Top 100 Artist You Quotes
#1. If you're an artist, you do what you do, and in a way, you don't even control the core essence of what you do. You try to mold it and develop a style, but the core elements of what you do are just part of who you are.
Paul Banks
#2. When you're an artist, you can only do your own stuff. Even if you only write for other people, you're really more focused on yourself. So while everybody's out touring, I'm working on records.
Rico Love
#3. To be a true artist you have to play the way you feel - not the way others think you should feel.
Don Ellis
#4. 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
#5. As an artist, you have to maintain focus and eliminate the distraction of second-guessing yourself based on the opinions of others.
Dwight Yoakam
#6. In the great artist you see daring bound by discipline and discipline stretched by daring.
Robert Breault
#7. You continue to evolve with each album that goes by and, as an artist, you continue to expand with every recording project.
Randy Travis
#8. 'The Iliad' is about a war 1,200 years ago that solved nothing and achieved nothing. Most of our wars achieve very little. But whatever agenda I have gets buried in a work this great. If you're being honest, you realize that, as an artist, you're not a policy maker.
Denis O'Hare
#9. I just feel if you are an artist, you always have something to prove, if you are in music or in films, you have to prove that you can still do your best.
Sean Combs
#10. When you look at your life as an artist, you do see that when you get to be 60, you're coming - this is the last chapter.
Sally Mann
#11. In my experience, as a young black artist, you have to fulfill an archetype, or be a token - and I was unwilling to do that.
Solange Knowles
#12. As an artist, you have to express yourself. I make no excuses for my versatility. I grew up singing classical arias, but I love rock n' roll and jazz standards.
Idina Menzel
#13. As an artist, you need the naysayers and the nonbelievers to add fuel to your creative fire.
Ice-T
#14. As an artist, you don't think about the parabola or the arc you're describing or where you're going to ultimately end up, you're just kind of crawling around, seeing what's out there.
Michael Nesmith
#15. I'm not a very confessional artist, you know. I don't ever reveal what I'm feeling in my work, or what I think about the President. I use nature. I use found images.
Vija Celmins
#16. I have a lot of respect for all the artists I get compared to, even if, as an artist, you prefer to have your own identity.
Brittany Howard
#17. Yeah," I said, "but you're an artist. You don't believe in decency and honesty and gratitude. Where shall we eat?
Jack Kerouac
#18. When you're an artist, you have to hope for everything and expect nothing.
Darren Criss
#19. No thanks. I'm not an artist." "You don't have to be. That's the beauty of creating art. It's cathartic. Think of your past, your present, your future. Draw what troubles you. It can be a face, a place, a story inside of one single image.
Keri Lake
#20. There's a certain fear of simplicity. I think that's the thing, when you're younger as an artist, you get this idea in your head that complexity equals quality. The more notes you're playing, the better.
Patrick Stump
#21. I have my own little sense of style. As far as image goes today for a new artist, you'll find that fashion is really important. I wouldn't want to show up for a performance in something that is absolutely the opposite of who I am as an artist.
Miranda Lambert
#22. When you are an artist, you want your audience to think it's effortless and easy.
Charles Fleischer
#23. To be an artist you have to give up everything, including the desire to be a good artist.
Jasper Johns
#24. I have been in situations where actors are treated like robots: say the lines, say it like this, we don't have time for conversations. That is a terrible position to be in as an artist. You feel used.
Nia Long
#25. As an artist, you want to stretch. That's the only way you're going to grow. If I stay inside my comfort zone, do roles that I've done before, then I'm never going to get better as an actress.
Jurnee Smollett
#26. I never stop being a mother and I never stop being an artist. You understand? Which is probably why my kids are so creative, because it's not separated.
Jada Pinkett Smith
#27. To be a great artist, you have to be willing to take risks and to do things that no one would ever pay you for
at first.
Josephine Decker
#28. You give yourself permission to be the person you want to be, the artist you want to be, no matter what your circumstances!
Jill Eikenberry
#29. I hate the whole 'record your album, do your promo campaign, have a year off to write another album' pattern. As an artist, you should keep creating as much as you possibly can.
Marina And The Diamonds
#30. As an artist, you want to make good stories and create good art; as a businessman, you want to make money and make sure the investors are happy. The two will always clash, unfortunately.
Neil Jackson
#31. You don't get to celebrate yourself unless you risk being mocked or rejected. As an artist, you cannot play it safe. You just can't.
