A Quote by Adam Gopnik

For all the years I'd spent talking about pictures, the truth was that I had no idea how to draw or what it felt like to do it. I would mistrust a poetry critic who couldn't produce a rhyming couplet. Could one write about art without knowing how to draw?

Adam Gopnik

Quote Topics

About Art Could Critic Draw Felt Had How Idea Knowing Like Mistrust No Idea Pictures Poetry Produce Rhyming Spent Talking Truth Without Would Write Years

Quote Author

Adam Gopnik
American - Writer

I like art; if I could just draw pictures all day, I would, but I can't; I'm horrible. I practiced at it, still didn't get better - gave it up. I'm good with words, though, so I write music, poetry; sometimes I just journal in my phone.

Iman Shumpert

Particularly when I thought of myself as a Wallace Stevens acolyte, I wrote very difficult poetry and I was really guilty of not knowing what I was talking about. I was going for a kind of clever verbal effect. I was trying to sound linguistically or verbally interesting. I had a sense, I guess, from just reading a lot of poetry of how a poem would start and how it would end but really I didn't know what I was doing. It had very little connection to my life.

Billy Collins

What did I care about my hammer, about my bolt, about thirst or death? There was, on one star, on one planet, on mine, the Earth, a little prince to be consoled! I took him in my arms. I rocked him. I told him, 'The flower you love is not in danger...I'll draw you a muzzle for your sheep...I'll draw you a fence for your flower...I' I didn't know what to say. How clumsy I felt! I didn't know how to reach him, where to find him...It's so mysterious, the land of tears.

Antoine de Saint-Exupery

To be fond of learning is to draw close to wisdom. To practice with vigor is to draw close to benevolence. To know the sense of shame is to draw close to courage. He who knows these three things knows how to cultivate his own character. Knowing how to cultivate his own character, he knows how to govern other men. Knowing how to govern other men, he knows how to govern the world, its states, and its families.

Confucius

Fashion it's not just about learning how to draw pretty pictures, and how to sew, it's everything that makes up your life.

Tim Gunn

My uncle, who's an art teacher, took me under his wing and gave me a really strong foundation in art. I spent summers with him, and he taught me how to draw, how to see, how to mix colors, how to use different mediums and perspective, and so forth.

Kadir Nelson

It's easier to write about heartbreak after you've had your heart broken. You have more material to draw from, you can extrapolate from your own experiences and make reasonable assumptions about how your characters would feel and act.

Patrick Rothfuss

Don't worry about how you 'should' draw it. Just draw it the way you see it.

Tim Burton

I'm very interested in the question of how we perceive something, how consciousness goes from one thing, like looking at you in your black hat to what it might mean to my imagination and how I would draw that or write that, how I would subjectify you? It's something that is endlessly interesting to me.

Hilton Als

I was never a doodler. I had never felt a drive to draw... Actually when I was a kid, I really hated art classes. My father was a kind of a Sunday painter and he liked to draw and do water colors. So, I would bring him my assignment and he would do them for me, because it was easy for him to do.

Wade Guyton

I'm a comic book artist. So I think to myself, what do I like to draw? I like to draw hot chicks, fast cars and cool guys in trench coats. So that's what I write about.

Frank Miller

I'm a comic book artist. So I think to myself, what do I like to draw? I like to draw hot chicks, fast cars and cool guys in trench coat. So that's what I write about.

Frank Miller

I've always been sort of entrepreneurial. ... I felt that I needed to learn how to write and produce so I could write my own thing and not worry about Hollywood finding me.

Larry Wilmore

If you think about it enough to have a really articulate answer, you're not doing it right. That's how I feel about art. If your thought process could take you to knowing exactly what you're doing and why, there would be no point in making the art. It would become like propaganda. It's more nebulous than that.

Daniel Clowes

I could draw ideas. I remember writing a paper for a seminar class. I remember writing a paper about - and this is going to sound really sort of pretentious, but that's where my mind was at the time - how acting and the performing artist can really be like a Bodhisattva, how they can communicate ultimately an idea in a way that can move and shift things. And that was wonderful. I didn't know many classes where I could try and relate the thing that I really loved and wanted to do into an intellectual idea, and that happened to be one of them.