Top 100 Creative Artists Quotes
#1. Magic Johnson was in the seventh year of his Hall of Fame career when thoughts of his basketball afterlife led him to the office of uber-executive Michael Ovitz, co-founder of Creative Artists Agency, Hollywood's most powerful agency.
Don Yaeger
#2. I feel like I'm one of the more creative artists in the game. I think I'm going to be here for a while.
Wale
#3. I started off playing by ear, and being around a bunch of musicians and playing in the streets and in the different parades and, then, I got accepted to go to New Orleans Center for Creative Artists ... it's where Wynton Marsalis, Harry Connick, Jr. and all those guys went out.
Troy Andrews
#4. June Jordan once said something which is just wonderful. I'm paraphrasing her-that her function as a poet was to make revolution irresistible. Well o.k. that is the function of us all, as creative artists, to make the truth, as we see it irresistible.
Audre Lorde
#5. Today we've learned to celebrate mediocrity. Back in the day we had creative artists; today we have created artists.
Lionel Richie
#7. In this age when people expect to get their music for free, we have to work out how we can protect the rights of creative artists so they are compensated fairly and that the record business itself remains sound and healthy.
Clive Davis
#8. People must insist on the right to say no, to be alone, to stand out from the herd. Creative artists can say all this in their own way and in their own field, by hard, rigorous work.
Tahar Ben Jelloun
#9. Although in society in general, the idea of an Irish composer of 'classical music', or whatever you want to call it, is still a strange item, generally speaking. Even in the arts, among our fellow creative artists in other disciplines, you still feel slightly out of it.
John Kinsella
#10. Creative artists have great passion.
Jack Welch
#11. Because I didn't go to film school, you learn so much from a lot of creative artists.
F. Gary Gray
#12. Obscurity is a far greater threat to authors and creative artists than piracy.
Tim O'Reilly
#13. We should not have a tin cup out for something as important as the arts in this country, the richest in the world. Creative artists are always begging, but always being used when it's time to show us at our best.
Leontyne Price
#14. The nation is bound together by its creative artists and not by parallel lines of rusting steel.
Pierre Berton
#15. Creative Artists Agency put together a project of extraordinary mediocrity and colossal stupidity. Otherwise, it was great.
Mikhail Baryshnikov
#16. Poets do not go mad; but chess-players do. Mathematicians go mad, and cashiers; but creative artists very seldom. I am not, as will be seen, in any sense attacking logic: I only say that this danger does lie in logic, not in imagination.
G.K. Chesterton
#17. 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
#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. A person's work allows their character to form and provides a creative outlet for their inner world of imaginative thoughts and creative impulses. A person whom fails to find suitable work that allows their soul room to grow will quickly begin eroding into a withered and desiccated being.
Kilroy J. Oldster
#20. 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
#21. 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
#22. Every day you run into artists on the streets in SoHo or other creative people you want to do something with. There's nothing to match that chance encounter.
Jeffrey Deitch
#23. You know how creative people are, we have to try everything until we find our niche.
E.A. Bucchianeri
#24. Pseudo-artists think that being an artist means opposing whatever seems to be an establishment. That is not creative at all. True creativity is the ability to gain perspective wherever you may have missed it before.
Criss Jami
#25. Many people are dead inside which is why they crave the living artists creative truth.
Bryant McGill
#26. The value of an artist is more because of his originality than his skill.
Amit Kalantri
#27. Artists are visionaries. We routinely practice a form of faith, seeing clearly and moving toward a creative goal that shimmers in the distance - often visible to us, but invisible to those around us.
Julia Cameron
#28. I've made money, and I've been ripped off. I've had creative freedom, and I've been pressured to make hits. I have dealt with diva behavior from crazy musicians, and I have seen genius records by wonderful artists get completely ignored. I love music. I always will.
David Byrne
#29. Fortunately, artists can live off their works, if you're creative at how you do it. If you just depend on the videos and the radio, you're at a loss.
