The greater the artist, the greater the doubt.
Robert Hughes.
“It seems obvious, looking back, that the artists of Weimar Germany and Leninist Russia lived in a much more attenuated landscape of media than ours, and their reward was that they could still belie...”
“It is hard to think of any work of art of which one can say 'this saved the life of one Jew, one Vietnamese, one Cambodian'. Specific books, perhaps; but as far as one can tell, no paintings or scu...”
“Political stress is always apt to shrink the private arena and attach it on to the public”
“Landscape is to American painting what sex and psychoanalysis are to the American novel.”
“The basic project of art is always to make the world whole and comprehensible, to restore it to us in all its glory and its occasional nastiness, not through argument but through feeling, and then ...”
“What has our culture lost in 1980 that the avant-garde had in 1890? Ebullience, idealism, confidence, the belief that there was plenty of territory to explore, and above all the sense that art, in ...”
“And by the way, everything in life is writable about if you have the outgoing guts to do it, and the imagination to improvise. The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt.”
“You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you.”
“The road to hell is paved with adverbs.”
“The first thing you have to learn when you go into the arts is to learn to cope with rejection. If you cant, youre dead”
“When I am grown up I shall carry a notebooka fat book with many pages, methodically lettered. I shall enter my phrases.”
“Love the work: the grind, the dreaming, the distracted not-sleep, all of it. Its the one thing in the job that will always be there, and the real pleasure in the profession. Everything else is luck.”
“To write is to stand at the edge of a bottomless well, unafraid of falling in.”
“But when I say it isn't meant for anyone's eyes, I don't mean it in the sense of one of those novel manuscripts people keep in a drawer, insisting they don't care if anyone else ever reads it or no...”
“So here I am writing my zombie story and my lead character decides to betray me.”
