Great Artist Quotes

#1. Mrs. Nixon and I share the sorrow of millions of Americans at the death of Louis Armstrong. One of the architects of an American art form, a free and individual spirit, and an artist of worldwide fame, his great talents and magnificent spirit added richness and pleasure to all our lives.

Richard M. Nixon

#2. Once A. K. Coomaraswamy, the great twentieth-century Indian expert on traditional metaphysics and art, said that in modern society the artist is a special kind of person, while in traditional society every person is a special kind of artist.

Seyyed Hossein Nasr

#3. I don't mind being classified as a jazz artist, but I do mind being restricted to being a jazz artist. My foundation has been in jazz, though I didn't really start out that way. I started in classical music, but my formative years were in jazz, and it makes a great foundation.

Herbie Hancock

#4. It always seemed to me," she said at last, "that it must require a great deal of courage to be an artist, if only because the creative process is such a lonely one. I should imagine it must be all the more difficult for a woman.

Richard Yates

#5. I get a lot from great '90s artists like Juliana Hatfield, The Pixies, and bands like That Dog and The Breeders.

Margaret Cho

#6. An artist should write for himself & not for an audience. If the audience likes it, great. If not, they can keep away.

Artie Shaw

#7. 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

#8. Poverty is the great reality. That is why the artist seeks it.

Anais Nin

#9. It's very true that an artist who networks well will have better opportunities than one who doesn't network well. But great networking skills without great art won't change art history.

Mark Kostabi

#10. [The artist] is like a pump; he has inside him a great pipe that reaches down into the entrails of things, the deepest layers. He sucks up what was lying there below, dim and unnoticed, and brings it in great jets to the sunlight.

Gustave Flaubert

#11. I wanted to be an artist. I was studying art. I wanted to be a great painter. When I went into the Navy, there wasn't much to draw at sea. So I began writing, and I began reading a lot.

Evan Hunter

#12. Talking with other artists is an incredible process. You engage with the work very differently ... a nd different relationships between different works start to emerge. To tap into that energy-to tap into that moment-is great for me as an exercise.

Shahzia Sikander

#13. The artist is not a reporter, but a Great Teacher. It is not his business to depict the world as it is, but as it ought to be.

H.L. Mencken

#14. 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

#15. The artist, surgeon, through clay form, can only look for cure with great obstinacy until he discovers, repeatedly, that love is god's only gift that enables man to transcend his tragedy and regain his wholeness and well-being beyond the claws of evil, rampaging as evil may be.

Jabra Ibrahim Jabra

#16. I am a leader. Leaders always get heat. They're always going against the grain. Jimi Hendrix got heat; Bob Marley got heat; Miles Davis got heat. Every great artist got heat. Heat means you're doing something right.

Ziggy Marley

#17. 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

#18. Until you learn that an artist cannot afford to scorn any phase of life that is human, you will never do great work.

Marjorie Benton Cooke

#19. The great artist takes what he needs.

Kenneth Clark

#20. A student of James McNeill Whistler tells the great artist, 'I tend to paint what I see.' Whistler replies, 'Ah! The shock will come when you see what you paint!

James Whistler

#21. It's like every time you have one of these, you're sort of - your lease is renewed another five years. And that's kind of great for me 'cause that's all I really want to be doing still at this point, like just making records and getting to work with, like, artists that I think are exciting.

Mark Ronson

#22. My dream is to do exactly what I'm doing. I love writing and directing, and being somebody that can write about an artist I love or make a film about it. That's great. I would leave the other stuff to those who do it much better.

Cameron Crowe

#23. There are so many great artists, I think, who kind of suffer from being icons, legends, acknowledged masters.

Richard Linklater

#24. Artists are a very important part of our society because they make a great contribution to our values. The artist creates a value system that we all grow up on, whether we know it or not.

Roy DeCarava

#25. And I think it's because good cons are all based on the victim's need, and the successful con artist is the one, I guess, who can exploit that. I remember reading something about this, that one of the great traits of confidence tricksters is the level that they flatter their victim.

Alfred Molina

#26. The public is a great actuality, like war. If you are a creative and creating artist, you cannot ignore it, though it can ignore you.

Arnold Bennett

#27. I see artists as a great battalion moving through paint, words, music towards cosmological interpretation.

Lawrence Durrell

#28. Artists were always referred to as great artists. I thought that's what the profession was. One word: great-artist. There wasn't one moment in my life when I thought I wanted to be anything else.

Hedda Sterne

#29. 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

#30. I'm not going to talk about Picasso. I have done my duty to those memories. I have had a great career as an artist myself, you know. I'm not here just because I've spent time with Picasso.

Francoise Gilot

#31. Once an artist explores the vast variety of tools and features available on the great programs, we're hooked.

Buffy Sainte-Marie

#32. All-around 21st-century artist the great Kanye West at Design Miami/ Basel

Simon De Pury

#33. Calling a young artist 'great' these days can give one the heebie-jeebies: The word has been denatured in the past decade.

