Top 74 Artist Imagination Quotes
#1. We do live, all of us, on many different levels, and for most artists the world of imagination is more real than the world of the kitchen sink.
Madeleine L'Engle
#2. The art wouldn't complain if we leave her alone. Losing a touch with art, however, is losing a touch with our imagination.
Pawan Mishra
#3. I don't paint what people expect,
I paint what my heart yearns to express.
Nikki Rowe
#4. The knowledge an artist possesses is an advanced form of daydreaming.
Marty Rubin
#5. What distinguishes a great artist from a weak one is first their sensibility and tenderness; second, their imagination, and third, their industry.
Salman Rushdie
#6. I think part of being an artist is having the ability to define your own responsibilities. I certainly wouldn't prescribe any. As far as I'm concerned, my biggest responsibility is to my own imagination. We're all conduits. Art preceded me, and it'll be here long after I'm gone.
Pierre Coupey
#7. Reverie is the groundwork of creative imagination; it is the privilege of the artist that with him it is not as with other men an escape from reality, but the means by which he accedes to it.
W. Somerset Maugham
#8. The literary artist will ... portray what he knows, and little else. Imagination is built upon knowledge, and his dreams will rest upon his facts. He is worth to the world just about what he has learned from it, and no more.
Elizabeth Stuart Phelps Ward
#9. All good art has contained both abstract and surrealist elements, just as it has contained both classical and romantic elements - order and surprise, intellect and imagination, conscious and unconscious. BOTH SIDES of the artist's personality must play their part.
Henry Moore
#10. A poet is an artist that paints pictures by mixing thought, imagination, and emotion with words.
Debasish Mridha
#11. I wished to be an artist," Ivanya confides to Shara. "But it simply didn't turn out that way. I didn't have the ... I'm not sure. The imagination, I suppose, or the ambition, or both. You have to be a bit outside things to make something new, but I was always very much inside things.
Robert Jackson Bennett
#12. Israel is a wonderful place to be an artist - a place where imagination flourishes. Israeli culture is refreshingly avant garde - making films, music, performance art and visual art that continues to push the envelope, inspire and empower.
Ryan Kavanaugh
#13. Luckily, the world is absolutely full of interesting things to do. Only lack of imagination, or lack of energy, stand in the way. Otherwise each of us could be a poet or musician, an inventor or explorer, an amateur scholar, scientist, artist, or collector.
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
#14. The artist must bow to the monster of his own imagination.
Richard Wright
#15. The complete recipe for imagination is absolute boredom.
Criss Jami
#16. A picture is first of all a product of the imagination of the artist; it must never be a copy.
Edgar Degas
#17. Creating a world within the imagination one day at a time through words and colors.
Peggy A. Borel
#18. The image of the "self-destructive artist" is a culturally implanted kill switch. Ignore it. Imagination is a weapon; you have been indoctrinated with these images so that if you discover the weapon, you will use it on yourself and save them the trouble.
Jason Louv
#19. It has been my personal experience that as I allow the painting to speak I become lost, it is delicious and at the same time frightening. The best ones, to me, have a life of their own.
Luther E. Vann
#20. A great artist paints a picture on the canvas of his mind using the colors of his love and imagination before transferring the image onto a real canvas.
Debasish Mridha
#21. To be a writer is to constantly evolve and keep ones imagination expanding and that's what make a great author and artist.
Adona M. Pierre
#22. An artist must have imagination. An artist who does not use his imagination is a mechanic.
Robert Henri
#23. Artists are ... stubborn egomaniacs who are mysteriously - and sometimes correctly - certain that the world needs to know all about the figments of their imaginations and who gear their lives to getting those figments into circulation.
Jon Pareles
#24. Generosity is a two-edged virtue for an artist - it nourishes his imagination but has a fatal effect on his routine.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
#25. The function of the artist is to organize the facets of life according to his imagination.
Romare Bearden
#26. The fact that all of us die anyway (the rumor turns out to be true) is a mere detail in the celestial glow of imagination. The artist's eyes destroy death.
Herbert Gold
#27. A good artist does not just make imaginations beautiful to the mind, but also more pleasant to the eye with a superb visible touch of excellence.
Ernest Agyemang Yeboah
#28. Thoughts are like burning stars, and ideas, they flood, they stretch the universe.
Criss Jami
#29. A painting is above all a product of the artist's imagination, it must never be a copy. If, at a later stage, he wants to add two or three touches from nature, of course it doesn't spoil anything.
Edgar Degas
#30. Here, where we reach the sphere of mathematics, we are among processes which seem to some the most inhuman of all human activities and the most remote from poetry. Yet it is here that the artist has the fullest scope of his imagination.
Havelock Ellis
#31. Express your vision,
define your goals,
proceed with precision
till the end is known.
Inspiration is your map,
passion is your driver,
imagination is the vehicle
and art is the destination.
Matshona Dhliwayo
#33. The artist's imagination may wander far from nature. But as long as it is a living, moving power in his brain, isn't it just as real as any other natural phenomenon? The artist justifies his existence only when he can transform his imagination into truth.
Bill Vaughan
#34. Through artistry, imagination not only allows one to express their creativity, but also their soul.
Donald L. Hicks
#35. To cook, and to do it well, every talent must be used; the strength of a prize-fighter, the imagination of a poet, the brain of an empire builder, the patience of Job, the eye and the touch of an artist, and, to turn your mistakes into edible assets, the cleverness of a politician.
Anne Ellis
#36. It art can only succeed through the cooperating imagination and intelligence of its consumers, who fill out, for themselves, the artist's world and make it round, and whose own special genius partly determine the ultimate glory of it.
William H Gass
#37. An author is an artist who paints a picture in the imagination of the reader.
