Top 100 Be An Artist Quotes
#1. Do you want to be an artist so that the whole world will look at you, or do you want to be an artist because you would like to use your ability to attract attention, to have the world see itself through you differently?
Anna Deavere Smith
#2. It often is a terrible insult to some families if one of the kids turns out to be an artist and that's one way to really shake up the family if you haven't got nerve enough to turn into a homosexual.
Kurt Vonnegut
#3. A historian may be an artist too, and a novelist is a historian, the preserver, the keeper, the expounder, of human experience.
Joseph Conrad
#4. I so much appreciate it when anybody tries to make something and tries to be an artist - I'm happy to see the work.
Laurie Anderson
#5. I want to be an artist, not ... a celluloid aphrodisiac.
Marilyn Monroe
#6. Who would be an artist if they did not believe that that happens? If they did not know it happens, because they have felt the god within them use their tongue, their hands? Maybe only once, once in their lives. But once is enough. Nor
Ursula K. Le Guin
#7. Having kids is a full-time job. And I don't know any woman who isn't constantly fighting between the exquisite selfishness required to be an artist and this exquisite selflessness that's required to be a parent.
Liz W. Garcia
#8. It wasn't that I wanted to be an artist. But when I took my first drawing class with the painter Doug Ohlson, I could never finish a drawing.
Lynne Tillman
#9. You can never be an artist if your work comes without effort
Amy Tan
#10. It was perfectly possible to be an artist, yet also to be robust and responsible.
Julian Barnes
#11. I didn't want to be an artist in the same place I worked. You could always have people that might feel like you would do something more for yourself.
DJ Khaled
#12. I don't think you have to earn your income as an artist to be an artist. But if you are an artist, then art is what you do, whether or not you're paid for doing it; it is what you do, not what you are. I regard artist not as a description of temperament but as a category of profession, of vocation.
Tony Kushner
#14. I suppose I felt doomed to be an artist early on because of the way I drew all over the books that I needed for school, from ancient history to math. I was more interested in drawing in the margins than actually doing the work.
Nancy Spero
#15. At art college, I started to do music and then painting and drawing - and that would have been my ideal life, to be an artist and be paid for it, to be able to create stuff. I realized it was difficult, but I don't know if I had the application for it.
Sean Bean
#16. What did it mean for a black woman to be an artist in our grandmothers' time? In our great-grandmothers' day? It is an answer cruel enough to stop the blood.
Alice Walker
#17. 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
#18. Don't try to be an artist. Find the thing within you that needs to be expressed. You might find it is art.
Duane Michals
#20. It's hard to be an artist. It's hard to be anything. It's hard to be.
Bill Murray
#21. I never considered myself an artist. I aspire to be an artist, but I never thought I had the depth or substance or gift to be an artist. I do think I have some talent, but it doesn't go as far as being an artist.
Woody Allen
#22. To be an artist is to take responsibility for the world's destiny. You shape it by your vision.
Laurence Gartel
#23. When you have a chance to be an artist with an audience in your lifetime, you have to say thanks to your audience. That's a great thing. That's the best thing that can happen to an artist.
Rokia Traore
#24. I can safely say that I had an incredibly difficult and trying past growing up and trying to be an artist and standing up as who I am in this world.
Matt Bomer
#25. If you want to be an artist, truly try to write what you believe, and if you write when you don't believe then you should try to become an actor.
Chuck D
#27. When people have told me that because I am a Catholic, I cannot be an artist, I have had to reply, ruefully, that because I am a Catholic I cannot afford to be less than an artist.
Flannery O'Connor
#28. The man incapable of contemplation cannot be an artist, but only a skillful workman.
Ananda Coomaraswamy
#29. At the dressing table, every woman has a chance to be an artist, and art, as Aristotle said, completes what nature left unfinished.
Sophia Loren
#30. To be an artist you have to give up everything, including the desire to be a good artist.
Jasper Johns
#31. When I first started out in the music industry and went to Elektra Records, I didn't go to be an artist, I went to get a record label started. And they said in order to have a label deal, I had to be an artist - so that's what I did.
Missy Elliott
#33. It is difficult to say why I decided I wanted to be an artist. Obviously, I had some facility, more than other people, but sometimes facility comes because one is more interested in looking at things, examining them, more interested in the visual world than other people are.
