Top 100 Artist S Life Quotes
#1. In an artist's life, death is perhaps not the most difficult thing.
Vincent Van Gogh
#2. It's the artist's duty to have an artist's life, somehow to obtain time and freedom and then to muster the desire and discipline to make good work out of the life, whether that goodness is in the world's aesthetics, its radicalism, its candor, its singularity, or its universality.
Stephanie Mills
#3. When I was 18, I lived in Greenwich Village, New York, for nine months. At that time, I wanted to change the world, not through architecture, but through painting. I lived the artist's life, mingling with poets and writers, and working as a waiter. I was intrigued by the aliveness of the city.
Christian De Portzamparc
#4. It makes my makeup artist's life easier. [Plus] it makes my eyes look a little more open on TV, which is where I happen to work right now.
Kelly Ripa
#5. The artist's life nourishes itself on the particular, the concrete.
Sylvia Plath
#6. Every work of art is aggressive, Isabella. And every artist's life is a small war or a large one, beginning with oneself and one's limitations. To achieve anything you must first have ambition and then talent, knowledge, and finally the opportunity.
Carlos Ruiz Zafon
#7. The observation of nature is part of an artist's life, it enlarges his form [and] knowledge, keeps him fresh and from working only by formula, and feeds inspiration.
Henry Moore
#8. The artist's life is to be where life is, active life, found in neither ivory tower nor concrete shelter; he must be out listening to everything, looking at everything, and thinking it all out afterward.
Sean O'Casey
#9. There is an appalling amount of mechanical work in the artist's life ... Talent is mysterious, but the qualities that guard, foster, and direct it are not unlike those of a good quartermaster.
Anne Truitt
#10. At the core of everything I do, is not my ambition but my desire to make music. Somewhere along the line I stumbled onto something that was bigger, different than anything I had ever imagined, which was actually being involved with other people. I just don't live the average artist's life.
El-P
#11. There comes a moment in a young artist's life when he knows he has to bring something to the stage from within himself. He has to put in something in order to be able to take something.
Mikhail Baryshnikov
#12. Love is the spirit that motivates the artist's journey. The love may sublime, raw, obsessive, passionate, awful. or thrilling, but whatever its quality, it's a powerful motive in the artist's life.
Eric Maisel
#13. They say that art comes from the soul. The more drama in an artist's life, the more he can draw on for his art. Van Gogh and Picasso had troubled souls, but poor Steve Kaufman has been shot once, stabbed 3 times - all by women. That is a lot of drama for great art.
Robin Leach
#14. The idea of a talent that was bigger than an artist's ability to choose to use it, that would dictate the artist's life more than the artist could dictate, was interesting to me.
Alexander Chee
#16. An artist's life is supposed to lead toward his masterpiece, not away from it.
John Thomas Sladek
#17. The naturalness of life ... the sense of community is, I think, a very important factor in an artist's life.
Barbara Hepworth
#18. Make your life your art. It doesn't have to be that you're an artist. I know I talk about art a lot, but I mean a very broad thing with that. You could be a veterinarian, that's your art. Find your art; find your thing you love.
Gerard Way
#19. This is the story of an electrically alive young woman on the brink of her adult life. An artist equally attuned to the light as the shadows, with a limitless hunger for experience and knowledge, completely unafraid of life's more frightening opportunities.
Elizabeth Winder
#20. You have a strange relationship with calamity when you're a writer: you write about it; as an artist, you objectify and fetishize it. You render life into material, and that's a creepy thing to do.
Tony Kushner
#21. History has proven that it's impossible to crush the artist. There's always gonna be a need for somebody to write a poem or sing a song about something, about life - that makes it real. There's the word that goes beyond the word.
Mos Def
#22. Artists with the lack of proper education and experience of working from life will copy whatever is visible on the photograph, without knowing what's underneath. As a result, instead of creating the in-depth and full of character portrait, they draw a mask with no soul.
Igor Babailov
#23. A garden is a result of an arrangement of natural materials according to aesthetic laws; interwoven throughout are the artist's outlook on life, his past experiences, his affections, his attempts, his mistakes and his successes.
Roberto Burle Marx
#24. Being an artist is not exactly the most universally respected, or secure thing to do with your life. It can be frightening and you can feel that you're taking a lot of risks just with your own life, and your family's security. But the rewards outweigh those things.
Joan Osborne
#25. 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
#26. I say that I suffer from what Rosalind Krauss was calling the post-medium condition, where an artist essentially employs several mediums in order to bring to life whatever specific ideas that they have. For me it's always been that way.
