Ludwig Mies van der Rohe Quotes

To create a work of art, great or small, is work, hard work, and work requires discipline and order.

Created stuff is meant to be shared. That’s why the creative person created it. Why else do creative people exist?

The ultimate aim of all creative activity is the building!

It's easy to attack and destroy an act of creation. It's a lot more difficult to perform one.

It may sound affected - but it is the act of creation itself, and it is equally exhilarating whether one is working on a teaspoon or a national bank.

Creation is the artist's true function; where there is no creation there is no art.

One writes out of one thing only - one's own experience. Everything depends on how relentlessly one forces from this experience the last drop, sweet or bitter, it can possibly give. This is the only real concern of the artist, to recreate out of the disorder of life that order which is art.

Painting is the passage from the chaos of the emotions to the order of the possible.

If you write an original, it's like you went in and dug a well, and you hit oil. But an adaptation, it's like the oil well's on fire, and they bring you in to put the fire out and get it working again - or something like that.

Art is that which comes to a man, and stands between himself and an implacable witness: the work.

There is always an emotional element to anything that you make.

The task of art today is to bring chaos into order.

After all, the work isn't the point; the piece is.

The glory of science is not in a truth more absolute than the truth of Bach or Tolstoy, but in the act of creation itself. The scientist's discoveries impose his own order on chaos.

Whether I'm writing scripts or prose, the goal is identical. To give pleasure. Now whether I succeed or not is up for debate, and, mostly, I fail. But I try. I like to make things. It's a way to stay busy during one's ephemeral and confusing life.

When you draw, you copy the world don't you? You remake it on paper, but it isn't the same. It's yours. No one else could have created it just like that. When I make poems, I use the words we all use, but the order and the sound create a new power. This wood is someone's creation. We stumble through it's tendrils, as if we're crawling through the synapses of his mind.

Artists are visionaries. We routinely practice a form of faith, seeing clearly and moving toward a creative goal that shimmers in the distance - often visible to us, but invisible to those around us.

If you're writing, you're a writer. If you're talking about it or thinking about it, I'm not so sure. Writing is ninety-eight percent work and two percent magic.

ART Art is that thing having to do only with itself—the product of a successful attempt to make a work of art. Unfortunately, there are no expamples of art, nor good reasons to think that it will ever exist. (Everything that has been made has been made with a purpose, teverything with an end exists outside of that thing, i.e., "I want to sell this", or "I want this to make me famous and loved", or "I want this to make me whole", or worse, "I want this to make others whole.") And yet we continue to write, paint, sculpt and compose. Is this foolish of us?

There's nothing better than finishing something and looking at it. Whether it be a script or a movie, it's this complete little thing that now exists and is hopefully immortal.

Why is it that we understand playing the cello will require work, but we attribute writing to the magic of inspiration?

My goal as a creative person is to express truth and beauty in whatever I do

Painting and animation can be kind of long work. Music was more immediate and more fun.

Private imaginings may have no outcomes in the world at all. Creativity does. Being creative involves doing something.

I am in the world only for the purpose of composing.