Being An Artist Quotes

#1. Sometimes being an artist is a real drag. It can be incredibly bureaucratic.

Micah Lexier

#2. Being an artist is very independent thinking, although there's always going to be a lot of doubt.

Brice Marden

#3. 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

#4. Being an artist is being an isolated individual.

Asger Jorn

#5. I guess I had a suspicion of it my entire life without knowing exactly what it was - knowing that there was something different about me, which I attributed to being an artist. At 11 or 12 I started sort of clarifying for myself. It took a while.

Randy Harrison

#6. 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

#7. The teacher is of course an artist, but being an artist does not mean that he or she can make the profile, can shape the students. What the educator does in teaching is to make it possible for the students to become themselves.

Paulo Freire

#8. Part of being an artist is being willing to be shocked, being willing to be surprised, being willing to be hurt.

Holly Near

#9. Being an artist is nothing, or at least, not enough; what you want is to be a poet.

Luc Delahaye

#10. I feel like being an artist and being an activist are separate things; I know some people who feel very differently.

Oscar Isaac

#11. The greatness of being an artist is the kind of ridiculous guffaw you can have at one's own misery. 'That was miserable! Now how can I write about it?'

Michael Winter

#12. The unique essence of being an artist is dying. Eveything looks the same. Now there's a formula. And it works. - But it takes away from the reason we do it.

Usher

#13. The words. I love words. I love to write. Being an artist is what I love.

Taylor Swift

#14. Being an artist is not just about what happens when you are in the studio. The way you live, the people you choose to love and the way you love them, the way you vote, the words that come out of your mouth ... will also become the raw material for the art you make.

Teresita Fernandez

#15. 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

#16. Artists no longer starve in garrets. Some people may think this is not wholly a good thing, that being an artist has become too comfortable, at least in the West. I'm not sure I agree. It's a mark of civilization to encourage the arts and the life of the mind.

J.M. Coetzee

#17. Being an artist is the same as being a wizard. Only instead of a wand you use a pencil for your magic.

Kristina Webb

#18. Not any particular religion or school of religion, but being an artist, you have to be spiritual, in a way.

Hiroshi Sugimoto

#19. Life is different than it was in the Nineties. I'm a dad, and there are other things I have to get done in an afternoon than just being an artist.

Chris Robinson

#20. He's been living on the fringes of art for so many years, talking and talking about it, that he's come to expect all the prerogatives of being an artist without ever doing the work. I mean he's an art bum ...

Richard Yates

#21. It's like whether you're in a huge movie or you've just recorded an incredible album you've got to do the next thing, and that's part of being an artist.

Brad Garrett

#22. There's a great social component to being a writer, to being an artist.

Rebecca Makkai

#23. I think I've always had these two currents, equally strong, of wanting to change the world and make the world better and fight injustices and fight violence, and then being an artist, which is a very different strain.

Eve Ensler

#24. My father didn't think being an artist was a respectable or worthy goal for a man.

Richard Diebenkorn

#25. I loved being a child. If I do have a talent, it's not so much being an artist, but it's being able to remember back to that time.

Jan Brett

#26. Though I played classical piano since age 5 and sang in a cappella groups, being an artist didn't seem like something I was talented enough to do full time. So I kind of buried that dream.

Rachel Platten

#27. My older sister achieved her dream of being an artist. She's an illustrator living in Manhattan.

Jeannette Walls

#28. The integrity of being an artist for Frank Stella means going into the unknown.A great artist is somebody who's not scared to reinvent themselves and to start all over again. And some artists do it once, twice, three times in their career. He's done it probably a dozen times or more.

Frank Stella

#29. The main thing that attracts me to Buddhism is probably what attracts every artist to being an artist - that it's a godlike thing. You are the ultimate authority. There is no other ultimate authority.

Laurie Anderson

#30. To be a qawwal is more than being a performer, more than being an artist,One must be willing to release one's mind and soul from one's body to achieve ecstasy through music. Qawwali is enlightenment itself.

Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan

#31. I love making up visual works of art in language. I get to be an artist without actually being an artist in that sense.

Siri Hustvedt

#32. I just really feel so grateful to Sundance because I've always been an artist and I've never been able to make a living at being an artist until Sundance.

Lynn Shelton

#33. A true artist could and should create till the day they die. You don't ever fail as an artist until you quit being an artist.

Christian Keiber

#34. We should self-examine and talk about things like our own white privilege and these phony senses of being an artist.

Geoff Rickly

#35. Every painting I do blends time frames. The great thing about being an artist is I can make the past join the present in some reality of the future.

