pearce, submitted by CastaicGrapeFruit

So you see, imagination needs moodling - long, inefficient, happy idling, dawdling and puttering.

- Brenda Ueland