Top 100 Artists Are Quotes
#1. A lot of people are promoting records that are just throw-it-agains t-the-wall-see- if-it-sticks meaningless bullshit. Everybody has the responsibility to do the right thing and promote artists that mean something.
Dave Grohl
#2. Iconic artists are never straight ahead. Michael Jackson loved Elvis and Burt Bacharach, and uniquely blended both of them into what he did.
Pharrell Williams
#3. Melodrama is one of the most stunning art forms. These are stories where the emotions are big, and the situations are big, and the artists believe in the situation dramatically. There's no irony or distance.
James Gray
#5. Women have sat indoors all these millions of years, so that by this time the very walls are permeated by their creative force, which has, indeed, so overcharged the capacity of bricks and mortar that it must needs harness itself to pens and brushes and business and politics.
Virginia Woolf
#6. I relied mainly on other artists, who I think are smarter than critics, any critics or curators or anybody like that. They really know.
Robert Barry
#7. There are certainly things labels can still provide that indie artists can't. They can pave the way to radio and pay big bucks for promotion.
Sam Tsui
#8. We are all born artists. If you have kids, you know what I mean. Almost everything kids do is art. They draw with crayons on the wall.
Kim Young-ha
#9. There are contemporary artists that I hate with all my heart. These are provocateurs that are without feeling. Where is the real emotion?
Paolo Sorrentino
#10. I'm so proud that my offspring became a musician. I'm full of awe that we are able to have a whole family live the life of artists.
Maxine Hong Kingston
#11. Water and stones. Those are the unpromising ingredients of two very different endeavors ... painting, because artists' pigments are made from fluids ... mixed together with powdered stones to give color ... and the other is alchemy, the stone the ultimate goal.
James Elkins
#13. I think young artists are always inspiring because they are coming at worlds from a different point of view.
Shirley Manson
#14. Artists are never complete people. But if it's art that completes them, then what is taken away?
Alexander Theroux
#15. I think the advice, regardless of gender, is always be open to conversations with people who do things differently than you do. If you're starting to work in tech, talk to the artists, talk to the lawyers, talk to the people who are interested in other things.
Beth Simone Noveck
#16. Laborers want their kids to be merchants or business people. Business people want their kids to be professionals. Professionals want their kids to be academics, professors. Academics want their kids to be artists. And artists don't care if their kids are laborers or not. They can be anything.
Demetri Martin
#17. There is a great promise for our cultural growth, but this promise is achieved only when our artists recognize that all great art has nationality, an imprimatur achieved with the keenest remembrance of time and place.
F. Sionil Jose
#18. I've had people come up to me with the strangest interpretations of what my lyrics might mean, and I'm like, "You go! I never thought of that, but that works,"...I think that true art is a universal reflection, and true artists are just messengers of that reflection or, at best, skilled presentors.
Serj Tankian
#19. Anybody auditions for X-Factor it's because they want to be famous, not because they are artists.
Bruce Dickinson
#20. The more freedom artists have to do what they want to do, the more they do what other artists are doing.
Walter Darby Bannard
#21. Everyone knows of the talking artists. Throughout all of the known history of the world they have gathered in rooms and talked. They talk of art and are passionately,almost feverishly, in earnest about it. They think it matters much more than it does.
Sherwood Anderson
#22. If an artist wants to work with me because they feel I've made some credible albums and there've been things that are long-lasting, it's because those artists took the time and we built an idea.
Phil Ramone
#23. The poets, by which I mean all artists, are finally the only people that know the truth about us. Soldiers don't, statesmen don't, priests don't, union leaders don't ... only the poets.
James Baldwin
#24. My favorite artists have always been Elvis and The Beatles and they still are!
Johnny Ramone
#25. Stalin said artists are the engineers of human souls. I wanted to show what happens to the soul when the engineers get through with it.
Antonin Kratochvil
#26. There are female artists I can look at that I find more in common with than the male artists, because they're blending the pop, dance and theatricality ... but currently there aren't a lot of guys who go there.
Adam Lambert
#27. I imagine if Spotify becomes something that people are willing to pay for, then I'm sure iTunes will just create their own service, and they're actually fair to artists.
Patrick Carney
#28. Beware of artists, they mix with all classes of society and are therefore most dangerous.
Queen Victoria
#29. There are some artists that don't like working with other females, which is fine. They have their own thing. I personally love being surrounded by other females.
Bonnie McKee
#30. I think if the copyright regime focuses on the people we are supposed to be helping, the artists and creators, and builds a system that gives them the freedom to choose and to protect and to be rewarded for their creativity, then we will have the right focus.
Lawrence Lessig
#31. What are we artists for? We are for showing you what you've wandered for to find the home of your spirit ...
Hiroko Sakai
#32. I have come to realize, after over thirty years of studying human creativity, that the great divide is not between those who are artists and those who are not, but between those who understand that they are creative and those who have become convinced that they are not.
Erwin Raphael McManus
#33. We are the visionaries, inventors, and artists. We think differently, see the world differently, and solve problems differently. It is from this difference that the dyslexic brain derives its brilliance.