M. Night Shyamalan
#32. As an artist, you put so much into what you do and it can all be torn down in a nanosecond.
Rufus Wainwright
#33. But you're an artist. You don't believe in decency and honesty and gratitude.
William S. Burroughs
#34. I think as an artist you have to reinvent yourself every day.
Damien Hirst
#35. As an artist, you always have to be growing. You don't just want to do what you already know people like.
John Darnielle
#36. As a new artist you should ignore trends at all costs.
Wendy Starland
#37. I feel like, to have a career as an artist, you don't need to meet the same criteria as you do to win a singing competition. They're two very different animals.
Judith Hill
#38. As an artist, you have a path that you're on that evolves with the kinds of stories you want to tell.
Daniel Radcliffe
#40. I think as an artist you evoke feeling and change and through that you send a message.
Kristanna Loken
#41. The fact is, when you date an artist, you have to know that they're going to sing about you.
Tove Lo
#42. There's something peculiar about artists. They have ups and downs ... After a while everything you do is just wonderful ... then you slide back. If you're a good artist you're going to go down. And then it's up to you.
Milton Resnick
#43. I am an artist, you understand? For me, a picture is like poetry. When you make art, this is not coming from an intellectual place. It's coming from the deep side of your unconscious, your soul.
Alejandro Jodorowsky
#44. As an artist, you want to do roles that challenge you and say something.
Jussie Smollett
#45. As an artist, you're pretty sheltered backstage. You often don't know what's going on out there.
Gavin Rossdale
#46. I think if you are a musician, and artist, you have to have a certain courage. Repeating yourself or photocopying other's art... it's cowardice. If you actually risk your career to do something new, even if it's in a very small way, then it's art.
Thomas Gabriel Fischer
#47. I love feeding off the audience, and to me, what's the point if you're not going to think of the fans. Anyone can play music in their house, but you put it out because you want interact with your fans. And, as an artist, you get so much from your fans.
Dido Armstrong
#48. There's such a freedom about being an artist ... You're not accountable - you're this renegade thing.
Cornelia Parker
#49. As an artist, you've got to see the mess. That's what we do. We get a human being, and it's like putting together a puzzle. And the puzzle has got to be a mixture, a multifaceted mixture of human emotions, and not all of it is going to be pretty.
Viola Davis
#50. To be a truly conscientious artist, you have to look at what's not working and challenge it. You riff on things.
Kara Walker
#51. If you really want to be an artist, you search yourself, and you find a lot of it comes from earlier times. I have pretty much built the work around my experiences. When I've moved from one place to another, the work has changed.
Claes Oldenburg
#52. If you're an artist, you try to keep an ear to the ground and an ear to your heart.
Bruce Springsteen
#53. Being a pop-leaning, female artist, you'd think that I'd have my record company breathing down my neck and trying to control everything I'm doing. Actually, they've just kind of let me take the wheel.
Halsey
#54. As a storyboard artist, you have to be able to draw anything.
John Allison
#55. Branding is quite an important thing. As an artist, you want to be able to explore facets of yourself.
Nick Offerman
#56. The only logical thing I can think of is that I knew there were such things as artists, and I knew there were none where I lived. So I knew that to be an artist you had to be somewhere else. And I very much wanted to be somewhere else.
Jasper Johns
#57. Sometimes as an artist you get wrapped up in what you are doing and you can't be objective.
Joe Nichols
#58. I think that, just like the art scene and the music scene is exploding in LA - I mean, let's face it: if you want to be an artist you cannot live in New York anymore because it is too expensive
Jon Bernthal
#59. The past is part of the present, is part of the future, it's all part of being an artist. You cannot be something that you're not when you're not that thing anymore, and if you do that then you're a liar.
Courtney Love
#60. As an artist, you never want to write the same song again, you always want to challenge yourself to writing in a different way.
Serj Tankian
#61. Every time the economy goes south, art grows. If you were an actuary or an accountant you'd consider those years horrid, but if you were an artist, you'd consider them magic.
Marc Spitz
#62. Try to sing exactly like an artist you hear, and then all of the sudden, you'll feel what it feels like if you're singing properly, depending on who you're mimicking.
Laura Bell Bundy
#63. You sought to preserve your creative instincts and what would nourish them. But neurosis itself does not nourish the artist, you know; he creates in spite of it, out of anything, any material given to him. The torments and hells of [crazy men], are not for you.
