Top 100 Great Artist Quotes
#1. 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
#3. 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
#4. 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
#5. I wish I was a great writer or a great journalist or a great scientist or a great artist; I'm not.
Nicolas Berggruen
#6. 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
#7. 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
#8. 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
#10. A great artist can change society because of the entertaining and mesmerizing quality of his or her art.
Jeffrey Lewis
#12. 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
#13. Becoming a great preacher, like becoming a great artist, requires a life commitment.
Calvin Miller
#14. 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
#15. 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
#16. Be a great artist especially when you draw your life's picture.
Debasish Mridha
#17. 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
#19. A little artist has all the tragic unhappiness and the sorrows of a great artist and he is not a great artist.
Gertrude Stein
#20. 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
#21. The great artist, whether he be musician, painter, or poet, is known for this absolute unexpectedness.
Loren Eiseley
#22. A great artist is not one who merely fits into a genre but one who defines the genre.
Vikas Swarup
#23. 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
#25. One of the reasons why I love to do Shakespeare is that this great artist was able to talk to a wide variety of audiences. He could do the bawdy plays and the humor and the clowns-as you know, because you're a wonderful Stephano-that speaks to the populace, the masses, the groundlings, whatever.
Julie Taymor
#27. I was an artist, but not a self-proclaimed great artist, just a common man who was working in a form of art which is universal.
Jack Kirby
#28. A great artist is a great man in a great child.
Victor Hugo
#29. My music library has about every genre of music possible. I've really gotten into Ray LaMontagne, He makes amazing music, so I listen to him, and he's a great artist.
Jean-Luc Bilodeau
#30. A picture of human life such as a great artist can give, surprises even the trivial and the selfish into that attention to what is apart from themselves, which may be called the raw material of moral sentiment.
George Eliot
#31. My favorite song I ever wrote is 'Yeah 3x' because it was my first placement. It was with a great artist, Chris Brown, and I couldn't believe it at the time. Honestly, I still can't really believe it! It is the first time someone ever gave me a shot, so that is my favorite.
Sevyn Streeter
#32. There are selections so acute that they come to define a place, with the result that we can no longer travel through that landscape without being reminded of what a great artist noticed there.
Alain De Botton
#33. I don't know of a great artist who did not sacrifice and thereby have to wrestle with the depths of loneliness and sadness.
Cornel West
#34. [Stanley] Kubrick was a great artist and a perfectionist. He always wanted the exact right thing. He did a million takes. Everything had to be perfect. I'm an imperfectionist. I don't really care that much about the work. I write quickly. I'm careless. I shoot carelessly.
Woody Allen
#35. The purpose of subject matter is to veil technique. The great artist uses the cloak of resemblance to hide the means.
John French Sloan
#36. Thackeray's a good writer and Flaubert is a great artist. Trollope is a good writer and Dickens is a great artist. Colette is a very good writer and Proust is a great artist. Katherine Anne Porter was an extremely good writer and Willa Cather was a great artist.
Truman Capote
#37. If one can't be a great artist or a great soldier, the next best thing is to be a great criminal.
F Scott Fitzgerald
#38. I have come to believe that a great teacher is a great artist and that there are as few as there are any other great artists. Teaching might even be the greatest of the arts since the medium is the human mind and spirit.
John Steinbeck
#39. A great artist has a unique vision ... obsession. They are someone willing to fail flamboyantly.
Jerry Saltz
#40. The great artist is the man who most obviously succeeds in turning his pains to advantage, in letting suffering deepens his understanding and sensibility, in growing through his pains.
Walter Kaufmann
#41. There is no substitute for skill. It is the priceless possession of every great artist in every field of endeavor. It is instinctly felt by an audience and is reflected in the superiority of his work
Paul LePaul
#42. poet convinced both of his own talent and of the need to be self-indulgent in order to be a great artist.
Walter Isaacson
#43. The great poet is a great artist. He is painter and sculptor. The greatest pictures and statues have been painted and chiseled with words. They outlast all others.
