Artist Quotes

The picture must all come out of the artist's inside, awareness of forms and figures... It is more than memory. It is the image as it lives in the consciousness, alive like a vision, but unknown.

The genuine artist is as much a dissatisfied person as the revolutionary, yet how diametrically opposed are the products each distills from his dissatisfaction.

No artist has ethical sympathies. An ethical sympathy in an artist is an unpardonable mannerism of style.

It is a shame to see in the work of an artist the limitations of his critics.

The artist is a member of the leisured classes who cannot pay for his leisure.

It is the job of each artist to believe in the possibility of meaningful, substantial, and sustainable change.

A subject that is beautiful in itself gives no suggestion to the artist. It lacks imperfection.

I am a human being and an artist: I really, simply, surely am.

It is in an artist's real interest to congratulate herself more often: not out of narcissism, but in her role as her own dear friend and advocate.

An artist who is too self-centered is liable to exhibit faults he abhors: carelessness, callousness, and even downright cruelty.

Artists know failure. It is not tragic that they know failure; it is only tragic if they know failure and little else.

The artist can't paint, sing, or dance without emotion: if he does, he is a machine masquerading as a person.

Love is the greatest touch-up artist of all.

Because she favours solitude and indwelling, an artist can live a significantly more claustrophobic life that she had ever intended.

A time comes, after years in the trenches, when the artist begins to fathom what his career has looked like so far and what it will look like if he continues as he's proceeded.

The artist is a god, but he is also an idiot. That is the human way.

The artist must reckon with his own character flaws, which do not disappear just because he has been called to be an artist.

The growth that an artist seeks is a fine combination of mastering craft, garnering an audience, maintaining one's mental health, and working mightily from a ever-expanding base of experience.

An ability to choose is a necessity for the artist.

Hurray for criticism, if it means that an artist's voice is heard. Let the wise artist invite criticism and survive it when it comes.

The artist must possess at least as much conviction as does his enemy, the dogmatic, mealy-mouthed, anti-art bigot.

An inability to choose is a hallmark of anxiety... The too-anxious artist, afraid to choose, will halt dead in the water.

Ambition is vital, but dangerous: it is a keen motive and a driving force, but over what edge can it drive the artist?

The artist's talent sits uneasy as an object of public acclaim, having been so long an object of private despair.

An artist's fine goal is to manifest a well-nigh heroic self-discipline, carefully attending to all that concerns him.

No muse shoots darts of insight into the unsuspecting artist.

It is the artist's job to revere beauty without being enchanted by it, to aim for it but also to aim for truth and goodness - just in case they, and not beauty, are the real things of value.

Boredom is the thing that regularly arrives between excitements and episodes of meaning: it is as natural as the tides, and in it an artist can drown.

If an artist has talent, he needs no other critic.

Perhaps all artists were, in a sense, housewives: tenders of the earth household.

It is perfectly possible to be a professional director or a professional writer and not to be an artist: merely a sort of executor of other people's ideas.

The definition of art has changed almost every day since the first artist created the first work at least fifty thousand years ago.

A successful artist is inspired by his muse, and his muse is inspired by the payment of a commission.

I'm a very restless person. I'm always doing something. The creative process never stops.

We're dealing with sophisticated customers. What's most important to these women is individuality. I have to create things she'll want to wear, no matter who she is.

I like light, color, luminosity. I like things full of color and vibrant.

I'd love to be considered a post-pop artist, but I love to have five or six different styles in every painting, just for the pleasure of the eye.

The first assumption of an art critic is that the artist meant to paint something else.

There's a number of hip-hop artists who are highly talented but politically retrograde.

I think the job of an artist is to be honest and fearless.

Artists of many diverse types began using simple forms to their own ends.

Music and art and poetry attune the soul to God.

The artist is seen like a producer of commodities, like a factory that turns out refrigerators.

The work of art expresses precisely those things which do not die. It must do so, however, in a form that bears witness to the artist's own era.

I think there are some artists whose works are misanthropic.

The worst thing you can do as an artist is to repeat yourself.

Children, like animals use all their senses to discover the world. Then artists come along and discover it the same way...Or now and then we'll hear from an artisit who's never lost it.

Artists should be aware that petty stroking could be the source of arrested productivity. An artist's job includes the avoidance of premature closure by the begged or gratuitous approval of others.

As self-governing entities, artists have a profound interest in change. Embracing change, we embrace growth and we embrace our future.

The overly-verbal artist is led by his understanding of things--rather than by direct observation of things as they are.