“...she (the artist, the writer) doesn't wait for inspiration, she acts in the anticipation of its apparition.”
More from Steven Pressfield on Art
“The Muse honors the working stiff.”
“The working artist will not tolerate trouble in her life because she knows trouble prevents her from doing her work.”
“The awakening an artist must be ruthless, not only with herself but with others.”
“The artist committing himself to his calling has volunteered for hell.”
“The most important thing about art is to work. Nothing else matters except sitting down every day and trying.”
“To labor in the arts for any reason other than love is prostitution.”
Others on Art
Picasso
18 quotes“The purpose of art is washing the dust of daily life off our souls.”
Vincent van Gogh
13 quotes“Painting is a faith, and it imposes the duty to disregard public opinion.”
Michelangelo
12 quotes“Trifles make perfection, and perfection is no trifle.”
John Keats
10 quotes“With a great poet the sense of Beauty overcomes every other consideration, or rather obliterates all consideration.”
Susan Sontag
10 quotes“Time eventually positions most photographs, even the most amateurish, at the level of art.”
Beethoven
8 quotes“Music is a higher revelation than all wisdom and philosophy.”
Percy Shelley
8 quotes“Poetry is a mirror which makes beautiful that which is distorted”
Wallace Stevens
8 quotes“The only emperor is the emperor of ice cream.”
Charles Baudelaire
8 quotes“The mixture of the grotesque and the tragic is agreeable to the spirit, as are discords to the jaded ear.”
Ezra Pound
7 quotes“Artists are the antennae of the race but the bullet-headed many will never learn to trust the great artists.”
Marshall McLuhan
7 quotes“Advertising is an environmental striptease for a world of abundance.”
Jackson Pollock
7 quotes“The modern artist is working with space and time, and expressing his feelings rather than illustrating.”