Top 100 Artists Who Quotes
#1. I'm sometimes critical about other artists who come out with something different until maybe I hear the music. If the music is there, then they did their job, and I'll enjoy the CD.
Brian Austin Green
#2. 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
#3. There was a time when television was sort of frowned upon among people who wanted to be serious artists. John Travolta kind of exploded that. He was one of the [actors] who made that go away.
David Rasche
#4. When one would ask most modern artists, poets, writers and other status quo fueled semi-intellectuals who Machiavelli was - was that an opera singer?
Martijn Benders
#5. The big pay-off was to work as an artist and gain some shred of respect from your friends, who were also artists. But there was never any notion that you could make a living out of art. On the rare occasions you had a gallery show, and sold a little work, well, that was just gravy.
Edward Ruscha
#6. Many artists who sign deals in the US and UK get the benefit of worldwide promotion and have a better shot at breaking globally.
Wendy Starland
#7. In the UK and the US especially you've got a lot of throwaway artists who have their 40 million dancers and they do their show. There's many artists who would not do a live show because they know they can't.
Jamelia
#8. My favorite artists from comics were early ones like Jack Kirby or Steve Ditko who had a real heavy ink style. Captain America, co created by Jack Kirby, was a favorite of mine and I sometimes use an altered version of his costume on some of my characters.
Marcel Dzama
#9. 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
#10. I have a merely ethical and moral relationship to collecting. Whereby I never collect things that I necessarily like. I collect things by young artists who don't have any money because I need to give them some money! Because I think that they should carry on whether I like it or not.
Ryan Gander
#11. There's a bunch of people who sit around and make excuses for themselves and get upset with artists, but you already know what this is - it's an ego-driven business.
Rico Love
#12. It's not curators, it's not critics, it's not the public, it's not collectors who find great artists - it's other artists.
David Galenson
#13. Creativity is not just for artists. It's for businesspeople looking for a new way to close a sale; it's for engineers trying to solve a problem; it's for parents who want their children to see the world in more than one way.
Twyla Tharp
#14. 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
#15. But in the old days, visual artists used to fall into two distinct categories: those of us who created images with cameras and those of us who applied stuff onto other stuff, with brushes or other tools.
Buffy Sainte-Marie
#16. Before I was through my teens, I had been introduced and exposed to artists who would, in later years, become legendary.
Jacques D'Amboise
#17. With my friends in Brooklyn, many of them started out as artists. I saw many of these friends move into late middle age, still struggling without health insurance or a cushion. I saw people who had given up being artists. Being an artist necessitates a compromise or living on the edge.
Kate Christensen
#18. 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
#19. The question isn't whether or not to censor artists who espouse misogynistic views. The question is whether or not we support them as listeners and consumers.
Dessa Darling
#20. 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
#21. I'm not one of those artists who doubts that they made dope-ass records. From the first record to now, each record has gotten better. I started dope, so I've just gotten doper and doper and dopest and super dope.
Killer Mike
#22. 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
#23. 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
#24. When you think back in history about producers and artists or writers who've had good synergy, a lot of times they date, or they're married, or there's a friendship and a kinship.
Solange Knowles
#25. Writing, acting, music, comedy. A deep love of literature and books. Thank God for all the artists who've helped me.
Bill Hicks
#26. 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
#27. Artists to my mind are the real architects of change, and not the political legislators who implement change after the fact.
William S. Burroughs
#28. My personality is very good for nurturing. I'm very empathetic to my artists. You speak to anyone who's worked with me and they'll say, "Oh yeah, Steve's great. He doesn't have the ego."
Steve Lillywhite
#29. 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
#30. 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
#31. Artists who seek perfection in everything are those who cannot attain it in anything.
Eugene Delacroix
#32. I wanted to be a pariah, because all my heroes were cult artists, people who devoted their lives to poking into very narrow, very deep corners - Erik Satie, Alfred Jarry, Malcolm Lowry - people who suffered in order to express their vision of life.
Jim Woodring
#33. I definitely want to work with people who are artists and who are interested in being their best version of themselves.
Andre Holland
#34. Many artists who don't go off to art school come to New York. It's about what you learn when you're here.
Urs Fischer
#35. There are so many great artists, I think, who kind of suffer from being icons, legends, acknowledged masters.
Richard Linklater
#36. 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
#37. If the man who paints only the tree, or flower, or other surface he sees before him were an artist, the king of artists would be the photographer. It is for the artist to do something beyond this.
James Whistler
#38. Hollywood used to be run by artists and people who loved artists ... people who wanted to make movies for all the right reasons. For the love. The Art. To tell stories. Yes to make money as well, but it was about both. Now I feel, it's mostly about bottom line and making money.