Jerry Saltz

#34. 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

#35. A great cricketer must be an artist and express himself in his strokes.

Margaret Hughes

#36. I wish I was a great writer or a great journalist or a great scientist or a great artist; I'm not.

Nicolas Berggruen

#37. In short, [Coltrane's] tone is beautiful because it is functional. In other words, it is always involved in saying something. You can't separate the means that a man uses to say something from what he ultimately says. Technique is not separated from its content in a great artist.

Cecil Taylor

#38. Artists are exposed to great temptations: their eyes see paradise before their souls have reached it, and that is a great danger.

Phyllis Bottome

#39. The great artists ... do not want security, egoistic or materialistic.

Brenda Ueland

#40. The notion that the great artist requires a great patron has been around since the Pharaohs. That the born patron also needs an artist to patronize is a less-studied phenomenon.

Shana Alexander

#41. I've been asked to do a retrospective since I was about 28 and I always thought that was a bit odd. It's great to look forward as an artist because in the future the possibilities are infinite; you look back and it's all fixed so it's a scary thing.

Damien Hirst

#42. A great artist transforms our world, removes scales from our eyes, plugs from our ears, gloves from our fingertips and teaches us to perceive reality differently.

John Edgar Wideman

#43. You know, it's no accident that the great painters came from areas like Europe where there is a lot of clouds and rain, which begets color and subtle washes of tone. Most great graphic artists come from areas with prevalent sun, where line and shadow are paramount.

Al Hirschfeld

#44. Time is not a great artist but weakens all he touches.

William Hogarth

#45. Individuality and originality is was separates good and great artists! How much they can move people with what they do! If they can shake the heart with what they do, is the key!

Hiromi

#46. Doing theater anywhere, especially in L.A., is a constant uphill battle, and there's also the unsexy parts of the business that you're faced with, like getting money. It's a really great thing to do. You feel like you're really an artist when you're doing that and you're in a company of artists.

Finn Wittrock

#47. True poets, like great artists, have scarcely any childhood, and no old age.

Sophie Swetchine

#48. How did I come to be an artist ? Endless curiosity, observation, research - and a great amount of joy in the thing

George Grosz

#49. My father started out as a riveter, but he had the soul of an artist. He worshiped Shakespeare and had aspirations to be an actor. He claimed that from the first day he laid eyes on me, I was going to be this great dramatic actress.

Christine Ebersole

#50. If the artist is necessarily sensitive, does that sensitiveness form in its essence a state constantly liable to shade off into the morbid? Does this liability, moreover, increase in proportion as the effort is great and the ambition intense?

Henry James

#51. A great artist can change society because of the entertaining and mesmerizing quality of his or her art.

Jeffrey Lewis

#52. A great artist is always before his time or behind it.

George Edward Moore

#53. A great magician is as divine as God and his stage is as majestic as the paradise.

Amit Kalantri

#54. Artists get to step outside their comfort zone a 'lil bit and we get some great songs!!

Matt Squire

#55. I love music that has good catchy choruses and fits into many different genres ... I like real artists, that write their own material and are great performers.

Perez Hilton

#56. Artistic growth is, more than it is anything else, a refining of the sense of truthfulness. The stupid believe that to be truthful is easy; only the artist, the great artist, knows how difficult it is.

Willa Cather

#57. As an artist, it is great to be able to market yourself to people who don't know you, and people who do.

Tony Yayo

#58. I love Frank Ocean. I think he's so talented and his music is so great. So, I would love to do one of his songs like 'Bad Religion' or 'Pink Matter.'

Jacob Artist

#59. There was a great sense of community mainly among the women artists at the time because we felt left out. I still know most of the women that I knew then, the ones that are still alive.

Michelle Stuart

#60. Why is an artist an artist? Artists simply do feel and see things in a different way to other people. In a way it's a blessing, but it can also be a terrible curse. There's a great deal of satisfaction to be earned from it but often it's also a terrible burden.

Roger Waters

#61. I love Darius Rucker. He's a true artist, a great songwriter who can play his instrument, sing and write about his life.

Randy Houser

#62. 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

#63. So in every sense, from an independent artist to a major label artist, you just have to have great product, great faith and great people, they all go together.

Ledisi

#64. Becoming a great preacher, like becoming a great artist, requires a life commitment.

Calvin Miller

#65. I'm just following my own art, and I just think that the only thing I can do to be a great artist is do the best job I can in whatever movie I do.

Justin Chon

#66. Roman Polanski is a man who cares deeply about his art and its place in this world. What happened to him on his incredible path is filled with tragedy, and most men would have collapsed. Instead, he became a great artist and continues to make great films.

Harvey Weinstein

#67. If you write great songs with meaning and emotion, they will last for ever because songs are the key to everything. Songs will outlast the artist and they will go on for ever if they are good.

Elton John

#68. Be a great artist especially when you draw your life's picture.

Debasish Mridha

#69. I think that most great artists who are extremely known, as I am, would intimidate a lot of people. I don't want to do that to people, but I know I do.