Rashid Johnson
#27. That's part of the requirement for me to be an artist is that you're trying to share your personal existence with others and trying to illuminate modern life, trying to understand life.
Francis Ford Coppola
#28. As an artist you organize your life so that you get a chance to paint, a window of time, but that's no guarantee you'll create anything worth all your effort. You're always haunt by the idea you're wasting your life.
Chuck Palahniuk
#29. The work of the artist is not so much what you say or what you know, it's recognizing what you know. That's what life is about. That's what photography is about. You see something, or you hear someone say something, and you say That is a truth. You know, deep in you. That's when you start shooting.
Sylvia Plachy
#30. It's a shock for me to go through and see all those years of painting my life, which is very personal for me. It's a very difficult thing for an artist to look back at his work.
Andrew Wyeth
#31. Artists were always referred to as great artists. I thought that's what the profession was. One word: great-artist. There wasn't one moment in my life when I thought I wanted to be anything else.
Hedda Sterne
#32. If you're an artist, you want to draw from real life; you want to draw from experiences, emotion, and it's something that a lot of musicians juggle with. I've always found it so fascinating.
Damien Chazelle
#33. Yes, but the artist?" said Nigel almost fiercely. "He's different, you know he is. He's driven by some compulsion: if he can't do what he knows he has to do with his life he might as well be dead. He's got to break through the world's indifference, or else break himself against it. He can't help it.
Mary Stewart
#34. I'm not the type of artist that's like, 'Let's go out and party and dance your life away!' I think those artists are so cool, but I wanted meaning in my songs and they have messages.
Claudia Lee
#35. This is the artist, then, life's hungry man, the glutton of eternity, beauty's miser, glory's slave.
Tom Wolfe
#36. It is only too true that a lot of artists are mentally ill - it's a life which, to put it mildly, makes one an outsider. I'm all right when I completely immerse myself in work, but I'll always remain half crazy.
Vincent Van Gogh
#37. She pours sugar on her life
and drinks the artist's marrow
in the bone of her glass and she lives.
Kelli Russell Agodon
#38. I'm very happy with my lot. I like the variety I get. You don't want to spend your life repeating yourself. It's true of any kind of artist, you want to explore as wide and far as you can go, so that's what I've been trying to do.
Toni Collette
#39. It's an old and sad story. The artist lets the bottle or the dope get between him and his art. He spends half his life achieving success and the second half throwing it all away. How many talents have self-destructed before him? How many more will follow in his wake?
H. Joaquin Jackson
#40. To be an artist, you don't have to compose music or paint or be in the movies or write books. It's just a way of living. It has to do with paying attention, remembering, filtering what you see and answering back, participating in life.
Viggo Mortensen
#41. The advantage of having an artistic tradition is that the younger artist could see an organic link between the real life of one's country and its art work which is a sublimation of that life.
Kuo Pao Kun
#42. Know what you want and try to go beyond your own expectations....set a very high goal, one that will be difficult to achieve. Because that is an artist's mission: to go beyond one's limits. An artist who desires very little and achieves it has failed in life.
Paulo Coelho
#43. I love Darius Rucker. He's a true artist, a great songwriter who can play his instrument, sing and write about his life.
Randy Houser
#44. You start to become successful, and everybody starts to drive your money train to the bank, and they're not thinking anymore about what you want as an artist or if any of that even matters to you. It genuinely upsets people in my life that I don't care about money, and that's not my problem.
Lady Gaga
#45. An artist's work is one long conversation with life.
Marty Rubin
#46. After reading Eminem's autobiography, which I did because I'm so interested in him as an artist, I respect him a lot. Even though he seems angry and mad, he's had to fight so many demons in his life.
Taryn Manning
#47. The artist's mission must not be to produce an irrefutable solution to a problem, but to compel us to love life in all its countless and inexhaustible manifestations.
Leo Tolstoy
#48. Citizen's Band radio renders one accessible to a wide variety of people from all walks of life. It should not be forgotten that all walks of life include conceptual artists, dry cleaners, and living poets.
Fran Lebowitz
#49. Be a great artist especially when you draw your life's picture.
Debasish Mridha
#50. Born to be a natural artist you love or hate but can't deny
While us minions in our millions tumble into history's chasm
We might have a couple of laughs but we're still wastes of protoplasm
Jeffrey Lewis
#51. Perhaps it's good for one to suffer. Can an artist do anything if he's happy? Would he ever want to do anything? What is art, after all, but a protest against the horrible inclemency of life?
