Yevgeny Zamyatin Quotes

All art is based on non-conformity.

The great artists of the world are never Puritans, and seldom even ordinarily respectable.

Consistency is the enemy of enterprise, just as symmetry is the enemy of art.

I feel like the point of being an artist is to have your own voice: to do it the way you would do it and not the way anyone else would do it. If you're a strong enough writer, then that voice is going to come out all the time, and I can't stop it from coming out, no matter what I do.

Most artists like to think of themselves as rugged individualists, as independent characters.

The creative individual has the capacity to free himself from the web of social pressures in which the rest of us are caught. He is capable of questioning the assumptions that the rest of us accept.

When it came to my art, I went my own way and did not follow the trends.

Willie Nelson is the perfect person, it seems to me, to think about. Because something tells me that he operates on his own frequency.

Anyone who sees and paints a sky green and fields blue ought to be sterilized.

Irresponsibility is part of the pleasure of all art; it is the part the schools cannot recognize.

What people don't realize is that when you start making things outside of the convention of what is normal or good or 'best practices,' you're also shedding some of the baggage that comes with the concept of what a game 'should' be.

We do things differently. You don't have to worry about being part of a particular genre. You just go for it.

What counts most is finding new ways to get the world down in paint on my own terms.

When you start out on a career in the arts you have no idea what you are doing. This is great. People who know what they are doing know the rules, and know what is possible and impossible. You do not. And you should not. The rules on what is possible and impossible in the arts were made by people who had not tested the bounds of the possible by going beyond them. And you can. If you don't know it's impossible it's easier to do. And because nobody's done it before, they haven't made up rules to stop anyone doing that again, yet.

Art reaches its greatest peak when devoid of self-consciousness. Freedom discovers man the moment he loses concern over what impression he is making or about to make.

Let none presume to measure the irregularities of Michael Angelo or Socrates by village scales.

Creativity is the greatest rebellion in existence.

One thing is for sure-none of the arts flourishes on censorship and repression. And by this time it should be evident that the American public is capable of doing its own censoring.

The only people who get paid what they're worth are people who don't follow the instruction book, who create art, who are innovative, who work without a map.

Art isn't about following the rules. It's about breaking them.

It's time to stop complying with the system and draw your own map. Stop settling for what's good enough and start creating art that matters.

Every artist of importance creates his own world, with its own laws - creates and shapes it in his own shape and image, and no one else's. This is why it is difficult to fit the artist into a world that has already been created, a seven-day, fixed and solidified world: he will inevitably slip out of the set of laws and paragraphs, he will be a heretic.

Genius disregards the boundaries of propriety. Genius is permitted to shout if shouting is productive.

It is not logical for art to be logical. Art goes against the grain of the times as readily as it goes with it and at the very same moment. Instead of seeking the nearest exit, art responds to a new situation by uncovering a labyrinth of problems.

Perhaps whatever there is in my work that may be really interesting to others and surely what is interesting to me, is the result of a sometimes successful effort to free myself from any idea that what I produce must be art.