Top 70 Chuck Close Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Inspiration is for amateurs. The rest of us just show up and get to work.”

— Chuck Close

Featured in: Inspirational Entrepreneurship Quotes, Inspirational Quotes, Hard Work Quotes, Excellence Quotes, Work Ethic Quotes

2. “If you’re overwhelmed by the size of a problem, break it down into smaller pieces.”

— Chuck Close

Featured in: Problem-Solving Quotes

3. “Inspiration is for amateurs. The rest of us just show up and get to work. If you wait around for the clouds to part and a bolt of lightening to strike you in the brain, you are not going to make an awful lot of work. All the best ideas come out of the process; they come out of the work itself.”

— Chuck Close

4. “Inspiration is for amateurs. professionals work everyday. Personally the best inspiration is a deadline.”

— Chuck Close

5. “Every child should have a chance to feel special.”

— Chuck Close

6. “The advice I like to give young artists, or really anybody who’ll listen to me, is not to wait around for inspiration. Inspiration is for amateurs; the rest of us just show up and get to work.”

— Chuck Close

7. “All the best ideas come out of the process; they come out of the work itself.”

— Chuck Close

8. “Never let anyone define what you are capable of by using parameters that don’t apply to you.”

— Chuck Close

9. “Having a routine, knowing what to do, gives me a sense of freedom and keeps me from going crazy. It’s calming.”

— Chuck Close

10. “You don’t have to reinvent the wheel every day. Today you will do what you did yesterday, and tomorrow you will do what you did today. Eventually you will get somewhere.”

— Chuck Close

11. “Those who are waiting for an epiphany to strike may wait forever. The artist simply goes to work, making art, both good and not so good.”

— Chuck Close

12. “Far more interesting than problem solving is problem creation.”

— Chuck Close

13. “Get yourself in trouble. If you get yourself in trouble, you don’t have the answers. And if you don’t have the answers, your solution will more likely be personal because no one else’s solutions will seem appropriate. You’ll have to come up with your own.”

— Chuck Close

14. “Art saved my life in two ways. It made me feel special, because I could do things my friends couldn’t, but it also gave me a way to demonstrate to my teacher that, despite the fact that I couldn’t write a paper or do math, I was paying attention.”

— Chuck Close

15. “A face is a road map of someone’s life. Without any need to amplify that or draw attention to it, there’s a great deal that’s communicated about who this person is and what their life experiences have been.”

— Chuck Close

16. “I don’t believe in inspiration. Inspiration is for amateurs. Some of the time you know you’re cooking, and the rest of the time, you just do it.”

— Chuck Close

17. “Inspiration is for amateurs.”

— Chuck Close

18. “There are so many artists that are dyslexic or learning disabled, it’s just phenomenal. There’s also an unbelievably high proportion of artists who are left-handed, and a high correlation between left-handedness and learning disabilities.”

— Chuck Close

19. “Ease is the enemy of the artist. When things get too easy, you’re in trouble.”

— Chuck Close

20. “Every idea occurs while you are working. If you are sitting around waiting for inspiration, you could sit there forever.”

— Chuck Close

21. “I’m not by nature a terribly intuitive person; I need to build a situation in which I will behave more intuitively, and that has really changed the life of my work – I found a way to trick myself into being intuitive.”

— Chuck Close

22. “I think I was driven to paint portraits to commit images of friends and family to memory. I have face blindness, and once a face is flattened out, I can remember it better.”

— Chuck Close

23. “There’s something Zen-like about the way I work – it’s like raking gravel in a Zen Buddhist garden.”

— Chuck Close

24. “Part of the joy of looking at art is getting in sync in some ways with the decision-making process that the artist used and the record that’s embedded in the work.”

— Chuck Close

25. “In the 7th grade, I made a 20-foot long mural of the Lewis and Clark Trail while we were studying that in history because I knew I wasn’t going to be able to spit back the names and the dates and all that stuff on a test.”

— Chuck Close

26. “I always thought that one of the reasons why a painter likes especially to have other painters look at his or her work is the shared experience of having pushed paint around.”

— Chuck Close

27. “Amateurs look for inspiration; the rest of us just get up and go to work.”

— Chuck Close

28. “Losing my father at a tender age was extremely important in being able to accept what happened to me later when I became a quadriplegic.”

— Chuck Close

29. “Inspiration is highly overrated. If you sit around and wait for the clouds to part, it’s not liable to ever happen. More often than not, work is salvation.”

— Chuck Close

30. “Most people are good at too many things. And when you say someone is focused, more often than not what you actually mean is they’re very narrow.”

— Chuck Close

31. “While photography is the easiest medium in which to be competent, it is the hardest in which to develop an idiosyncratic personal vision.”

— Chuck Close

32. “I absolutely hate technology, and I’m computer illiterate, and I never use any labor-saving devices although I’m not convinced that a computer is a labor-saving device.”

— Chuck Close

33. “In my art, I deconstruct and then I reconstruct, so visual perception is one of my primary interests.”

— Chuck Close

34. “If it looks like art, chances are it’s somebody else’s art.”

— Chuck Close

35. “I always thought problem solving was greatly overrated – and that the most important thing was problem creation.”

— Chuck Close

36. “A photograph doesn’t gain weight or lose weight, or change from being happy to being sad. It’s frozen. You can use it, then recycle it.”

— Chuck Close

37. “I’m poor white trash from the state of Washington.”

— Chuck Close

38. “Neurologically, I’m a quadriplegic, so virtually everything about my work has been driven by my learning disabilities, which are quite severe, and my lack of facial recognition, which I’m sure is what drove me to paint portraits in the first place.”

— Chuck Close

39. “Painting is the frozen evidence of a performance.”

— Chuck Close

40. “It doesn’t upset artists to find out that artists used lenses or mirrors or other aids, but it certainly does upset the art historians.”

— Chuck Close

41. “I build a painting by putting little marks together-some look like hot dogs, some like doughnuts.”

— Chuck Close

42. “From my point of view, photography never got any better than it was in 1840.”

— Chuck Close

43. “The thing that interests me about photography, and why it’s different from all other media, is that it’s the only medium in which there is even the possibility of an accidental masterpiece.”

— Chuck Close

44. “Painting is a lie. It’s the most magic of all media, the most transcendent. It makes space where there is no space.”

— Chuck Close

45. “I think most paintings are a record of the decisions that the artist made. I just perhaps make them a little clearer than some people have.”

— Chuck Close

46. “The reason I don’t like realist, photorealist, neorealist, or whatever, is that I am as interested in the artificial as I am in the real.”

— Chuck Close

47. “The camera is objective. When it records a face it can’t make any hierarchical decisions about a nose being more important than a cheek. The camera is not aware of what it is looking at. It just gets it all down.”

— Chuck Close

48. “At the same time that I’m finding the color world I want, I’m also trying to make the imagery, you know, by the nature of the strokes themselves.”

— Chuck Close

49. “I think women realise that I love women, and very often women seem to love me.”

— Chuck Close

50. “I think the problem with the arts in America is how unimportant it seems to be in our educational system.”

— Chuck Close