“You have a masterpiece inside you, too, you know. One unlike any that has ever been created, or ever will be. And remember: If you go to your grave without painting your masterpiece, it will not get painted. No one else can paint it. Only you.”— Gordon MacKenzie, amazon.com
“Every artist returns to things. The drawings that you make as a child or as an adolescent and the ideas that you have as a young beginning artist, no doubt they crop up again and again.”— Elaine de Kooning, aaa.si.edu
“How do we respond when confronted with the reality that the destruction of the old is inherent to creating anything new?”— John Green, youtube.com
“I love making, I love doing. I love being to the full, I love everything which is not sitting and watching and copying and dead at heart.”— John Fowles, amazon.com
“We could have easily become absorbed by the tragedy, lost in it and paralyzed by it, but what came back to us was the instinct to dance. I began as a dancer, and in those days of pain and shock I went back to where I started. Creating dance is the thing I know best. It is how I recognize myself.”— Twyla Tharp, amazon.com
“I know writers who say they take little pleasure in writing but they love having written. I'm not like that. I'm more like the athlete who enjoys practicing as much as playing the actual game.”— Twyla Tharp, amazon.com
“Give me a writer who thinks he has all the time in the world and I'll show you a writer who never delivers.”— Twyla Tharp, amazon.com
“In order to be habitually creative, you have to know how to prepare to be creative.”— Twyla Tharp, amazon.com
“Art is not about minimizing risk and delivering work that is guaranteed to please.”— Twyla Tharp, amazon.com
“I'm often asked, 'Where do you get your ideas?' This happens to anyone who is willing to stand in front of an audience and talk about his or her work. The short answer is: everywhere. It's like asking 'Where do you find the air you breathe?' Ideas are all around you.”— Twyla Tharp, amazon.com
“The first steps of a creative act are like groping in the dark: random and chaotic, feverish and fearful, a lot of busy-ness with no apparent or definable end in sight.”— Twyla Tharp, amazon.com
“Like the knights of the Middle Ages, there is little the creatively inclined person can do but to prepare himself, body and spirit, for the labor to come — for his adventures are all unknown. In truth, the work itself is the adventure. And no artist could go about this work, or would want to, with l…”— Mary Oliver, amazon.com
“When I'm in the studio I'm looking for a feeling I haven't felt. It's a high.”— Kendrick Lamar, complex.com