Talib Kweli
#30. You kind of attribute this magic to music and as you meet the people you realize that they don't contain the magic. They just channel it a little bit sometimes, but they never possess it. They never own it.
Kyle Morton
#31. The degree of talent, the size of the gift, is immaterial. All artists must listen, but not all hear great symphonies, see wide canvasses, conceive complex, character-filled novels. No
matter, the creative act is the same, and it is an act of faith.
Madeleine L'Engle
#32. There has to be solidarity among the artists, songwriters and all the creative forces within that circle in order for the necessary changes to take place and for each person to get what is rightfully due.
Oleta Adams
#33. It was a period when live TV was just starting and getting popular and they took it seriously too. Not so much like TV now. They did [Ernst] Hemingway and [William] Faulkner - and they're all wonderful artists and it just was very creative at that time.
Gena Rowlands
#34. Without audiences, artists would be doing something else, and their creative and technical skills would fall on absent eyes.
Ryan Kavanaugh
#35. I guess I learned a couple of good lessons from my dad. One was when you're creating something, what you want when you're working with a team of other artists, is everybody to work with some creative freedom, so that you really get the best out of everybody.
Brian Henson
#36. It's impossible for a creative artist to be either a Puritan or a Fascist, because both are a negation of the creative urge. The only things a creative artist can be opposed to are ugliness and injustice.
Liam O'Flaherty
#37. If professional religious leaders cannot instruct us in mythological lore, our artists and creative writers can perhaps step into this priestly role and bring fresh insight to our lost and damaged role.
Karen Armstrong
#38. Remind me, Lord, of why I create things and that YOU ... you are the best of artists, put these gifts in me to share with the world.
Jennifer Allwood
#39. Creativity requires introspection, self-examination, and a willingness to take risks. Because of this, artists are perhaps more susceptible to self-doubt and despair than those who do not court the creative muses.
Eric Maisel
#40. Artists don't like the business side. None of us were born understanding money. We all had to learn how to do it. So it's just something creative people need to get familiar with ... not really so scary.
Adam Leipzig
#41. In England, there is a dividing line between artists and illustrators, who are thought inferior to painters. Well, that's absolute rubbish. Some of the most creative work is being done in children's books. In Japan, everything is art. They don't say painting is better than ceramics or dress design.
Brian Wildsmith
#42. Fame is a spiritual drug. It is often a by-product of our artistic work, but like nuclear waste, it can be a very dangerous by-product.
Julia Cameron
#43. However, there are quite a few current artists doing clever, creative musical comedy, including The Lonely Island, Flight of the Conchords, Tenacious D, Ylvis, Garfunkel and Oates, Reggie Watts,
Anonymous
#44. Fame is not the same as success, and in our true souls we know that.
Julia Cameron
#45. Women can also be creative in total isolation. I know excellent women artists who do original work without any response to speak of. Maybe they are used to lack of feedback. Maybe they are tougher.
Elaine De Kooning
#46. I've noticed in my life that as you work on more things with more people, you spend less time hanging out with other people who are artists, creative people who give you a sense of family.
Aaron Rose
#47. You've got to run your career. What happens is a lot of times artists have this talent and they're just looking for somebody to take it and do something with it. And you have to be the creative force.
Will Smith
#48. I really don't have a theme when I start a sculpture. The rock guides me to the final sculpture. I think that is true for many creative sculpture artists.
Jimmy Carl Black
#49. The sooner you finish procrastinating, the sooner you can get back to your art.
Stephanie Lennox
#51. I'm never happier than when I'm being creative, whether that's with Coldplay or other artists. I just love being in the studio.
Guy Berryman
#52. I believe art prefers rules. For some artists, the worst thing you can do is say 'Do whatever you want.' Such permission can be terrifying. I know it is for me. Often it's better if you impose rules or restrictions on a project. Requirements can force you to be creative in unusual ways.
Lisa Mangum
#53. We can either own our circumstances and be creative in them, or we can throw up our hands and say, I cannot be held accountable because the conditions are not ideal.