David Hockney
#34. I believe myself to be an artist. That was my calling, to do my work, and what's most important to me is to do the best work I possibly can. And that is what means the most, that is what will endure.
Patti Smith
#36. I think of myself as a producer who tries to bring the best out of everyone, whether that be an artist, songwriter or a publicist.
L.A. Reid
#38. In order to be an artist, one must be deeply rooted in the society.
Simone De Beauvoir
#39. I always wanted to be an artist, I just didn't know that you could be, or how you could be. I went to an art high school but they never even took me to a gallery.
Francesca DiMattio
#40. I'm not looking to be the greatest pop star of all time. I want to be an artist. I want to influence people and I want to get people to think about the world, to think and talk to each other and connect. To challenge one another.
Jillian Hervey
#41. What an artist is trying to do for people is bring them closer to something, because of course art is about sharing. You wouldn't be an artist unless you wanted to share an experience, a thought.
David Hockney
#42. I always wanted to be an artist; being a songwriter for myself was always a must but being a songwriter for others has been a bonus.
Jessie J.
#43. [To be an artist,] this desire to conquer all with images.
Gunter Grass
#44. So it's hard to be an artist and be true to the reality of the world you want to create and also make it entertaining and successful financially.
Antoine Fuqua
#46. I think it's unreasonable to expect kids at 17 to know what they want to do with the rest of their lives. And actually, I guess I had a desire to be an artist, and I did enroll in art school out of high school.
Jonathan LaPaglia
#47. To be an artist is to fail, as no other dare to fail ... failure is his world and the shrink from it desertion
Marcel Proust
#48. 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
#49. My job is to be an artist and thus I use different media to deal with the status of the body in our society.
Orlan
#50. Video is a funny thing. It's one thing to be an artist, singer-songwriter, and use words and create pictures in people's minds. And then be asked to do video for it, to actually give a certain visual for your song.
Melissa Etheridge
#51. When I was young, anywhere I would go in Germany, I would see my father's posters. Everyone knew about him. And he had many friends who were artists who were also quite famous. So, for me, it seemed very natural to be an artist and be known.
Ruth Bernhard
#52. To give a body and a perfect form to one's thought, this - and only this - is to be an artist.
Jacques-Louis David
#53. I would rather be an artist than a leader. Ironically, a leader has to follow the rules.
Criss Jami
#54. To be an artist at all is like living in Switzerland during a world war. To be an artist in Zurich, in 1917, implies a degree of self-absorption that would have glazed over the eyes of Narcissus.
Tom Stoppard
#55. The first choice an artist makes is precisely to be an artist, and if he chooses to be an artist it is in consideration of what he is himself and because of a certain idea he has of art
Albert Camus
#56. Isn't it wonderful to be an artist whose works have mostly been lost?
Carl Andre
#58. Each role demands the right actor. To play an artist, one must be an artist.
Bruno Dumont
#59. 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
#60. By the time I was a teenager, I knew I wanted to be an artist. I was a born draftsman and liked all forms of art, so I just knew that's what I wanted to do.
Frank Frazetta
#61. To be an artist is to believe in life.
Henry Moore
#62. Secretly I knew I had been transformed, moved by the revelation that human beings create art, that to be an artist was to see what others could not.
Patti Smith Just Kids
#63. How wonderful it feels to be an artist and a woman in the twentieth century,
Muriel Spark
#64. You remember I had a strong inclination all my life to be a painter. Under different circumstances I would rather have been a painter than to bother with these god-damn words. I never actually thought of myself as a poet but I knew I had to be an artist in some way.
William Carlos Williams
#65. 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
#66. You don't have to go to some special private school to be an artist. Just look at the intricate beauty of cobwebs. Spiders make them with their butts.
Jenny Lawson
#67. And I want to find a way to be of service to humanity. I think that's crucial. So want to be an artist and a servant, a humanitarian, and I want to play goofy weirdoes.
Rainn Wilson
#68. 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
#69. If a man wants to be an artist, he should never look at pictures.
Winslow Homer
#70. To be an artist is to enter into competition with god.
Patti Smith
#71. 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
#72. I barely knew I wanted to be an artist. I liked my art classes and painting was fun, I guess, but I didn't realize that seeing the country was going to inspire me to further explore that ... but that's what it did.