Robert Green Ingersoll
#44. The prevarication and white lies which a mind that keeps itself ambitiously pure is as uneasy under as a great artist under the false touches that no eye detects but his own, are worn as lightly as mere trimming when once the actions have become a lie.
George Eliot
#45. My story is really an affirmation of my strength and my luck. To live with a great artist like Ted Hughes or Mick Jagger is a very, very destructive role for a woman trying to be herself. In fact, it can't be done.
Marianne Faithfull
#46. [Abbas Kiarostami] is a great artist and a poet. I sometimes think that if Samuel Beckett made films, he'd make them like Kiarostami makes them.
Anthony Minghella
#47. A man cannot be wise enough to be a great artist without being wise enough to wish to be a philosopher.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
#48. I am in no sense of the word a great artist, not even a great animator; I have always had men working for me whose skills were greater than my own. I am an idea man.
Walt Disney
#49. In order for me to be successful ... In order to be a great artist - musician, actor, painter, whatever - you must be able to be private in public at all times. That is what we do.
Lady Gaga
#50. The quality of our lives is diminished every time we lose a great artist. It's a different world without Sam Cooke, Otis Redding, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Jim Morrison, Curtis Mayfield, Brian Jones and the rest.
Steven Van Zandt
#51. I am not a great cook, I am not a great artist, but I love art, and I love food, so I am the perfect traveller.
Michael Palin
#52. A great spirit has been amongst us, and a great artist is gone.
Ezra Pound
#53. A great artist ... must be shaken by the naked truths that will not be comforted. This divine discontent, this disequilibrium, this state of inner tension is the source of artistic energy.
Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
#54. To be a great artist, you need to know yourself as best as you possibly can. I live my life and delve into my own psyche. It's more about exploring how I feel rather than making pale imitations of something that came before. We are unique beings, and the way we look at things is our own.
Bat For Lashes
#55. In the great artist you see daring bound by discipline and discipline stretched by daring.
Robert Breault
#56. I am a great artist and I know it. It's because of what I am that I have endured so much suffering, so as to pursue my vocation, otherwise I would consider myself a rogue - which is what many people think I am, for that matter.
Paul Gauguin
#58. I would like to be a great artist. I would quit pitching if I could paint like Monet or Rousseau. But I can't. What I can do is pitch, and I can do that very well.
Tom Seaver
#59. A great artist ... takes what he did not make and makes of it something that only he can make ...
Stevie Smith
#60. On the ridge where the great artist moves forward, every step is an adventure, an extreme risk. In that risk, however, and only there, lays the freedom of Art.
Albert Camus
#61. Persons who would never think of announcing boldly to the world, 'I am a scholar,' 'I am a great artist,' 'I am a beautiful woman,' nevertheless seem to think it wholly within the bounds of good taste to announce that they are Christians!
Georgia Harkness
#62. I remember being influenced by great artists when I was a kid - not to call myself a great artist - but people who I thought were great enough that they really made a difference. And so I would never want to be disappointed by them, and I want to make sure I never disappoint audience.
Sarah Jones
#64. The great artist is one whom constraint exalts, for whom the obstacle is a springboard.
Andre Gide
#65. I consider my work great, as I am a great artist.
Pola Negri
#66. Every great artist gives birth to a new universe, in which the familiar things look the way they have never before looked to anyone.
Rudolf Arnheim
#67. Memory is a great artist. For every man and for every woman it makes the recollection of his or her life a work of art and an unfaithful record.
Andre Maurois
#68. The great artist is conscious of the talent and power he possesses otherwise he would not see his faults and so would not be able to improve.
Henri Gaudier-Brzeska
#69. To wish for the crazy times one last time and freeze it in the memory of a camera is the least a great artist can do.
Lou Reed
#70. Then Martine said: "So yuo will be poor now all your life, Babette?"
Poor?" said Babette. She smiled as if to herself. "No, I shall never be poor. I told you that I am a great artist. A great artist, Mesdames, is never poor.We have something, Mesdames, of which other people know nothing.