Matthew Lillard
#39. 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
#40. 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
#41. I watch artists say they wrote all these songs and don't mention anybody else who was involved, and that's fine. I don't expect an artist to give me credit. I know that they're gonna take the credit for everything. But, it's my job to give myself that exposure and not make excuses, not grow bitter.
Rico Love
#42. 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
#43. I'm a believer in the notion that artists who do good work believe in the ideas of extremes.
Wayne Thiebaud
#44. 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
#45. I've always been inspired by artists who have shown musical and intellectual curiosity and the courage to take risks.
Renee Fleming
#46. Where music is heard can determine the sort of music created by the artists who perform there.
David Byrne
#47. When I was a kid, I wanted to emulate Mel Blanc, who is arguably one of the most legendary voiceover recording artists of our time. I used to watch all the cartoons where he would voice Daffy, Elmer Fudd and Porky the Pig. I knew one day I wanted to do that.
Jesse McCartney
#48. Myth must be kept alive. The people who can keep it alive are the artists of one kind or another.
Joseph Campbell
#49. 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
#50. The best musicians or sound-artists are people who never considered themselves to be artists or musicians.
Richard D. James
#51. I tried to just do things like make some money, be responsible, help out other artists who I see have had a similar path.
Ariel Pink
#52. There's so much great stuff out there. The artists who've been most formative to me are the ones I've had the privilege to work with over the years.
Nick Blaemire
#53. If you're an artist trying to put out your own record on your own label, it's hard to get a distribution deal because no one wants to sign a deal with one entity. They want to sign distribution deals with labels, who have lots of product, lots of artists.
Aimee Mann
#54. Lots of artists who paint have the experience to one degree or another ... where their thinking doesn't precede their doing ... It's a funny thing, what I really hate yet I have to go through with it, is the preparation.
Philip Guston
#55. Of all the artists who emerged in the '80s, I think perhaps Cindy Sherman is the most important.
Chuck Close
#56. Artists, who are selfish people, become anxious around the self-sacrificing
Karan Mahajan
#57. I'll bet there are a lot of artists that nobody hears about who just make more money than anybody. The people that do all the sculptures and paintings for big building construction. We never hear about them, but they make more money than anybody.
Andy Warhol
#58. Every man who is any kind of artist has a great deal of female in him. I act and give of myself as a man, but I register and receive with the soul of a woman. The only really good artists are feminine. I can't admit the existence of an artist whose dominant personality is masculine.
Orson Welles
#59. Players are artists who create their own reality within the game.
Shigeru Miyamoto
#60. I look at other artists who have had fabulous first albums, and you don't know what they're doing today. Who's to say I'll be an exception to that rule?
Toni Braxton
#61. The interesting artists I know are the ones doing political work. The most interesting people I know are the people who care about politics.
Nell Zink
#62. Hip hop has always been, for us, for artists who are pure to the craft - any place overseas, whether it's Australia, any place in Asia, Germany, Africa, it becomes something where you can still go and work. Hip hop is an import culture. We're spoiled by it here. It's homegrown.
Talib Kweli
#63. Everybody who writes about Blake begins by saying that he was a visionary. It is a vague term. All artists, even the most realistic, start with some kind of vision - that is what leads them to select what they need from the infinite diversity of appearances.
Kenneth Clark
#64. I have always believed and still believe that artists who live and work with spiritual values cannot and should not remain indifferent to the conflict in which the highest values of humanity and civilization are at stake.
Pablo Picasso
#65. I see so many activists ... who are artists because they feel that they have the power of communication.
Yoko Ono
#66. I think right now, you've seen these artists pop up over the last decade who've flirted with branching together a lot of different kinds of music. Some of them have been huge, and sold millions of records. And I think over time it's become a little bit of what the industry can be.
Eric Church
#67. The hack is like a politician who consults the polls before he takes a position. He's a demagogue. He panders.
Steven Pressfield
#68. Sex is an art; those who know better are the better artists.
M.F. Moonzajer
#69. I have friends in France who are artists. I go to gallery openings and things like that.
Anthony Geary
#70. Maybe the way we have learned to look has changed in the last 25 years, and the exotic is much more acceptable. There are many artists now, younger artists, who work out of the exotic.
Anish Kapoor
#71. All forms of madness, bizarre habits, awkwardness in society, general clumsiness, are justified in the person who creates good art.
Roman Payne
#72. The goal as an actor is to constantly surround yourself with amazing artists who challenge you and make you grow.
Sarah Shahi
#73. James Brown was one of the first artists who found four bars that he liked and played them the entire way through, and then he just added to it vocally.