Patti Digh
#54. Even at my biggest, I want to be writing for other artists. Even at my peak - the highest I can be as an artist - I always want to be keeping my creative juices flowing, keeping money in the bank, putting my intellectual property out there.
Keri Hilson
#55. I don't agree with this romantic fantasy that people who suffer from depression are more likely to be artists. I find that I am more creative when I am happy actually.
Sinead O'Connor
#56. Most artists have experienced the creative block. We get stuck in our work. We beat our head against the wall: nothing. Sometimes, it is because we are trying something at the wrong time.
Lukas Foss
#57. The most mesmerizing of artists is always like one who was merely drawing in the sand and people came to watch.
Criss Jami
#59. The challenge is this: training creative, independent, and innovative artists is new to us.
Seth Godin
#60. The artist lives to have stories to tell and to learn to tell them well.
Criss Jami
#61. It's an artist's right to rebel against the world's stupidity.
E.A. Bucchianeri
#62. I think that what most artists are trying to do is trying to understand. I think what distinguishes creative people and/or artists from another type of person is perhaps a willingness to go headlong into that uncertainty.
Brandon Boyd
#63. I mean really, how could an artistic individual stay grounded in the nitty-gritty of how many minutes per pound meat has to stay in the oven when trying to fathom the creative philosophy behind the greatest artistic minds of the world?
E.A. Bucchianeri
#64. Marc Jacobs is full of creative people and Louis Vuitton is again a name on the door, a name that has existed for many years but I'm a collaborator there and I bring in other people, other artists and I work with a great creative design team.
Marc Jacobs
#65. Scenius." Under this model, great ideas are often birthed by a group of creative individuals - artists, curators, thinkers, theorists, and other tastemakers - who make up an "ecology of talent.
Austin Kleon
#66. Among the mysteries of the creative ego is how the transcendence of what artists do is their own response to the darkness of who they are, and the same personal darkness that is at odds with the art is what propels artists to the light of what they create.
Steve Erickson
#67. Like most artists, everything I produced was connected to who I was - and so I suffered according to how my work was received. The idea that anyone might be able to detach their personal value from their public output was revolutionary.
Jessie Burton
#68. The future belongs to a different kind of person with a different kind of mind: artists, inventors, storytellers-creative and holistic 'right-brain' thinkers whose abilities mark the fault line between who gets ahead and who doesn't.
Daniel H. Pink
#69. As an artist, you need the naysayers and the nonbelievers to add fuel to your creative fire.
Ice-T
#70. Like all artists, I go through creative spurts.
Nikki Sixx
#71. My sisters were going out with artists and poets, and eventually it was the creative world which attracted me.
Luc Ferrari
#72. It isn't a hunch but the subconscious mind, which is the creative mind, at work. That is the mind which makes artists do things without their knowing how they came to do them. Perhaps with me it was the cumulative effect of a lot of little things individually insignificant but collectively powerful.
Jesse Lauriston Livermore
#73. As artists, we must learn to be self-nourishing. We must become alert enough to consciously replenish our creative resources as we draw on them.
Julia Cameron
#74. The Internet has been a great outlet for storytelling. After all, there are web-based shows that have started online and have then gotten picked up. I think it's a great opportunity for artists to get through the network roadblock. It just allows us another venue to be creative in.
Eva LaRue
#75. Art is often born from inner struggle. Artists are plagued by impulses they must express. Contentment does not seek action but struggle always seeks release, and for the creative it can take the form of art.
Eric Gibbons
#76. The human spirit's unquenchable drive for originality and compulsion for creating art is the compelling force of our humanity.
Kilroy J. Oldster
#77. For many artists fame complements the value of creative self-expression. Ludwig van Beethoven loved composing music, but he probably would have enjoyed it less if no one ever listened to the product.
Tyler Cowen
#78. Many artists and writers have used cannabis for creative stimulation - from the writers of the world's religious masterpieces to our most irreverent satirists.