Thomas Kinkade

#36. Working as a model liberated me from ever having to hold a day job. I transitioned from doing that to working full-time as an artist. If you're 19 and living cheap, being an artist model can sustain you.

Molly Crabapple

#37. The only thing that I am concerned with in life is being an artist .. I had to suppress for so many years in high school because I was made fun of but now I'm completely insulated in my box of insanity and I can do whatever I like.

Lady Gaga

#38. I do think you get lonelier and lonelier being an artist as you get older.

Gary Hume

#39. Being an artist is not easy - I have always said that to the students I have taught over the years. It's a huge sacrifice.

Marina Abramovic

#40. I always thought being an artist was a lazy job. I was wrong.

Damian Loeb

#41. The awesome thing about being an artist? You can't be fired from your own mind.

Rose McGowan

#42. The thing about being an artist," Dad said, folding his newspaper and setting it down on the table, "is that there are always going to be people who want to stop you from doing your art. But this usually says more about them and their issues than it does about you and your art. Trust me.

Leila Sales

#43. It's called "being an artist" for a reason; it's something YOU ARE. It's how you live. It's WHO you are. How you spend your life and what you leave behind.

Charlotte Eriksson

#44. Being an artist means forever healing your own wounds and at the same time endlessly exposing them.

Annette Messager

#45. Being an artist and having to be responsible for the art that you make is really quite challenging, and as you get older it becomes more and more difficult.

Tracey Emin

#46. Part of being an artist is that you are always concerned you don't have what it takes. It ... keeps us honest.

Lupita Nyong'o

#47. An artist should be taking risks. That's the whole idea of being an artist.

JR

#48. Being an artist is a totally godlike thing to do - and I have a god complex.

Laurie Anderson

#49. The easy part of being an artist is figuring out the message that everyone else is ready to hear. The hard part is waiting for the proper lull to make the announcement.

Mark Twain

#50. So there's a cloud of rage around me, but being an artist kind of changes that. No matter what you thought coming in, what ignorant thing you believed, you're in show business for two years, you're like, "OK, I was wrong." It's hard to be mad at any particular group of people when you're an artist.

Chris Rock

#51. Being an artist means, not reckoning and counting, but ripening like the tree which does not force its sap and stands confidence in the storms of spring without fear that after them may come no summer

Rainer Maria Rilke

#52. For me, the heyday was in 1959. It was before the Ferus Gallery moved across the street, in the days when Ed Kienholz and Walter Hopps ran it. At that time, art was taken very seriously in terms of being an artist, and not as a profession.

Billy Al Bengston

#53. Over the years I have learned that creating art has made me happy. I used to be a lawyer and I'm much happier being an artist.

Nathan Sawaya

#54. When I'm up on stage, I'm thinking more about my fans and about myself as a singer and an artist. When I'm at home being a daddy, the last thing I'm thinking about is being an artist. It is two things that I never really put together.

Josh Turner

#55. I feel it's my job to continue being a student of music if I want to continue being an artist and a producer of other artists. You have to keep filling your mind with other music. You have to be ahead of the curve.

Bruno Mars

#56. What's exciting about being an artist, still, and what I'm really finding is awesome is that you can do it until you drop. I don't care how many lines I have on my face - I'll keep doing it!

Nikki Sixx

#57. I think part of being an artist is having the ability to define your own responsibilities. I certainly wouldn't prescribe any. As far as I'm concerned, my biggest responsibility is to my own imagination. We're all conduits. Art preceded me, and it'll be here long after I'm gone.

Pierre Coupey

#58. There's such a freedom about being an artist ... You're not accountable - you're this renegade thing.

Cornelia Parker

#59. I think that the genes for being an artist and mentally ill aren't just related, they are the same gene, but try telling that to a bill collector. We

Neil Hilborn

#60. When people like your music because it has vulnerable honesty, and you're able to comfortably admit to flaws and imperfections, then that's the most liberating thing about being an artist.

Tove Lo

#61. Being a songwriter is really the base of being an artist, for me.

Kelsea Ballerini

#62. Everybody needs a release. Sometimes people mosh at my shows. That inspired me to make records to get the people more crunk. People need a release and I enjoy being an artist that can do that for people.

Yelawolf

#63. Being an artist is more than a job or a skill; it's a way of walking through the world.

Anita Diamant

#64. Laguna prided itself on being an artist's colony that accepted all classes and cultures, not merely tolerating eccentrics but delighting in them.

Dean Koontz

#65. There's just some dysfunctionalism with artists. There are good things and bad things about being an artist, and the good thing is, sometimes you get an inside line on what's really happening. You develop these strange antennae that clue you in to what's really going on.