Brian Austin Green
#74. Much of my writing has taken the form of a pilgrimage: to sacred places that represent the best of America, to musicians and other artists who represent the best of their art.
William Zinsser
#75. The artist who is not also a craftsman is no good; but, alas, most of our artists are nothing else.
Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
#76. Because I was a dancer when I was a kid, I have so much empathy for these young girls who are so drawn to something lovely in music and in movement, and yet they encounter a world full of judgment and criticism of 11-year-old artists and bodies.
Sharon Lawrence
#77. I just am fascinated by other female artists, probably because I feel a kinship with them, no matter who they are and what they do.
Shirley Manson
#78. Music is art, art is life, and we are who we are, and all of these aforementioned women, unless they should choose not to, will be performing well into the next many decades because they are great artists.
Lara St. John
#79. I saw 'Sleeping Beauty' when I was, like, 6 years old at the Mercury Theatre. Then, when I came to Disney, I was in the company of these wonderful artists. People like Glen Keane, like Mark Henn, who were brilliant animators who could really bring these things to life.
John Musker
#80. I did hate those people ... those false artists whose work consists of the poses they strike: saying outrageous things, cultivating complicated tastes and appetites, being artificial, irritating, unbearable. People who, in fact, take from art only what is false and external ...
Mario De Sa-Carneiro
#81. Writers who are activists are very rarely taken seriously as artists.
Larry Kramer
#82. Modern music is people who can't think signing artists who can't write songs to make records for people who can't hear.
Frank Zappa
#83. Look, none of the artists who I admire or respect have ever shied away from a role because it might make them unpopular with somebody.
Matt Bomer
#84. In our culture, imitation-based experience dominates reality-based experience. I find this an awful thing. But there are artists who know from the bottom of their souls that art is about the experience of reality. The reason we have art is because you can't get a real experience from the world.
Richard Tuttle
#85. There is my love ... of the young artists of my country who can carry on the dreams and ideals into the future.
Joseph Plaskett
#86. Those artists who say that somehow therapy or analysis will thwart their creativity are completely misinformed. It's absolutely the opposite: it opens closed doors.
Paul Schrader
#88. I think the nice thing about showing work in New York is that other artists come to see it. When you show work in Switzerland or somewhere else, everywhere else seems to be the provinces in a certain way. You wonder what your paintings are doing on the walls and you wonder who's looking at them.
Julian Schnabel
#89. I know artists whose medium is life itself, and who express the inexpressible without brush, pencil, chisel or guitar. They neither paint nor dance. Their medium is Being. Whatever their hand touches has increased life ... They are the artists of being alive.
Frederick Franck
#90. I mean, there's plenty of artists who are making R&B music, but because of their ethnicity, it's considered something else.
Miguel
#91. I feel like artists that are always quite sad in real life always make really happy music, and artists who are really bouncy and bubbly always make really sad music.
Marina And The Diamonds
#92. Real joy is becoming exceedingly rare among artists of any kind. And I have an idea that those who can and do communicate it are always people who have had a hard time. Then the joy has no smugness or self-righteousness in it, is inclusive not exclusive, and comes close to prayer.
May Sarton
#93. Corporations have steered the industry into what it wants, and a lot of times they will make artists record what it wants or to make songs talk to who they want to talk to. But sometimes the heart and the head have to be able to talk and deal with a situation that's evident.
Chuck D
#94. When you look at the artists who have come up through 'Billboard' over the years, it's incredible.
Tracy Morgan
#95. I love Ruth Brown, not just her singing, but Ruth Brown has more girl power than anyone, because she fought hard against people who ripped her off and then helped other artists through the Rhythm and Blues Foundation.
Ronnie Spector
#96. The loner who looks fabulous is one of the most vulnerable loners of all.
Anneli Rufus
#97. Artists are the people among us who realize creation didn't stop on the sixth day.
Joel-Peter Witkin
#98. It was special with me being from Memphis and knowing the history of the venue, knowing all of the artists who performed in the Orpheum before me. Even having the idea to approach it was ambitious on my part, but I thought they would turn me down at first.
Yo Gotti
#99. [Who are the artists you admire, Surrealist or otherwise?]
Remedios Varo, Max Ernst, Charlotte Salomon, Goya, Aubrey Beardsley. Beardsley is not so much about the impossible as he is about freaks and deformities, but those are interesting to me too.
Audrey Niffenegger
#100. I know there are a lot of musicians and a lot of artists, and there are a lot of writers and other people who inspire young people, but I'd like to see somebody in political life be able to connect and make these choices that we need to make in Washington real in terms of people's lives.
John F. Kerry