Ray Charles

#70. To photograph is to hold one's breath, when all faculties converge to capture fleeting reality. It's at that precise moment that mastering an image becomes a great physical and intellectual joy.

Henri Cartier-Bresson

#71. In general, you have great artists who have died far too early and who have left great cultural impact. If you look at people like Vincent van Gogh or Jean-Michel Basquiat-there's a long, long list of artists who have died in tragic circumstances, and far, far too early.

Simon De Pury

#72. Each artist seems thus to be the native of an unknown country, which he himself has forgotten, different from that from which will emerge, making for the earth, another great artist.

Marcel Proust

#73. I make art when I can't gather the words to say.

Nikki Rowe

#74. The woods are full of regional writers, and it is the great horror of every serious Southern writer that he will become one of them.

Flannery O'Connor

#75. The great artist is the simplifier.

Vincent Van Gogh

#76. A little artist has all the tragic unhappiness and the sorrows of a great artist and he is not a great artist.

Gertrude Stein

#77. If you're an artist, it's great to have a knowledge of the business and be educated about that, but you've got to keep the balance right between business and artistry; otherwise, you get cynical.

Gugu Mbatha-Raw

#78. A way you can get really good abs in film is you get your makeup artist to paint shadows - faux washboard. But if you see me in a movie and I have great abs, it means I have a great body double.

Jennifer Tilly

#79. TV does so much these days. It is such a great platform for an artist.

Cheyenne Kimball

#80. A lot of writers and artists are like chefs who eat their own cooking in the kitchen and then deliver an empty plate with assurances that it's great.

Peter Schjeldahl

#81. Originality is way overrated. To make, you need to take. All great artists do.

Walter Darby Bannard

#82. I am just doing photo shoots. It's not something that extraordinary. I'm not a great artist, I'm not writing books, I'm not a painter, and people in the streets ask me for a picture or a note, and I say, 'Why?'

Carine Roitfeld

#83. General belief is "There is no real magic, only tricks" but a great magician compel people not to trust that belief and make them believe, after all "There does exist a real magic".

Amit Kalantri

#84. We all know that a good person can be a bad artist.But no one will ever be a genuine artist unless he is a great human being and thus also a good one.

Marc Chagall

#85. All great scientists have, in a certain sense, been great artists; the man with no imagination may collect facts, but he cannot make great discoveries.

Karl Pearson

#86. The great artist, whether he be musician, painter, or poet, is known for this absolute unexpectedness.

Loren Eiseley

#87. No, I don't. I find them very superficial. Calculated. He's a good artist, but I think he could be a great one, if he could use more instinct and less technique. He's a very good draftsman.

Louise Penny

#88. 'Super 8' was a lot of fun. It was a lot of fun working with J.J. Abrams, who I think is a kid in a grown man's body, which is a great ingredient for any artist in our business. You have to be a kid at heart to be able to make believe, and his imagination is phenomenal.

Glynn Turman

#89. I don't know what motivated the artist, which means that the paintings have an intrinsic quality. I think Goethe called it the 'essential dimension,' the thing that makes great works of art great.

Gerhard Richter

#90. In the tradition of great female artists, Karla Bonoff, Bonnie Raitt, Christine McVie, Shawn
Colvin, Sarah McLachlan ... now enter Maia Sharp.

Art Garfunkel

#91. A great artist is not one who merely fits into a genre but one who defines the genre.

Vikas Swarup

#92. It evoked Picasso and Miles Davis for me - two great artists who totally indulged themselves in their work and who they were, but they certainly didn't give a damn what other people thought.

Rodney Crowell

#93. It's really amazing that I was discovered and that I've been given these great opportunities to travel the world and work with amazing artists. I'm very blessed.

Misty Copeland

#94. There's a great difference between being popular and being an artist.

Shirley Knight

#95. I have noted that, barring accidents, artists whose powers wear best and last longest are those who have trained themselves to work under adversity. Great artists treasure their time with a bitter and snarling miserliness.

Catherine Drinker Bowen

#96. My parents never projected their dreams onto me. If they hoped I would be a great pitcher, or political figure, or artist (no chance), they never told me about it. Their view of parenting was to offer love and encourage me to chart my own path.

George W. Bush

#97. I would hate to be a new artist or writer in town today. But somehow the cream continues to rise. If there's one who's great, he just jumps out of the pack like you can't believe.

Steven Curtis Chapman

#98. Art is an affirmation of life, a rebuttal of death. And here we blunder into paradox again, for during the creation of any form of art, art which affirms the value and the holiness of life, the artist must die. To serve a work of art, great or small, is to die, to die to self.

Madeleine L'Engle

#99. Crumb was such an influence on me. He's such a visionary, such a great artist, that he so shaped my artistic sensibilities on a certain level that I do owe everything to him. The way I see the world is largely changed by him.

Terry Zwigoff

#100. I think that in Sweden and a lot of European countries, there's this whole mythology of the wounded artist: that you can't really do any great art unless you're suffering.

Joel Kinnaman