Failed Artist Quotes

#1. 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

#2. When life gives you lemons... chuck them at someone's head. You'll be surprised how good it feels.

Nicole Hofmann

#3. Capitalists work hard to produce what consumers want. Artists who work too hard to produce what consumers want are often accused of selling out. Thus, even the languages of capitalism and art conflict: a firm that has 'sold out' has succeeded, but an artist that has 'sold out' has failed.

Alex Tabarrok

#4. Lying in bed, you know, you don't seem so tall.

Ani DiFranco

#5. Since 1869, baseball has been doing pretty well.

Pete Rose

#6. If these artist were trying to convince me that the pursuit of love in the postdigital age was more exciting, more mysterious, more ... . well, everything love should be, they'd failed.

Kate Klise

#7. The artist's greatest creation began
the night he washed his memory of his failures
rubbed opium on his lips
drank the wine that women offered him
and lay down and wept.

Roman Payne

#8. Not even you can save the whole galaxy before breakfast.

Claudia Gray

#9. I am a conservationist. It is in my DNA.

Louis Bacon

#10. Love! In the midst of deception, you are my trust.

Debasish Mridha

#11. It is because artists do not practise, patrons do not patronize, crowds do not assemble to reverently worship the great work of Doing Nothing, that the world has lost its philosophy and even failed to invent a new religion.

Gilbert K. Chesterton

#12. All of us our but his instruments who do our part and pass by.

Mother Teresa

#13. Lenin is an artist who has worked men, as other artists have worked marble or metals. But men are harder than stone and less malleable than iron. There is no masterpiece. The artist has failed. The task was superior to his capacities.

Benito Mussolini

#14. All intervening steps, scribbles, sketches, drawings, failed work models, studies thoughts, conversations, are of interest. Those that show the thought process of the artist are sometimes more interesting than the final product

Sol LeWitt

#15. For my eightieth year warns me to pack up my baggage before I leave life.

Marcus Terentius Varro

#16. One of the central flaws in the state of contemporary music is that the major record companies have failed to incorporate that simple fact into their business plans. They've come into an industry that's based on idiosyncratic artists and tried to erase every idiosyncratic aspect out of it.

Moby

#17. Only someone who doesn't understand art tells an artist their art somehow failed. How the fuck can art fail? Art can't be graded, because it's going to mean something different to everyone. You can't apply a mathematical absolute to art because there is no one formula for self-expression.

Kevin Smith

#18. True, there are photographers who are failed artists, but so are most artists.

Bill Jay

#19. A calling is simply God's shaping of your burden and beckoning you to your service to him in the place and pursuit of his choosing.

Ravi Zacharias

#20. Know what you want and try to go beyond your own expectations....set a very high goal, one that will be difficult to achieve. Because that is an artist's mission: to go beyond one's limits. An artist who desires very little and achieves it has failed in life.

Paulo Coelho

#21. A human being is a spirit. But what is spirit? Spirit is the self. But what is self? The self is a relation that relates itself to itself or is the relation's relating itself to itself in the relation.

Soren Kierkegaard

#22. It was the artist's duty to find the appropriate objects, and the audience's job to decipher meaning. If the piece failed to work, it was their fault, not yours.

David Sedaris

#23. I must be allowed to add some explanatory remarks to bring the subject home to reason-to that sluggish reason, which supinely takes opinions on trust, and obstinately supports them to spare itself the labour of thinking.

Mary Wollstonecraft

#24. If I physically made every work myself, I would get only one or two paintings done a year, if that.

Jeff Koons