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I think writers with actual intentions generally end up saying things they already thought they knew, and I'm not much interested in reducing my vocation as a poet to something like propagandist. I write poems to find things out, not to communicate some previously ossified conclusion.

-poet Scott Cairns in an interview with Image

It is interesting to note how many artists have had physical problems to overcome, deformities, lameness, terrible loneliness.... It is chastening to realize that those who have no physical flaw, who move through life in step with their peers, who are bright and beautiful, seldom become artists. The unending paradox is that we do learn through pain.

--Madeleine L’Engle

"Let us sing now, not in order to enjoy a life of leisure, but in order to lighten your labors.  You should sing as wayfarers do--sing, but continue your journey.  Do not be lazy, but sing to make your joruney more enjoyable.  Sing, but keep going."

--St. Augustine

"Novelists write out of their deepest selves.   Whatever is there in them comes out willy-nilly, and it is not a conscious act on their part. If I were to consciously say, ‘This book shall now be a Christian book,’ then the act would become conscious and not out of myself. It would either be a very peculiar thing to do--like saying, ‘I shall now be humble’--or it would be simple propaganda...

"Propaganda occurs when a writer is directly trying to persuade, and in that sense, propaganda is not bad. When I think of Who Am I? (1992), I think of propaganda. But persuasion is not story, and when you try to make a story out of persuasion then you’ve done something wrong to the story. You’ve violated the essence of what a story is."

I ask, "Would you then say that you are a Christian writer?" expecting her to quail at the label.

But she does not.... "A Christian first," she says. "I have a vocation as a writer; that is my calling. But a Christian first."

--from an interview with Katherine Paterson in Books and Culture

Thanks to Fritz Liedtke for forwarding us some of his favorite excerpts about art, artists, and artmaking.

The story itself should force its moral upon you. You find out what the moral is by writing the story....

--C.S. Lewis

An unliterary man may be defined as one who reads books once only.

--C.S. Lewis

Poetry may be defined as a way of remembering what it would impoverish us to forget.

--Robert Frost

If you lose yourself in your work, you find who you are.

--Frederick Buechner

If you express the best you have in you in your work, it is more than just the best you have in you that you are expressing.

--Frederick Buechner

Thanks to Geoff Pope for sending this one along:

The soul should always stand ajar, ready to welcome the ecstatic experience.

--Emily Dickinson

Thanks to Margaret Smith for sending this one along:

There is no lighter burden, nor more agreeable, than a pen. Other pleasures fail us, or wound us while they charm; but the pen we take up rejoicing, and lay down with satisfaction; for it has the power to advantage not only its lord and master but many others as well, even though they be not born for thousands of years to come.... As there is none among earthly delights more noble than literature, so there is none more lasting,  none gentler or more faithful; none that accompanies its possessor through the vicissitudes of life at so small a cost of effort or anxiety.

-- Petrarch

I think one's art goes as far and as deep as one's love goes. I see no reason for painting but that. If I have anything to offer, it is my emotional contact with the place where I live and the people I do.

--Andrew Wyeth, quoted in
Andrew Wyeth: A Secret Life by Richard Meryman

I do not so much write a book as sit up with it, as with a dying friend.   During visiting hours, I enter its room with dread and sympathy for its many disorders.  I hold its hand and hope it will get better.  This tender relationship can change in a twinkling.  If you skip a visit or two, a work in progress will turn on you.

- Annie Dillard, from The Writing Life

The thing that makes a creative person is to be creative and that is all there is to it.

- Edward Albee

Whatever creativity is, it is in part a solution to a problem.

- Brian Aldiss

A hunch is creativity trying to tell you something.

-Frank Capra

First, I do not sit down at my desk to put into verse something that is already clear in my mind. If it were clear in my mind, I should have no incentive or need to write about it. We do not write in order to be understood; we write in order to understand.

- Robert Cecil Day-Lewis

It's like driving a car at night. You never see further than your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.

- E. L. Doctorow

Most people die before they are fully born. Creativeness means to be born before one dies.

- Erich Fromm

Creativity represents a miraculous coming together of the uninhibited energy of the child with its apparent opposite and enemy-the sense of order imposed on the disciplined adult intelligence.