David Bowie

#66. But that's what being an artist is - feeling crummy before everyone else feels crummy.

The New Yorker

#67. Being an artist is a way of saying, I am here, and this is what I stand for.

Jodie Foster

#68. When an artist stops being a child, he stops being an artist.

Isamu Noguchi

#69. I'm terminally dissatisfied. That's probably part of being an artist.

Jared Leto

#70. 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

#71. Being an artist is more of a mindset, a way of seeing things; it is no longer so much about producing something.

Ai Weiwei

#72. I don't pay attention to auction prices. Nothing interests me less. One of the benefits of not being an artist is I don't have to navigate the social hierarchies of the art world as a person of desire. I don't need anything. I live in a different way.

Rachel Kushner

#73. I didn't think of being an artist until after I went away to boarding school. There were other things to be interested in. And it seemed like a nightmare.

Elizabeth Neel

#74. The thing about being an artist today is you get to develop right in front of people's eyes before you even put out an album.

J. Cole

#75. For me, being an artist with a high profile is a good thing for art.

Tracey Emin

#76. Once I started reinventing for myself what being an artist was - not going into a studio, but making things on my own terms in response to being out in the world - I started to really enjoy it ... I realized that everything else for me was hell.

Cornelia Parker

#77. One of the beauties of being an artist is that you can create a whole new world, with circumstances that are better in your invented world than they are in the real world.

Maurice Sendak

#78. 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

#79. My father had always identified himself as a writer to my mother when they met. When they met, he was writing this great novel, there was no doubt about it. Part of why she left him was this delusion of greatness and identifying it very directly with being an artist.

Nick Flynn

#80. The best thing about being an artist is the free clothing and getting to kiss pretty girls.

James Rosenquist

#81. The greatest compliment I ever got was when people called me an artist, and I understand that solo aspect of being an artist, when you're in there by yourself, trying to do something great, and people who don't even know you can come up and just dump on you.

John McEnroe

#82. 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

#83. With the Ford Foundation grant all of a sudden instead of being an artist that had made a couple of short films, I became a filmmaker who dabbled in the arts.

Bruce Conner

#84. I went to Princeton High School, when I was very serious about being an artist. I was in a theatre family but I didn't want to become an actor.

John Lithgow

#85. Being an artist doesn't start because you're 21, and it doesn't end because you're 51. You are who you are until the day you die.

Jennifer Lopez

#86. Women are emotional! And being an artist and a woman is probably more difficult because you have more stuff to overcome.

Chris Johnson

#87. I was recognized as being an artist and a storyteller. If Hulk Hogan was the Elvis of wrestling, I was the Robert De Niro.

Bret Hart

#88. Being a songwriter requires versatility while being an artist requires you to create a cohesive body of work. I truly enjoy both.

Wendy Starland

#89. It is a good motive, fame and money, as it is tangible and measurable. Being an artist is neither measurable nor tangible and certainly not a way to become rich.

Dirk Benedict

#90. I didn't see any difference between being a photographer or being an artist. I didn't make those boundaries. If someone wants to think it's art, that's great, but I'll let history decide.

David LaChapelle

#91. Being an artist is a job for life.

Brian Eno

#92. The good thing about being an artist, is it's a legitimate way of looking at things cross-eyed.

John Chamberlain

#93. I've always been interested in how fast-moving our identity is and that I've never been able to pin down who I truly am. That inspires me to write, because I feel like that cements me a bit, in that I find my identity in being an artist.

Marina And The Diamonds

#94. Being an artist is supposed to be a scam, not a career.

Wade Guyton

#95. Being an artist is dragging your innermost feelings out, giving a piece of yourself, no matter in which art form, in which medium.

Henry Rollins

#96. In Europe, being an artist is a form of behavior. In America, it's an excuse for a form of behavior.

William Faulkner

#97. The story that I wanna tell is pretty much about the way I grew up. Being bi-racial, growing up in a big city and being an artist.

Lenny Kravitz

#98. Practicality continues to be a challenge for me - it's at odds with being an artist. I actually had a career on stage in New York - not a brilliant career or I'd still be doing it - but I got enough work to keep my agent and my union health insurance.

Debra Dean

#99. Being an artist, it's always tempting to measure success through other people's eyes, be they critics, journalists or audiences.

Sara Blecher

#100. To be born with a unique instinct, will demand 'unique duties'. If you didn't think about being an artist before 7 years of age you probably don't have it and you will be able to paint what you want to paint.

David Luiz