Artist Quotes

We're not cameras, we're artists.

Though I know consciousness kind of boxes you in, it still encompasses the artists that I knew were conscious throughout history of music - they're the ones that you look at as the legends.

The job of the artist is not to resolve or beautify, but to hold complexities, to see and make clear.

A child's attitude toward everything is an artist's attitude.

Maybe 80 percent of what we conceive to be a song idea or the meaning of a song is not exactly what the artist meant most of the time. It's not bad - people can take what they want from it.

Lets just say that I think any person who aspires, presumes, or feels the calling to be an artist has a built-in sense of duty.

They shaved my head, eyebrows. This is not a sci-fi picture. It's not a fantasy picture. You're dealing with something that's supposed to be in reality. But we had a genius makeup artist.

I'm an artist, I'm not an academic folklorist.

In the great artist you see daring bound by discipline and discipline stretched by daring.

She died with a knife in her hand in her kitchen, where she had cooked for fifty years, and the death was solemnly listed in the newspaper as that of an artist.

If evil means to be self-motivated, to be the center of one’s own universe, to live on one’s own terms, then every artist, every thinker, every original mind, is evil.

In every society, the artists will be the ones who set themselves up as contrary to whatever the society expects.

The reason artists want to have works in museums is that we want our works to be seen by as many people as possible and we want our ideas to be understood in more complicated ways.

As an artist I have an even more abiding interest in the compact between the Arts and Government.

It is for the artist... in portrait painting to put on canvas something more than the face the model wears for that one day; to paint the man, in short, as well as his features.

Unless artists can remember what it was to be a little boy, they are only half complete as artist and as man.

I do not like to be thought of as avant-garde or some kind of didactic artist.

The aim of the poet, or other artist, is first to make something; and it's impossible to make something out of words and not communicate

As an artist, I've been very fortunate.

The aim of every artist is to arrest motion, which is life, by artificial means.

The form of government that is most suitable to the artist is no government at all. Authority over him and his art is ridiculous.

My mother was a housewife but she was also an artist. My father was an electrical engineer.

Some artists shrink from self-awareness, fearing that it will destroy their unique gifts and even their desire to create. The truth of the matter is quite opposite.

Artists are fiery; they do not weep.

I never really consider myself as a great artist. I just always like to draw.

The arrogance of the artist is a very profound thing, and it fortifies you.

The artist... may suppose that ideas are his chief currency; but unless he is also attuned to feelings, in life and in art, he will not move his fellow human beings.

The primary distinction of the artist is that he must actively cultivate that state which most men, necessarily, must avoid: the state of being alone.

The unique essence of being an artist is dying. Eveything looks the same. Now there’s a formula. And it works. - But it takes away from the reason we do it.

A great artist is not one who merely fits into a genre but one who defines the genre.

By the time I was 9, I had the conviction that everybody in the world was an artist except plumbers or people who delivered groceries.

Who knows how many artists fail because the light that shines through them is defracted in a thousand directions and not concentrated in a single beam?

Pointed criticism, if accurate, often gives the artist an inner sense of relief. The criticism that damages is that which disparages, dismisses, ridicules, or condemns.

The artist is the world's scapegoat.

The artist who imagines that he puts his best into a portrait in order to produce something good, which will be a pleasure to the sitter and to himself, will have some bitter experiences.

If you want to establish an international presence you can't do so from New York. You need the consecration of Paris.

I don't work from drawings. I don't make sketches and drawings and color sketches into a final painting.

As to what I would like to be, it is difficult to say. An artist of some kind. If nothing else I shall always study the Arts.

The Artist should not forget his mission, perhaps the most religious of all, of sustaining faith in the worthwhileness of art and thus of life.

I'm tired of trying to get other people to see into my brain. I'm done.

The modern artist must live by craft and violence. His gods are violent gods. Those artists, so called, whose work does not show this strife, are uninteresting.

You have to write badly to write at all. If it's crappy, I will rewrite it later. But it will be mine. You can hear the resonance of an artist who goes into herself.

At the moment, I have it planned as a six or seven year experiment, but the books will only ever appear in bursts like this every couple of years and only with the best quality artists.

In Paris, it used to feel like you were living in a museum. As beautiful as it was, it's still limited. But here you have just everything.

There is always an unconscious collaboration among artists.. ..the artist who imagine himself a Robinson Crusoe is either a primitive or a fool.

An artist is someone who makes art... He didn't invent it.

One of the things I want to do as an artist is to connect generations.

I feel sometimes an American artist must feel, like a baseball player or something - a member of a team writing American history.

When people ask me silly questions about my private life, I just say, I don't discuss that.

The first people who died of AIDS were artists. They were the most interesting people.