-Norman Podhoretz

...if revelation is regarded simply as a system of truths about God and an explanation of how the universe came into existence, what will eventually happen to it, what is the purpose of Christian life, what are its moral norms, what will be the rewards of the virtuous, an so on, then Christianity is in effect reduced to a world view, at times a religious philosophy and little more, sustained by a more or less elaborate cult, by a moral discipline and a strict code of law. 'Experience' of the inner meaning of Christian revelation will necessarily be distorted and diminished in such a theological setting. What will such experience be? Not so much a living theological experience of the presence of God in the world and in mankind through the mystery of Christ, but rather a sense of security in one's own correctness: a feeling of confidence that one has been saved, a confidence which is based on the reflex awareness that one holds the correct view of the creation and purpose of the world and that one's behavior is of a kind to be rewarded in the next life. Or, perhaps, since few can attain this level of self-assurance, then the Christian experience becomes one of anxious hope--a struggle with occasional doubt of the "right answers", a painful and constant effort to meet the severe demands of morality and law, and a somewhat desperate recourse to the sacraments which are there to help the weak who must constantly fall and rise again. This of course is a sadly deficient account of true Christian experience, based on a distortion of the true import of Christian revelation.

-Thomas Merton, Zen and the Birds of Appetite

(This quote was included in an e-mail from recording artist Sam Phillips in answer to an inquiry about her own Christian perspective.   In this editor's opinion, the quote is quite relevant to any understanding of Ms. Phillips' own artistic metaorphosis over the years.  If you haven't explored her work, you've missed some of the most interesting and challenging songwriting by any artist--Christian or otherwise--in the past twenty years.)

But it sometimes happens that it is not the poet himself, but another, who discovers the wider relevance [of the poet's work]. If so, he is justified in so interpreting it in the place where he finds it; for the relevance was always potentially there, and once seen and recognized it is actually there forever. This does not, of course, mean that we can read into poets anything that we jolly well like; any significance that contradicts the whole tenor of their work is obviously suspect. But it means that in a very real sense poets do sometimes write more greatly than they know; and it also means that every poet's work enriches not only those to whom he transmits the tradition, but also all those from whom he himself derived it.

    - Dorothy Sayers, "Dante and Charles Williams", The Whimsical Christian

One may have a blazing hearth in one's soul and yet no one ever comes to sit by it. Passersby see only a wisp of smoke rising from the chimney and continue on their way. - Vincent Van Gogh

Here's an interesting clip from Salon Magazine 1999's interview with film director Terry Gilliam (The Fisher King, Twelve Monkeys, Brazil):

INTERVIEWER: At one point in your life, you studied to be a Presbyterian missionary. Where would you be today if you had taken that path? Any regrets?

GILLIAM: No regrets, but I may have gone to darkest Africa. The idea of being a missionary was a chance to see the world and have an excuse to do so. I basically got fed up with the church because they couldn't take a joke. I was a real little zealot, but was constantly making jokes about God. I used to say: "What kind of God is this that you believe in that can't take my little jokes?" The people in the church were appalled by this. So I walked away.

...And when Jesus comes along saying that the greatest command of all is to love God and to love our neighbor, he too is asking us to pay attention. If we are to love God, we must first stop, look, and listen for him in what is happening around us and inside us. If we are to love our neighbors, before doing anything else we must see our neighbors. With our imagination as well as our eyes, that is to say like artists, we must see not just their faces but the life behind and within their faces. Here it is love that is the frame we see them in.

Frederick Buechner, Whistling in the Dark

Jeremiah 15:19 in NIV:

"Therefore this is what the LORD says:

'If you repent, I will restore you

that you may serve me;

if you utter worthy, not worthless, words,

you will be my spokesman.

Let this people turn to you,

but you must not turn to them.' "

Art happens when what is seen is mixed with what is on the inside of the artist.

Chaim Potok, My Name is Asher Lev

It’s a relational experience. Art happens somewhere along a relational arc, between what you are and the object of creation.

Chaim Potok in an interview in Mars Hill Review

The lesson here is simply that courting approval, even that of peers, puts a dangerous amount of power in the hands of the audience. Worse yet, the audience is seldom in a position to grant (or withhold) approval on the one issue that really counts —namely, whether or not you’re making progress in your work. They’re in a good position to comment on how they’re moved (or challenged or entertained) by the finished product, but have little knowledge or interest in your process. Audience comes later. The only pure communication is between you and your work.

--from "Art and Fear" by David Bayles and Ted Orland, p 47

You make a movie for people to see. But to provoke them, to engage them in some way--that's the best thing I think you can do. The worst criticism in the world doesn't come from a movie critic. It's an audience member who uses you as two hours of air conditioning because you fit the time slot before the pool opens. And then never tells another person about what you've done. That is the most damning thing, that your sphere of influence lasts only until they get to their car door.

--film director Neil Labute