Artistic Productivity Quotes

I built a studio in L.A. for me and my brother to just write every single day. And it's been great, man.

Don't think about making art, just get it done. Let everyone else decide if it's good or bad, whether they love it or hate it. While they are deciding, make even more art.

I'm constantly writing music and keeping myself busy somehow.

[Alexander] Hamilton estimated portrait painters as thieves of time.

I'd like to make as much art as I possibly can before I die, so I'm working on a few things.

Everybody is different. Some writers can write reams of great books and then J. D. Salinger wrote just a few. Beethoven wrote nine symphonies. They were all phenomenal. Mozart wrote some 40 symphonies, and they were all phenomenal. That doesn't mean Beethoven was a lesser writer, it's just some guys are capable of more productivity, some guys take more time.

Fifty is the new forty. I always thought my best work would come in the years forty to sixty, if I was fortunate enough to hang around - and it is hard to stick around.

As for my slowness as a writer - that's been a struggle, no question. We live in a culture that values and rewards machine-speed productivity. Even the arts are expected to conform to the Taylor model of productivity.

The juices never stop flowing. I still write songs.

I think it's important as artists to always keep creating and always have stuff in the archive because you never know when you will need them. I'm that kind of artist. I always plan.

I write about whatever turns up. Every single day, I'm sitting down for three to five hours in the evenings wrestling away and producing far too much verse.

I don't listen to a lot of music; I write more music than I listen to, for sure.

The thing with 50 Words of Snow is that it was literally back-to-back from Director's Cut [also released in 2011]. It was more or less that I got to make two albums in one hit. I was already in this space in my mind to be writing and making an album.

Finally here is a beautiful day, a superb sun like at Giverny. So I worked without stopping, for the tide at this moment is just as I need it for several motifs. This has bucked me up a bit.

I seem to have spent a little less time painting than I might've done.

In 29 years, I had recorded over 2,200 songs. I was amazed.

I'm always writing something. There's always some structure sitting around someplace. There's always things on the computer, things scratched on score paper, legal tablets full of lyrics. It's never not buzzing around me all the time. I'm always doing it.

Artists work best alone. Work alone.

I think I really produce my best work in Iran.

Our artistic heroes tend to be those self-exercisers, like Picasso, and Nabokov, and Wallace Stevens, who rather defiantly kept playing past dark.

With songwriters like me who are prolific, you just write the song and then put it on tape.

The point always is to be writing something - it leads to more writing.

Ideas for work are coming to me in abundance...I'm going like a painting-locomotive.

Painting is no problem. The problem is what to do when you're not painting.

Over the years, I've found one rule. It is the only one I give on those occasions when I talk about writing. A simple rule. If you tell yourself you are going to be at your desk tomorrow, you are by that declaration asking your unconscious to prepare the material. You are, in effect, contracting to pick up such valuables at a given time. Count on me, you are saying to a few forces below: I will be there to write.