Jack Herer
#79. An artist should paint from the heart, and not always what people expect. Predictability often leads to the dullest work, in my opinion, and we have been bored stiff long enough I think.
E.A. Bucchianeri
#80. What do young, budding artists do, but go to law school? I had creative periods now and again, but it wasn't until I was practicing law that I really needed a creative outlet. I'd come home from long days at the office and draw, paint, and sculpt from clay, wire - even candy.
Nathan Sawaya
#81. Mixtapes are extremely important, especially for New York or North East artists. They allow you to be creative, to get feedback and criticism, but most of all, it gets your name out there. I would say about 90-100% of my success was down to the mixtapes.
Joe Budden
#82. Anxious, inexperienced writers obey rules. Rebellious, unschooled writers break rules. Artists master the form.
Robert McKee
#83. Not only was he not mad, but he was a musician, and my favorite men had always been musicians or writers or anything that involved the creative process and behaving like tortured artists ... I found financial insecurity a great aphrodisiac.
Marian Keyes
#84. Weirdism is definitely the cornerstone of many an artist's career.
E.A. Bucchianeri
#85. The truth is an artist like me who doesn't get the type of promotion that we see more commercial artists receive, and especially in this climate of the music business, you have to be creative about how you promote yourself.
Chrisette Michele
#86. My experiences have been, from the very beginning, cultural and creative. And my business has been a way of exposing the culture, exposing the artists so that the world could hear and see them.
Russell Simmons
#87. There has to be something other than keeping busy that gives human life value, because our society so often functions as if 'productivity' and/or 'usefulness' are the measures of human value, and - particularly for artists - this is deeply problematic. We shouldn't given in.
Tasha Golden
#88. Don't separate 'real' life from 'creative' life.
Patti Digh
#89. The history of the creative progress of individual artists shows that, along with their spiritual growth and the increasing complexity of their inner life, their forms of expression become more complex.
Mieczyslaw Jastrun
#90. Other worshipful objects were content with worship; men, women, God, all let one kneel prostrate; but this form, were it only the shape of a white lampshade looming on a wicker table, roused one to perpetual combat, challenged one to a fight in which one was bound to be worsted.
Virginia Woolf
#91. I've lived all these years among those who create nothing and change nothing,' I said. 'Actors and musicians-they're saints to me.
Anne Rice
#92. If the opening chapters of Genesis portray God as a creative artist, then it only stands to reason that the people he made in his image will also be artists. Art is an imaginative activity, and in the act of creating, we reflect the mind of our Maker.
Philip Graham Ryken
#93. The nervous system of any age or nation is its creative workers, its artists. And if that nervous system is profoundly disturbed by its environment, the work it produces will inescapably reflect the disturbances, sometimes obliquely and sometimes with violent directness.
Tennessee Williams
#94. Seeing yourself as part of a creative lineage will help you feel less alone as you start making your own stuff. I hang pictures of my favourite artists in my studio. They're like friendly ghosts. I can almost feel them pushing me forward as I'm hunched over my desk.
Austin Kleon
#95. The great leaders of business, industry, finance, and the great artists, musicians, poets, and writers became great, because they developed the faculty of creative imagination.
Napoleon Hill
#96. People who just listen to music and are not a part of the creative community should realize that there is a lot of interaction between artists who have different styles.
Kristoffer Rygg
#97. Creativity is the brain's invisible muscle -- that when used and excercised routinely -- becomes better and stronger.
Ashley Ormon
#98. It is the artist who tries to gradually accustom people to the possibilities of a better state of things.
C.A. Dawson Scott
#99. Behind every creative act is a statement of love. Every artistic creation is a statement of gratitude.
Kilroy J. Oldster
#100. To the Young Artists of Italy! The cry of rebellion that we launch, linking our ideals with those of the Futurist poets, does not originate in an aesthetic clique. It expresses the violent desire that stirs in the veins of every creative artist today.
Umberto Boccioni