Aldous Huxley
#52. We're painting the same people all our life - it's just the way we look at them that changes. If you experience trauma, you can speak about it in so many different ways. You can speak about landscape, you can speak about your food; it's always different. Trauma is the beginning of life as an artist.
Christian Boltanski
#53. Measurements are never enough. The artist's eye and desire to breathe life into the subject must be the deciding factors.
David McCullough
#54. It would be narrowness to suppose that an artist can only care for the impressions of those who know the methods of his art as well as feel its effects. Art works for all whom it can touch.
Gordon S. Haight
#55. Words are your paintbrush, and your life is the canvas. You can paint whatever you want to paint; you can even copy another artist's work - but what you express with your paintbrush is the way you see yourself, the way you see the entire reality.
Miguel Ruiz
#56. I paint all the time. Each night I wrestle, I paint my face because I am an artist. It's kind of all coming together where I am able to do everything I really love to do and need in my life.
Jeff Hardy
#57. To be in any way a positive contribution, that's all anybody wants to be. It's all I've ever wanted to be. I wanted to be an artist, be a mother. You want to feel that in your life you've been of use, in whatever way that comes out.
Angelina Jolie
#58. When I was young, it was very exciting to have a thought that we can change the world if we all collaborated, but I think it's not just an artist's responsibility as I think we all have responsibilities to different things, whatever we choose in our lives.
Gates McFadden
#59. It's ironic that people speak of artists as dreamers. I think they are the most grounded people around. Conscious and present. As an artist, you really see life, connect with its beauty, and create something that shares those observations with others. You notice things.
Danny Gregory
#60. I'm not deciding what the artist is going to write about because it's the artist. They're gonna have to sing that song for the rest of their life. When they're old and they're 80 and they have their show in Vegas, they're gonna have to sing that song for the rest of their life.
Benny Blanco
#61. 'Faith and Will' is aimed at the same readership as 'The Artist's Way.' The book is for spiritual seekers in all walks of life.
Julia Cameron
#62. No-one has the right to terminate a person's life with a gun, a knife, or a makutu (spell).
Theresa Sjoquist
#63. For the artist treating of man's relation to all sides of life there cannot and should not be heroes, but there should be men.
Leo Tolstoy
#64. One of the beauties of art is that it reflects an artist's entire life. What I've learned over the past 30 years is really beginning to inform what I make. I hope that process continues until I die.
Andy Goldsworthy
#65. A writer's heart, a poet's heart, an artist's heart, a musician's heart is always breaking. It is through that broken window that we see the world ...
Alice Walker
#66. The most demanding part of living a lifetime as an artist is the strict discipline of forcing oneself to work steadfastly along the nerve of one's own most intimate sensitivity.
Annie Dillard
#67. I want to do musician things and start making this my life. I want to learn - there's so much I have to learn about what it takes to be a recording artist, about what it takes to go on tour. I want to take this time and be a sponge and start meeting people and start - just start.
James Wolpert
#68. 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
#69. Everyone in my family is an artist. Both my parents are painters and my mom's an opera singer. I was never shown any other way to process life.
Aleksa Palladino
#70. Choosing to be an artist . . . is choosing to mine deep caverns. It's like getting lost in the darkness and spending the rest of your life trying to find your way.
Michele Zackheim
#71. There's only one thing in life for a woman; it's to be a mother ... A woman artist must be ... capable of making primary sacrifices.
Mary Cassatt
#72. For women who have children, the economic difficulty of sustaining a life as an artist maybe makes it impossible. There's no maternity leave, there's no pension.
Elizabeth Price
#73. Is the phrase 'pay' or 'play the piper'
I inquire, why
'Cause I admire a desire to flip the switch
Yeah make a way to face the music like
Life savings for a mosh pit riot
Listen to a mix
Rock the tickets, higher volume
Velocity which shakes a cockpit's pilot
Criss Jami
#74. I don't think there's anything to be afraid of. Failure brings great rewards - in the life of an artist.
Quentin Tarantino
#75. I'm still a martial artist at heart. I believe in controlling yourself ... I think that's huge in life-to be a good man.
Cub Swanson
#76. Literature will save me it's the only certainty i am sure of.
Nikki Rowe
#77. The clock is ticking and you're hearing the beat. You stop by a museum shop, sign your name on a scuba-diving sheet, and commit yourself to Saturday mornings in the deep end. You're either losing your mind - or gaining your soul. Life is meant to be an artist date. That's why we were created.