Tiffany Sunday
#34. People don't remember each tree in a park but all of us benefit from the trees. And in a way, artists are like trees in a park.
Yoko Ono
#35. Once we start collecting, the more you have, the more it gets valuable and that will stop us from responding to the present and taking on new ideas what the artists are doing now.
David Elliott
#36. All artists are crackpots. And it's their finest feature.
Irving Stone
#37. As long as there are young people, and old people, too, who can imagine realities beyond seeing and touching, and as long as there are poets, and artists, and musicians, there will be unicorns.
Jack Clifford Smith
#38. Artists can color the sky red because they know it's blue. Those of us who aren't artists must color things the way they really are or people might think we're stupid.
Jules Feiffer
#39. Recently, the Germans have developed a tendency to prefer the so-called first (youthful) style of great artists to their mature works. Could it be that they do not realize that their aesthetic criteria, generally speaking, are juvenile?
Franz Grillparzer
#40. Artists are traditionally resistant to labels.
Patti Smith
#41. If it's stage, the two most important artists are the actor and the playwright. If it's film, THE most important person is the director. The director says where the camera goes.
Brad Dourif
#42. Creative arts, new inventions, and new ideas spring from those blessed with imagination, and magic stimulates imagination. It is no coincidence that many artists, writers, and dancers are interested in magic.
Vivianne Crowley
#43. Artists of all times are like the gamblers of Monte Carlo, and this blind lottery allows some to succeed and ruins others. In my opinion, neither the winners nor the losers are worth worrying about.
Marcel Duchamp
#44. I don't suspect that in many instances the artists who are dedicated in that fashion to the progress of that community are as well protected by the community as might be necessary.
Gil Scott-Heron
#45. The kids I talk to are convinced their generation will make the best music. And the greatest artists have yet to be discovered. I walk around with that thought every day.
L.A. Reid
#46. You've always lived a life of pretense, not a real life
a simulated existence, not a genuine existence. Everything about you, everything you are, has always been pretense, never genuine, never real.
Thomas Bernhard
#47. All artists and creative people are basically unhappy people. If you were happy, that would mean you were content with the world as it was and why would you ever want to change it?
Peter Schjeldahl
#48. He had a theory that musicians are incredibly complex, and know far less than other artists what they want and what they are; that they puzzle themselves as well as their friends; that their psychology is a modern development, and has not yet been understood.
E. M. Forster
#49. Most artists are always fighting for their fame. They have that fear, like the saying goes, "out of sight, out of mind." They need to keep themselves out there. I have never had that fear. If I have any fear, it's not doing enough to reach people.
Chuck D
#50. Female artists are the perfect example of a creator: They know how to make life and art with their bodies. Life comes from their bodies, so on a very basic level, they have more to write about.
Brandon Boyd
#51. Not all of us are painters but we are all artists. Each time we fit things together we are creating - whether it is to make a loaf of bread, a child, a day.
Corita Kent
#52. The best artists are people who don't consider themselves artists, and the people who do are usually the most pretentious and annoying. They've got their priorities wrong. They're just doing it to be artists rather than because they want to do it.
Aphex Twin
#53. Contrary to popular belief, all evolving artists are in a full time battle with mediocrity.
Robert Genn
#54. Why do people think artists are special? It's just another job.
Andy Warhol
#55. We safeguard the right to attribution very strongly. After all, what we are fighting for is the intent of copyright as it is described in the US constitution: the promotion of culture. Many artists are using recognition as their primary driving force to create culture.
Rick Falkvinge
#56. Artists to my mind are the real architects of change, and not the political legislators who implement change after the fact.
William S. Burroughs
#57. Some artists are working to buy the mansion or whatever the element of fame must bear, but I spend all my money on my show.
Lady Gaga
#58. It is well known that a loose and easy dress contributes much to give to both sexes those fine proportions of body that are observable in the Grecian statues, and which serve as models to our present artists.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
#59. All artists are self-sacrificing human beings, and to become an artist is nothing but to devote oneself to the subterranean gods.
Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel
#60. Ladies and gentlemen, if some of the leading artists in a civilization see a man urinating in another man's mouth and see composition and lighting and do not see their civilization being pissed upon, we are in trouble.
Dennis Prager
#61. There are so many great artists and most of them are women, but that's good - the more the merrier!
Rachel Stevens
#62. Every young man's heart is a graveyard in which are inscribed the names of a thousand dead artists but whose only actual denizens are a few mighty, often antagonistic, ghosts.
Andre Malraux
#63. The role of artists is to attend the funerals. They are the pall-bearers of failure, and every wonder they raise high in celebration harks back to a time already dead.
Steven Erikson
#64. We were really poor when I was growing up; my parents, both artists, were bohemians. Life was a desperate struggle, but in service of a high ideal, which is exactly what my photographs are about.
Justine Kurland
#65. There are so many great artists that are doing interesting things, that I don't want to focus on boring people.
Kathleen Hanna
#66. There is nothing fiercer than a failed artist. The energy remains, but, having no outlet, it implodes in a great black fart of rage which smokes up all the inner windows of the soul. Horrible as successful artists often are, there is nothing crueler or more vain than a failed artist.
