A Quote by William Zinsser

Never hesitate to imitate another writer. Imitation is part of the creative process for anyone learning an art or a craft. Bach and Picasso didn't spring full-blown as Bach or Picasso; they needed models. This is especially true of writing.

William Zinsser

Quote Topics

Another Anyone Art Bach Blown Craft Creative Creative Process Full Hesitate Imitate Imitation Learning Models Needed Never Part Picasso Process Spring True Writer Writing

Quote Author

William Zinsser
American - Writer
October 7, 1922 - May 12, 2015

Never hesitate to imitate another writer - every person learning a craft or an art needs models. Eventually you'll find your own voice and will shed the skin of the writer you imitated.

William Zinsser

No theoretician, no writer on art, however interesting he or she might be, could be as interesting as Picasso. A good writer on art may give you an insight to Picasso, but, after all, Picasso was there first.

David Hockney

I visited the Museum of Modern Art and viewed the exhibition of Picasso's sculptures, and I couldn't help but think about what it would be like to have a room full of school children explore Picasso's approach to making art.

Jerry Pinkney

There's a point where art is not subjective, and my example for that is Picasso. If you don't like Picasso, that's your problem.

Danny Huston

Picasso's always been such a huge influence that I thought when I started the cartoon paintings that I was getting away from Picasso, and even my cartoons of Picasso were done almost to rid myself of his influence.

Roy Lichtenstein

Composers most identified with the chamber music form are Corelli, Vivaldi, Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert and, of course, Bach. Of course, Bach. If there is any one composer who gives us reason and emotion, it is Bach.

Karen DeCrow

A German officer visited Picasso in his Paris studio during the Second World War. There he saw Guernica and, shocked at the modernist «chaos» of the painting, asked Picasso: «Did you do this?» Picasso calmly replied: «No, you did this!»

Slavoj Žižek

There is nothing like a Bach fugue to remove me from a discordant moment... only Bach hold up fresh and strong after repeated playing. I can always return to Bach when the other records weary me.

Edward Weston

If we had never met Picasso, would Cubism have been what it is? I think not. The meeting with Picasso was a circumstance in our lives.

Georges Braque

I carried on buying paintings, works of art, and Yves Saint Laurent, if I may say so, had a right of inspection. We even shared a common reading of the history of art. It would never have crossed Yves's mind to say to me, "Ah, I saw a Pablo Picasso . . ." He knew perfectly well what was interesting with Picasso, as did I.

Pierre Berge

When we come to understand architecture as the essential nature of all harmonious structure we will see that it is the architecture of music that inspired Bach and Beethoven, the architecture of painting that is inspiring Picasso as it inspired Velasquez, that it is the architecture of life itself that is the inspiration of the great poets and philosophers.

Frank Lloyd Wright

Imitation of the art of earlier centuries, as that done by Picasso and Modigliani , is carried on not to perpetuate ancient values but to demonstrate that new aesthetic orders now prevail.