David Sedaris Quotes

I don't think that writers or painters or filmmakers function because they have something they particularly want to say. They have something that they feel. And they like the art form; they like words, or the smell of paint, or celluloid and photographic images and working with actors. I don't think that any genuine artist has ever been oriented by some didactic point of view, even if he thought he was.

I think the mystery of art lies in this, that artists’ relationship is essentially with their work — not with power, not with profit, not with themselves, not even with their audience.

I don't paint to live, I live to paint.

There are times when I've inhaled my work. There are artworks still inside of me.

When I taught art, I was always asked, 'How do you know you're an artist? What makes you an artist?' And to me, it's like breathing. You don't question if you breathe; you have to breathe. So if you wake up in the morning, and you have to realize an idea, and there's another idea, and another, maybe you are really an artist.

There's always hunger to create because I believe that's what I do. I believe that's what I'm supposed to be doing.

if I'd thought that nobody would like it as I was writing it, I would have written it even more. But I never think of the audience. I never think of people reading. I never think of people, period.

I think I'm one of those people that needed to be seen by someone else to see myself. But then on the other hand, the way I do my work, I always try to only completely focus on my work, so when I do my work I'm only interested in my character. So I don't have an idea of what it means for my career. So this is why I don't feel like I need to be discovered, because I feel like even without being discovered, I will be fine.

No one is a poet from eight to twelve and from two to six. Whoever is a poet is one always, and continually assaulted by poetry.

That's the difference between the serious artist and the craftsman--the craftsman can take material and because of his abilities do a professional job of it. The serious artist, like Proust, is like an object caught by a wave and swept to shore. He's obsessed by his material; it's like a venom working in his blood and the art is the antidote.

True artists are almost the only men who do their work for pleasure.

I have to do a show which is of interest to me, or else I'm lost.

Creativity runs on automatic, no matter what's happening in other parts of my life. I can't help myself. It's been in me, and it evolves in me over the years. It's a condition in me.

It's hard to predict and to say what goes on inside the minds of an artist, but that's what makes them an artist. That sense of creativity. That thing that makes them tick is probably the very thing that pushes them to the extremes that sometimes can cause, you know, fatalities and things that, you know, that end up not being good.

The real artist has no idea that he is sacrificing himself for art. He does what he does for one reason and one reason only-he can't help doing it.

Just as the bird sings or the butterfly soars, because it is his natural characteristic, so the artist works.

To me that's what art is about - when you don't really have any control over your desires to do it.

There are two kinds of artists in this world; those that work because the spirit is in them, and they cannot be silent if they would, and those that speak from a conscientious desire to make apparent to others the beauty that has awakened their own admiration.

But where there is no art show, I would still be painting.

Every good writer or filmmaker has something eating at them, right? That they can't quite get off their back. And so your job is to make your audience care about your obsessions.

If you're an artist, you need to work. It doesn't matter how old you are, who you are. It doesn't matter if you're 12: if you draw, you draw. If you're 85 and you paint, you paint.

You have to give every portion of yourself to it. As an artist, that is just what you do - because we love it - we were born to do it.

I think when you're doing good work, you don't necessarily need to be validated.

I'm really an artist. I really do this. I don't need the money. It doesn't matter to me.

Some small part of what the artist does is for approval of others.