Creative Sanctuary Quotes

When art find no temple open, it takes refuge in the workshop.

In my studio I'm as happy as a cow in her stall. That's the only place where everything is all right.

This tree house became our galleon, our spaceship, our Fort Apache...Ours was a learning tree. Through it we learned to trust ourselves and our abilities.

I always prefer to work in the studio. It isolates people from their environment

When I was young, there was never any space for me to get attention of my own that wasn't negative. Art, and the practice of making art, was the only space that was mine alone, where I could be anyone and do anything, where just by using my head and my hands I could cry, or laugh, or get pissed off.

The ivory tower of the artist may be the only stronghold left for human values, cultural treasures, man’s cult of beauty.

You must have a room, or a certain hour or so a day, where you don't know what was in the newspapers that morning a place where you can simply experience and bring forth what you are and what you might be.

There was something about the Cleveland Play House that was the holiest place - you know, with the ghost light on the stage and the brick. It was just the most beautiful theater in the world.

Patriotism is the last refuge of the sculptor.

There's a vulnerability in music but you've also got to protect your sacred place and have a place you can still retire to that no one else knows about. So that's a thing I just try to balance.

My studio, nicknamed 'Funny Farm,' is in a hidden location. It's very private. Not only do I create my photography there, but it is also where I write my books and create music.

...sometimes we enter art to hide within it. It is where we can go to save ourselves, where a third-person voice protects us.

No poet is ever completely lost. He has the secret of his childhood safe with him, like some secret cave in which he can kneel. And, when we read his poetry, we can join him there.

I have the barn, it's just kind of like a studio. Almost all artists have la studio to work in, and that's really what it is. A place to get away. I'll spend maybe four days out there if I can, just completely immersed - like where I don't bathe or brush my teeth for a few days, just get up and make coffee and experiment until the sun goes down.

As much as I love performing, nothing juices me up creatively like being in my own studio for an extended period. Songs, ideas, even paintings are pouring out of me. My inspiration and usual subject matter: life.

It so happened that Lucy, who found daily life rather chaotic, entered a more solid world when she opened the piano. She was then no longer either deferential or patronizing; no longer either a rebel or a slave.

I always forbade everyone to clean my studios, dust them, not only for fear they would disturb my things, but especially because I always counted on the protection of dust. It's my ally. I always let it settle where it likes. It's like a layer of protection.

Reality has become so intolerable, she said, so bleak, that all I can paint now are the colors of my dreams.

I'm not very much an open book, I do really express myself only through my music and when I'm in that safe environment and I don't have to let anything go out of the studios that I don't want to go out.

I've never had an exclusive relationship to a room where I write. I used to want one.

I'm removed in my real life, and unable to express certain things face to face. So I have always found myself in this fantasy world. That's why I started writing songs and stories from a very young age. I'd much rather walk around anonymously cooking up tales than face the people that I have known forever.

I feel like I live in my own little world, to be honest. I mean, I love my record, but I don't feel tied to it. I sort of created my own little universe in the studio, and that's why all of those musicians who made a living in the Nashville music scene loved coming over to my place so much.

I draw the line at letting people into my songwriting cave. To me, that's where the alchemy happens and where the mystery is.

I've gone to Yaddo many times, I've worked at the Rockefeller Foundation's Center for Scholars and Artists in Bellagio. That these are places of beauty and of changed landscape is helpful - but far more important for me is that they offer what I feel as a monastic luxury: undisturbed time.

Every movie I make. That’s my hideout, the place I don’t quite understand, but feel most at home.