Erica Jong
#67. I don't see many artists who are not trying to bring their work to the public - -to the contrary I see artists nearly desperate to get attention for their art and, failing that, often for themselves.
Sally Mann
#68. Don't be too dismissive of children. While it's true that few children are artists, all artists are children.
Ned Rorem
#69. Since I was 18, I've been under orders from magazines and newspapers - chiefly The New York Times and Rolling Stone - to step into the lives of musicians, actors, and artists, and somehow find out who they really are underneath the mask they present to the public. But I didn't always succeed.
Neil Strauss
#71. Artists who seek perfection in everything are those who cannot attain it in anything.
Eugene Delacroix
#72. The film [Boy and the World]gave me the possibility to create a new language. Animation is a very rich medium but hasn't fully been exploited by artists. Often artists are trapped by words.
Alex Abreu
#73. Comedy is a universal language. I grew up watching Nagesh, Surilirajan, Thenga Srinivasan and S.V. Shekhar's comedies. And, of course, Charlie Chaplin! These artists are so blessed: they can make other people happy.
A.R. Rahman
#74. Not all writers are artists. But all of us like the idea of somebody in the year 2283 blowing the dust off one of our books, thumbing through it and exclaiming, Hey, listen to what this old guy had to say back in the twentieth century!
William Attwood
#75. I definitely want to work with people who are artists and who are interested in being their best version of themselves.
Andre Holland
#76. It's like every time you have one of these, you're sort of - your lease is renewed another five years. And that's kind of great for me 'cause that's all I really want to be doing still at this point, like just making records and getting to work with, like, artists that I think are exciting.
Mark Ronson
#77. There are so many great artists, I think, who kind of suffer from being icons, legends, acknowledged masters.
Richard Linklater
#78. Artists are a very important part of our society because they make a great contribution to our values. The artist creates a value system that we all grow up on, whether we know it or not.
Roy DeCarava
#79. All good art is seditious, but the people in authority can never recognise it. I think when you mention sedition, artists are the ones whose eyes light up thinking, 'Oh, yes, I want some of that!'
Michael Leunig
#80. Austrian public-opinion pollsters recently reported that those held in highest esteem by most of the people interviewed are neither the great artists nor the great scientists, neither the great statesmen nor the great sport figures, but those who master a hard lot with their heads held high.
Viktor E. Frankl
#81. The trouble with the artists this year is they are all obsessed with Twitter and headlines. It feels like they are all getting a bit above themselves.
Gary Barlow
#82. He wasn't, but producers are by definition annoying because they have a different agenda from you. They're trying to stop you spending money and you're trying to not spend money, but at the same time we're great artists.
Michael Apted
#83. We younger Negro artists who create now intend to express our individual dark-skinned selves without fear or shame. If white people are pleased, we are glad. If they are not, it doesn't matter. We know we are beautiful. And ugly too.
Langston Hughes
#84. Artists are artists whether they produce or not. None of it requires much more than hanging out.
David Rakoff
#85. There are artists, true performers that have come before me who have been a big inspiration to me. I hope I do the same for others.
Janet Jackson
#86. A great many contemporary artists from hugely diverse backgrounds are currently approaching the prospect of cultural mixing ...
Lucy R. Lippard
#87. A true artist takes no notice whatever of the public. The public are to him non-existent
Oscar Wilde
#88. I'm personally looking for artists that are along the lines of today's pop stars. Whether it be a Rihanna or a Justin Bieber or a Kanye West or a Beyonce or a Lady Gaga, I'm looking for talent that's like that, that's what I love.
L.A. Reid
#89. You are an artist," she said. "But then all scientists are artists, my father used to say. You think like an artist, at any rate, and I can see that you want what you create to be a work of art.
Pearl S. Buck
#90. In 19th-century France, artists were part of government. Artists are very sensitive to their time. They're very thoughtful people - it makes sense to hear what they have to say.
Elizabeth Peyton
#91. Once you do a piece on the stage, you become that poem or you become that piece. That's really who you are. I think that's why some artists have stage names, you know? I don't have a stage name, it's pretty much just me.
Clinton D. Powell
#92. 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
#93. I see football as an art and all players are artists.
If you are a top artist, the last thing you would do is paint a picture somebody else has already painted.
Cristiano Ronaldo
#94. You know how creative people are, we have to try everything until we find our niche.
E.A. Bucchianeri
#95. For the past is what man should not have been. The present is what man ought not to be. The future is what artists are.
Oscar Wilde
#96. Myth must be kept alive. The people who can keep it alive are the artists of one kind or another.
Joseph Campbell
#97. The art world can be very intimidating because it's just so vast. You talk to people who are really clued in to all the young artists and coming into it you're never going to be able to catch up immediately, even though there's pressure to.
Daniel Radcliffe
#98. I enjoy being on stage with other artists. I have a chance to watch and see people responding to the other artists songs. I get to see how people are affected by the music.
Steven Curtis Chapman
#99. The best musicians or sound-artists are people who never considered themselves to be artists or musicians.
Richard D. James
#100. Activists are cultural artists. They envision a world that does not yet exist, and then take action to create that world.'
Robyn