Anais Nin
#65. But this role doesn't need an adventurer as much as it needs someone who can... look at each world with fresh eyes. Who can perceive things deeply. Not an adventurer - an artist. You were the one we needed all along.
Claudia Gray
#67. A record deal doesn't make you an artist; you make yourself an artist
Lady Gaga
#68. When you're a kid and someone's an artist, you think of Leonardo da Vinci. You don't think that's a job; you just think of a man with a beard painting the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel.
Noel Fielding
#69. When you're an actor or any kind of artist, you use your life as something to draw from in every experience.
Josh Peck
#70. I think being an activist and an artist is an interesting contradiction, because so often they are at odds with one another. When you write as an artist you have to clean the palate of your own politics in creating characters and activism is kind of the exact opposite.
Eve Ensler
#71. The bourgeoisie's weapon is starvation. If as a writer or artist you run counter to their narrow notions they simplyand silently withdraw your means of subsistence. I sometimes wonder how many people of talent are executed in this way every year.
Robert Louis Stevenson
#72. As a new artist, you come out, and there are so many other new artists. It seems like there's a whole wave of new artists that come along every year. In '05, I was part of the crop. It was a lot harder trying to set myself apart from the rest of the pack.
Jason Aldean
#73. As an artist, you want to play around with mediums and see if you can get the point across in different way.
M.I.A.
#74. Ariana Grande is a billionaire before she's been an artist. You have to work to be able to appreciate what you have ... what work did she ever have to do in her life?
Drake Bell
#75. Not any particular religion or school of religion, but being an artist, you have to be spiritual, in a way.
Hiroshi Sugimoto
#76. It's interesting how as an artist you keep evolving, but if you can get into the contemporary art space, if the works are in institutions and museums, they keep living on and on and on, even if you move to a different space, that work is still operating.
Kalup Linzy
#77. When you talk to an author or an artist, you're only ever getting half the story. We are crafting narratives for you. We are leaving the messy details out.
Phoebe North
#78. As an artist, you do understand you're never going to please everybody.
Paul Emsley
#80. If you are born an artist, you have no choice but to fight to stay an artist.
Lana Del Rey
#81. I think as any artist you always want to grow; you always want to get better.
Brad Garrett
#82. It's a lot different being a hip-hop artist. You just show up with a piece of paper with your words on it, say it in the mic, then you leave and some other guy does all the music.
Caroline Polachek
#83. As an artist you actually do have to make a choice to be an outsider. If you're an outsider you have the freedom to say what people on the inside don't dare to say.
Connie Nielsen
#84. No, as an artist, you have to be free to explore all the corners of your heart. There are no boundaries.
Dierks Bentley
#85. I had serious training of painting styles from different historical periods ... But to have all this training is not enough to be an artist. You have to add a new page to history; otherwise you are not making a contribution. But making history is not easy.
Liu Dan
#86. By being willing to be a bad artist, you have a chance to be an artist, and perhaps, over time, a very good one.
Julia Cameron
#87. There is a desperate tendency to try to legislate artists, to try to lay down rules for their obligations to society. Just leave artists alone. If you are a true artist, you will have a very finely tuned moral mechanism.
Athol Fugard
#88. As an artist you have to have a certain amount of arrogance.
Kim Weston
#89. It's interesting how people who were once fairly radical can become, later in life, kind of conservative, and not just in terms of politics - how, if you're an artist, you can start out being somewhat avant-garde and then end up doing landscapes.
Richard Prince
#90. I think possibly, as an artist, you're always treated with a certain respect but also with a certain sort of nervousness.
Susanne Bier
#91. As an artist, you have to do what you feel passionate about. It has to be something you can connect with.
Stephanie Sigman
#92. The awesome thing about being an artist? You can't be fired from your own mind.
Rose McGowan
#93. Once you're a Motown artist, you're always a Motown artist.
Smokey Robinson
#95. As an artist, you reach for the pen that's full of blood.
Paul Monette
#96. I hope what I do has an art to it, and as an artist you have to try new things and keep yourself entertained.
Craig Ferguson
#97. With food, you're the artist; you put the colour in it, you present it to the table and it has the ability to knock out the senses. It can look fabulous, be beautifully presented and smell great and taste good as well.
Anthony Warlow
#98. Be an artist; you can get away with anything.
A.D. Posey
#99. As an artist, you don't stop making art because people are not buying it.
Damien Hirst
#100. Pain is such an important thing in life. I think that as an artist you have to experience suffering.
Naomi Watts
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