Art is never finished, only abandoned.
Learn a lot about the world and finish things, even if it is just a short story. Finish it before you start something else. Finish it before you start rewriting it. That's really important. It's to find out if you're going to be a writer or not, because that's one of the most important lessons. Most, maybe 90% of people, will start writing and never finish what they started. If you want to be a writer that's the hardest and most important lesson: Finish it. Then go back to fix it.
To finish a work? To finish a picture? What nonsense! To finish it means to be through with it, to kill it, to rid it of its soul, to give it its final blow the coup de grace for the painter as well as for the picture.
You don't fully understand the meaning of a work until the audience responds to it. Because the audience completes the circle, and adds a whole other shade of meaning. Whenever you view something, and this is why great works of art survive decades and centuries, is because there's a door within the work that allows the audience to walk through and complete the meaning of the work. An audience isn't passive, nor are they unintelligent.
Most people can start a short story or a novel. If you're a writer, you can finish them. Finish enough of them, and you may be good enough to be publishable.
My fondest wish, I suppose, would be to die at the keyboard right after finishing a book, perhaps with a little time off to have some really good sex. It's not, 'Oh, thank God, this is book No. 250. I can die now.'
The poet can only write the poems; it takes the reader to complete the meaning.
I'm not like some other writers: I have no actual urgent need or desire to add to what's written. You write it; if you're lucky, it's performed, and that's the end of the whole thing.
When I've painted a woman's bottom so that I want to touch it, then [the painting] is finished.
The different bodies of my work end themselves when there's no more discovery to be had.
I've always felt that there's a point where a piece seems to be alive, that is, living. And that's the point where I know the composition is finished.
Books and movies are never finished, only surrendered.
It's easy to get published once you have written a really good book and the hard part, 99 percent of what you need to worry about, is really finishing it.
I think I can recognize when a piece is at a state of completion. I always say to my wife, "Oh yeah, it's roughly finished." I've got it there. And then there's that whole other phase of moving on to properly amp up the sentences and sometimes to move stuff around as well.
And I don't have any specific steps to take because I don't start the same way every time. But there is a knowing when it's enough and you can leave it alone.
Artists are never complete people. But if it's art that completes them, then what is taken away?
But after that, I was extremely happy with the story and the look of the show at the beginning of season two - everything was working together. I felt like it was finished conceptually.
There's that old cliche that art is never finished, only abandoned. That's the nice thing about comics. It forces you to abandon it long before maybe you're ready to let it go.
They talk about a lot of different things, but I think they definitely have the same school of thought as my husband [Games Of Thrones creator David Benioff], which is that the difference between being a writer and not being a writer is finishing.
The only difference between a good writer who publishes a book and a good writer who doesn't is that the writer who publishes actually finished her book.
Sure. Some of the reviews have been very flattering, but the series is not finished yet. The end needs to be as strong as the beginning.
If you can't count on your heart having some kind of unified response, you can't count on anything. You use your heart as a barometer for your movie's completeness.