Darrell Case
#38. Mistress Creation keeps calling my name ... i long for her, and she, for me ... we will be reunited soon. In the interim, i bide my time dreaming of her, writing about her and stretching her across the vast landscape of my imagination. "Soon", i whisper to her, "Soon
Jaeda DeWalt
#39. Despite the hundreds of attempts, police terror and the concentration camps have proved to be more or less impossible subjects for the artist; since what happened in them was beyond the imagination, it was therefore also beyond art and all those human values on which art is traditionally based.
Al Alvarez
#40. The real purveyors of the news are artists, for artists are the ones who infuse fact with perception, emotion, and appreciation ... We are beginning to realize that emotions and imagination are more potent in shaping public sentiment and opinion than information and reason.
John Dewey
#41. 'Super 8' was a lot of fun. It was a lot of fun working with J.J. Abrams, who I think is a kid in a grown man's body, which is a great ingredient for any artist in our business. You have to be a kid at heart to be able to make believe, and his imagination is phenomenal.
Glynn Turman
#42. All great scientists have, in a certain sense, been great artists; the man with no imagination may collect facts, but he cannot make great discoveries.
Karl Pearson
#43. I make art when I can't gather the words to say.
Nikki Rowe
#44. He's got to have the ability, and it seems to be fairly rare, to see things as they are and at the same time as they might have been. What we mean is the eye of an artist.
Jack Finney
#45. A director is a man, therefore he has ideas; he is also an artist, therefore he has imagination. Whether they are good or bad, it seems to me that I have an abundance of stories to tell. And the things I see, the things that happen to me, continually renew the supply.
Michelangelo Antonioni
#46. There is in every artist's studio a scrap heap of discarded works in which the artist's discipline prevailed against his imagination.
Robert Breault
#47. Vergil preferred to give a few touches, and to allow the imagination of his readers to fill out the picture: that is one reason for his almost universal appeal. He changes each of his readers into a poet or an artist.
Gilbert Highet
#48. All the mistakes committed by artists are due to their having separated themselves from truth, believing that their imagination is stronger. There is nothing stronger than nature. With nature in front of us we can do everything well.
Joaquin Sorolla
#49. Artists with serious aspirations need to be left alone to follow the course of their own imagination.
Robert Genn
#50. All of the stuff I can't afford to do on a TV budget, I just put into the comic book because you're really only limited in a comic by your artist's imagination.
Marc Guggenheim
#51. A distinction is made between artists who work directly from nature and those who work purely from imagination. Neither if these methods should be preferred to the exclusion of the other. Often both are used in turn by the same man ...
Henri Matisse
#52. Any artist is insulted by the suggestion that art is merely a matter of recording reality, and knows that it is impossible to explain how imagination can transform not only events and people, but the artist as well, into quite different "realities".
Joan Lindsay
#53. I am enough of an artist to draw freely upon my imagination. Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world.
Albert Einstein
#54. Today the function of the artist is to bring imagination to science and science to imagination, where they meet, in the myth.
Cyril Connolly
#55. The higher the artist, the fewer the gestures. The fewer the tools, the greater the imagination. The greater the will, the greater the secret failure.
Ben Okri
#56. For some reason I can't explain, artist and musicians tend to look younger than our age. Being in music, you need this youthful sense of discovery and wonder for what you're doing and keep your imagination open. That's a youthful way of looking at life and I think that reflects in how you age.
Joshua Bell
#57. If you paint the leaf on a tree without using a model, your imagination will only supply you with a few leaves; but Nature offers you millions, all on the same tree. No two leaves are exactly the same. The artist who paints only what is in his mind must very soon repeat himself.
Pierre-Auguste Renoir
#59. The real truthfulness of all works of imagination, sculpture, painting, and written fiction, is so purely in the imagination, that the artist never seeks to represent positive truth, but the idealized image of a truth
Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton
#60. I can create my imagination coz i am because Artist.!
Manish Suthar
#61. I can create my imagination because i am an Artist.!
Manish Suthar
#62. A stock certificate is not a tool, like a shovel, or a commodity, like a pound of cheese. What we sell a customer is not a share in a business, but a view of the Elysian Fields. A financier is a creative artist. Our function is to stimulate the imagination. We are poets!
Jean Giraudoux
#63. However, an artist is limited only by his own skill and imagination. He's in total control of his art. Whereas nature is the artist here, and I merely try to interpret and manage her design.
Crit Kincaid
#64. Care of the soul may take the form of living in a fully embodied imagination, being an artist at home and at work. You don't have to be a professional in order to bring art into the care of your soul; anyone can have an art studio at home, for instance.
Thomas Moore
#66. The artist's duty is to defend the exceptional: the imagination.
Marty Rubin
#67. Every production of an artist should be the expression of an adventure of his soul.
W. Somerset Maugham
#68. The artist who uses the least of what is called imagination will be the greatest.
Pierre-Auguste Renoir
#69. The imagination of the genius vastly surpasses his intellect; the intellect of the academic vastly surpasses his imagination
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
#70. Memory cannot produce a picture that Imagination has not retouched; and her pictures, even the ones least touched by Imagination, are no mere photographs, but the world of an artist.
Henry De Vere Stacpoole
#71. This tremendous world I have inside of me. How to free myself, and this world, without tearing myself to pieces. And rather tear myself to a thousand pieces than be buried with this world within me.
Franz Kafka
#72. As an artist, her imagination isn't fettered by the constraints of reality.
Sarah Cross
#73. Each one seems to be, in some way, essentially different from the others, and each is a surprise to me. I think that making books, or any kind of art, might also be like mining. The artist digs into his or her life and imagination and never knows what they'll find. That's the adventure.
Mordicai Gerstein
#74. To get such beauty from something that has been produced from the artist's own imagination appealed to me enormously,
Solomon R. Guggenheim
