Grand Falls, AZ

* an ongoing series of quotations – mostly from artists, to artists – that offers wisdom, inspiration, and advice for the sometimes lonely road we are on.

An artist can expect no help from his peers.  Any art form which is not his own must be intolerable to him and upsets him to the highest degree.  I have seen Claude Debussy ill at the orchestral rehearsals of Le Sacre.  His soul was discovering its splendour.  The form that he had given to his soul was suffering from another that did not accord with its own contours.  Therefore no help.  Neither from our peers nor from a mob incapable of consenting without revolt to a violent break with the habits it had begun to form.  Whence will help come?  From no one.  And it is then that art begins to use the obscure stratagems of nature in a kingdom which resists it, which even seems to fight it or turn its back upon it. 

Jean Cocteau in The Difficulty of Being

Comments are welcome!