Artistic Refinement Quotes

I don't listen to my songs. The only time I do it is when someone points out a flaw in the end product.

When Sonic Youth wrote music, we would rehearse for months before anybody heard anything.

I rewrote the ending of 'Farewell to Arms' 39 times before I was satisfied.

Quality and perfection are achieved with time. You do not create a perfect painting or a perfect poem by hurrying. Time is always coming.

I can work on a verse for a very long time before realising it's not any good and then, and only then, can I discard it.

I still have a lot of pleasure doing them, but as time goes by I come to appreciate more clearly which paintings are good and which should be discarded.

My journals were a clearing house - a garbage can. Once I was writing seriously, I understood that this was the stuff that didn't belong in my work.

Good taste has everything to do with being cultured and being refined, and if art has to do with anything, it has to do with being human.

Great art is created only through diligent and painstaking effort to perfect and polish oneself.

If they who understand the utmost refinement of any art will enjoy the perfection of it in a manner superior to other men, will they not amply pay for that advantage in feeling more than other men the imperfection of it, which in the natural course of things must so much oftener fall in their way?

The personality of the artist, at first a cry or a cadence or a mood and then a fluid, and lambent narrative, finally refines itself out of existence, impersonalises itself, so to speak. The aesthetic image in the dramatic form is life purified in and reprojected from the human imagination. The mystery of aesthetic like that of material creation is accomplished. The artist, like the God of the creation, remains within or behind or beyond or above his handiwork, invisible, refined out of existence, indifferent, paring his fingernails.

Lyrically, I could be so much sharper. Melodically, I could be so much stickier. Musically, I could have so much more texture. So I'm constantly doing that, trying to find new ways to mix things up.

I believe that bad taste is vulgar. It's like cursing. I think the world can be saved through design, because what is the most distasteful thing someone can do? Kill someone. So, good taste is the opposite of that.

In products of the human mind, simplicity marks the end of a process of refining, while complexity marks a primitive stage. Michelangelo 's definition of art as the purgation of superfluities suggests that the creative effort consists largely in the elimination of that which complicates and confuses a pattern.

The studio is a place where I can experiment before I'm prepared for an idea to become a body of work, or a new way of working, or a way of working that can sustain me over a period of time.

Art is the exclusion of the unnecessary.

I think you always, as an artist, feel like you would like to be more and more specific about your intent and your interests.

I want to solidify as an artist and show that as I grow as a person and make mistakes and learn from them, I'm going to grow artistically.

I did stand-up comedy for 18 years. Ten of those years were spent learning, four years were spent refining, and four years were spent in wild success. I was seeking comic originality, and fame fell on me as a byproduct. The course was more plodding than heroic.

I think that, right now, I am travelling in many different directions in my mind, on where I wanted to be. So much is wantin' to go back, but I still gotta move forward. But I think it's just that I'm my worst critic at all times, you know? And when I make somethin', it may be five or ten cuts later before I actually call it what it is. I've always been that kind of artist. I'm gonna put myself through the sweat for it, because I think, as an artist, that's what made me iller, is the fact that I didn't wanna just put out anything and everything. It's just a process, you know what I mean?

Songs always get better after you start playing them live.

I am no longer concerned with sensation and innovation, but with the perfection of my style.

Art is the elimination of the unnecessary.

The responsibility of the artist consists in perfecting his work so that it may become attractively disinteresting.

I'm going to keep perfecting my craft and keep getting better.