Edward Ruscha
#73. No work of art is more important than the Christian's life, and every Christian is called to be an artist in this sense ... The Christian's life is to be a thing of truth and also a thing of beauty in the midst of a lost and despairing world.
Francis Schaeffer
#74. I'd actually really love to review books and films and plays, but you can't be an artist and a critic. I would love it if I could.
Romola Garai
#75. I grew up painting and playing piano so when I was a little kid I thought I was going to be an artist or a painter but my mom had me taking piano lessons for about 10-12 years as a young kid.
Mike Shinoda
#76. When I got into art school, I thought it was paradise. I wanted to be an artist so much that I was really driven and nothing could stop me.
Sean Scully
#77. I went to art school, and I wanted to be an artist since I was 5. I basically moved to New York to do art, and I just sort of fell into doing music at an early age.
Kim Gordon
#78. I want to be an artist, not an erotic freak. I don't want to be sold to the public as a celluloid aphrodisiac.
Marilyn Monroe
#79. He who desires nothing, hopes for nothing, and is afraid of nothing, cannot be an artist.
Anton Chekhov
#80. I want to be an artist, an actress with integrity, and that includes all kinds of parts.
Marilyn Monroe
#81. I started in the late 70s, beginning of the 80s, and I think I started to sing and make music as a therapy for myself; I never planned to be an artist; sometimes when I think about it it's crazy that I'm here, and I'm touring, and I'm doing what I'm doing.
Mari Boine
#82. I'm a fashion designer. What I do is artistic, but I'm not an artist because everything I do is destined to be sold. That's not to say that you can't be an artist and a fashion designer. I think some designers are artists.
Tom Ford
#83. Now that I'm in my 40s, it's much easier to be an artist. It's good knowing that I'm not in the game to be competing with really young groups of kids on the radio. Or to, you know, make 'beat' music.
Sheryl Crow
#84. I'm one of those people who thinks you can have a happy life and still be an artist.
Shelley Duvall
#85. How can you be an artist and not reflect the times?
Nina Simone
#86. My mother was always encouraging about my wanting to be an artist.
Chris Ware
#87. As a white male in America, I have privilege. As a white male who happens to be an artist with a fan base, I have a platform to spread awareness about that privilege. However, songs about race and privilege are very difficult to A) write and B) dissect as a listener. They're heavy.
Macklemore
#88. It's an incredible dilemma to be an artist of color and to always be in denial about that, saying, 'I'm a choreographer first and then I'm black,' when in fact, that's not the case. I'm black first and then I'm also a choreographer.
Donald Byrd
#89. I knew I wanted to be an artist at age 5 or 6. I always drew. At 8, I was permitted to study.
Hedda Sterne
#90. I always wanted to be an artist, writer and poet since I was seven, and one has to live long enough to evolve as an artist and do one's finest work.
Patti Smith
#91. I wanted nothing less than to be a fiction writer when I was a kid. If you had told me I would be an artist or novelist when I grew up, I would have laughed in your face.
Caleb Carr
#92. I'd say, if you want to be an artist, start with your art; start with making great music and it will, hopefully, eventually cut through all of the nonsense that is out there.
Queen Latifah
#93. To be an artist is first to be a manual laborer.
Irving Stone
#94. Ever since I was a kid, I might have been eleven or twelve. I'd be telling anyone who would listen that when I grew up, I wanted to be an artist.
Graeme Base
#95. This was my first encounter with art as art (he saw 'Pinky' painted by Sir Thomas Lawrence and 'The Blue Boy painted by Thomas Gainborough) ... somebody actually MADE those paintings ... (it) was the first time I realized you could be an artist.
Robert Rauschenberg
#96. No great artist ever sees things as they really are. If he did, he would cease to be an artist.
Oscar Wilde
#97. Sometime during the mid-50s I said, 'I am an artist.' Before that, for many years, I had said, 'I'm going to be an artist.' Then I went through a change of mind and a change of heart. What made 'going to be an artist' into 'being an artist', was, in part, a spiritual change.
Jasper Johns
#98. I believe that a truly valuable artist must be an artist who realizes the impossibility of his task -and then continues to do it.
Keith Jarrett
#99. To be an artist or a writer is to be this weird thing - a hand worker in an era of mass production.
Susan Sontag
#100. It became like a symbolic thing, to be "an artist." After Duchamp, I realized that being an artist is more about a lifestyle and attitude than producing some product.
Ai Weiwei