Julia Margaret Cameron
#78. It's getting too late in my life to care about the small things. It's getting too late to not be brave, to not live my life fully, to not try to be an artist. Trivial things like how nice your hotel room is, or if you have to be naked for a while, they fade away.
Helen Hunt
#79. The more life you have, the more it's in your pores, the more able you are to be creative as an artist.
Lesley Manville
#80. Any artist, the work you do, if it's a painting or if it's a performance, you hope it translates to a common denominator with the people that they see something in their own life in there. Or they see something in somebody else's life. That's what's fun about sharing art.
Matthew McConaughey
#81. I've seen so many versions of you. With me. Without me. Artist. Teacher. Graphic designer. But it's all, in the end, just life. We see it macro, like one big story, but when you're in it, it's all just day-to-day, right? And isn't that what you have to make your peace with?
Blake Crouch
#82. I mean, reality sucks. The world is a cancer, and shits so bad it's scary. Everything's filthy. But you know what? One day, it's not going to be here. So be glad you know what life is. You're alive. Live.
Mitch Lucker
#83. I believe in the energy of art, and through the use of that energy, the artist's ability to transform his or her life, and by example, the lives of others.
Audrey Flack
#84. I think it's much richer and much more fun to be an artist than to be anything else. I can't think of a better life than acting.
Edward Herrmann
#85. I remind myself that traveling through life as an artist requires one to distill things slowly. To be inquisitive, inventive, and patient - a lot of things get discarded along the way. It's a little like boiling sea water to get at the salt.
James Nares
#86. The reading eye must do the work to make them live, and so it did, again and again, never the same life twice, as the artist had intended.
A.S. Byatt
#87. The ability to draw from life determines the artist's skill. This is why live drawing classes have always been at the top of the curriculum for properly structured academic workshops.
Igor Babailov
#88. The sad thing is that somehow, it is a type of event that mirrors the artist. You take it into account, and you're reminded in this specific case what the artist's work is about, what his life is like, and how life mirrors art.
Massimiliano Gioni
#89. To be a great artist, you need to know yourself as best as you possibly can. I live my life and delve into my own psyche. It's more about exploring how I feel rather than making pale imitations of something that came before. We are unique beings, and the way we look at things is our own.
Bat For Lashes
#90. I like life, it's wonderous and chaotic and somewhere in the middle I've created a safe place to do my thing in the world ~ I can't ask for much more & I am already so thankful when everything I got
Nikki Rowe
#91. When you're an artist, your personal life and your professional life kind of blend together. I'm writing from home so I don't have an office or anything. I don't know where to draw the line between "Okay, let's stop now and watch American Idol."
Daryl Wein
#92. One thing about an artist, it doesn't matter how much your work sells for in your life, it's going to sell for ten times more than that after you're dead, and that's what you have to protect.
Tracey Emin
#93. I am just a middle-class farm boy from Dodge City and my grandparents were wheat farmers. I thought painting, acting, directing and photography were all part of being an artist. I have made my money that way. And I have had some fun. It's not been a bad life.
Dennis Hopper
#94. I don't think I want to transition into being a recording artist for the rest of my life or anything like that, but it's something I'd like to try.
Laura Osnes
#95. Writing changed my life. It has an existential dimension, and that's the same for every writer. Every artist has a moment of awakening, of happening upon an idea that grabs hold of you, regardless of whether you are a painter or a writer.
Imre Kertesz
#96. I think it's harder than ever to be an artist. I think that you end up, especially as a middle-aged person, you pay such big consequences for saying, 'I'm just going to devote my life to making art,' or 'I'm going to devote my life to writing novels.' You end up with no resources.
Dana Spiotta
#97. As artists get wealthier and more famous, often their work gets worse ... I'm fascinated by the decline of artists. I suspect I'll be in decline myself. It's a fact of life.
Martin Parr
#98. Everyone is an artist. Everyone is creative in their own way and that that creativity is a great thing. It's a human thing and it needs to be nurtured and it can help us go down life's path and help us to become deeper, richer, more satisfied human beings.
Rainn Wilson
#99. The power of creativity does not just lie in an artist's work, but also in how he or she continues to create regardless of the obstacles life places in the way.
Sharon Louden
#100. I cannot draw to save my life, and I'm not a big art scholar, but I worked with many designers throughout my career - in theater, in dance, costume designers, set designers, and I have a lot of artist friends and I do photography, and I think it's kind of in my life.
Mikhail Baryshnikov
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