Karen Blixen
#71. Pollock was well known, certainly, but for all the wrong reasons. He was known as much for being wild and unconventional in his working methods as for being a great artist.
Kenneth Noland
#72. To be a great artist, you have to be willing to take risks and to do things that no one would ever pay you for
at first.
Josephine Decker
#73. It is frequently the tragedy of the great artist, as it is of the great scientist, that he frightens the ordinary man.
Loren Eiseley
#74. Beyonce is a beautiful, elegant woman who is also a wonderful dancer. And her voice is sublime. Just like her husband, Jay-Z, Beyonce has real talent. They are both the kind of truly great artist who will be remembered by history. Their child will be lucky to have such talented parents.
Azzedine Alaia
#75. I have never really been a great artist. I have been a human being that has loved art, which is not the same thing. But I have loved and believed in art and the idea of universal brotherhood so much, that I have put everything I have into them, and I have been blessed.
Josephine Baker
#76. Well, in order for me to be successful ... In order to be a great artist - musician, actor, painter, whatever - you must be able to be private in public at all times.
Lady Gaga
#77. The first time I sang with David Daniels ... I had never performed with a countertenor before. That first time was magic, it was so beautiful. And he's such a great artist.
Cecilia Bartoli
#78. As if the aim of a beautiful view is to create a great artist or to make the lonely to forget his loneliness or just to create a great ease in the tired minds of every creature!
Mehmet Murat Ildan
#79. When a great artist gets my attention, I pursue it. If I don't, someone else will, you know what I'm saying?
Larry Gagosian
#80. I think a great artist should be able to create any style, any form, anything from rock to pop to gospel to spiritual, just wonderful music where everybody can sing it ...
Michael Jackson
#81. The child and the great artist
these alone receive the sensation fresh as it was at the beginning of the world.
Edith Sitwell
#82. While one should always study the method of a great artist, one should never imitate his manner. The manner of an artist is essentially individual, the method of an artist is absolutely universal. The first personality, which no one should copy.
Oscar Wilde
#83. A small artist is content with art; a great artist is content with nothing except everything.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
#84. I have a lot of tattoos. My first tattoo I had when I was a teenager was just a little heart. I am very friendly with a great artist, Scott Campbell, and I started going to him to get tattoos. I'm very spontaneous about what I get.
Marc Jacobs
#85. It was supposed to say "Great Artist" on my tombstone, but if I died right now it would say "such a good teacher/daughter/friend" instead; and what I really want to shout, and want in big letters on that grave, too, is F*** YOU ALL.
Claire Messud
#86. What distinguishes a great artist from a weak one is first their sensibility and tenderness; second, their imagination, and third, their industry.
Salman Rushdie
#87. What if Van Gogh had taken medication for his mental illness? Would the world have been deprived of a great artist?
Peter D. Kramer
#88. My mother is a great artist, but she always treated her paintings like minor postcards. Had she pursued it, she would have been a great artist. Instead, she looked down on her art.
Isabel Allende
#89. I guess I am ruthless too because that's what makes a great artist. But I also respect people, I don't go around stepping on their heads.
Julian Schnabel
#90. I didn't come after Elvis and Dylan, I've been around always. But if I see or meet a great artist, I love 'em.
John Lennon
#91. A great artist is never a closed subject, but this catalogue is a milestone production, as useful as it is beautiful.
Norbert Lynton
#92. Every great artist raises art to a science, and every great scientist raises science to an art, hence we have Michelangelo's David and Einstein's Theory of Relativity.
Robert Breault
#93. The need to be a great artist makes it hard to be an artist. The need to produce a great work of art makes it hard to produce any art at all.
Julia Cameron
#94. The artists who the world has always recognized as the greatest are those with the widest sympathy. The greatness of the great artist depends precisely on the width and the intensity of his sympathy.
Aldous Huxley
#95. As Christians, we must see that just because an artist -even a great artist- portrays a worldview in writing or on canvas, it does not mean that we should automatically accept that worldview. Good art heightens the impact of that worldview, but it does not make it true.
Francis A. Schaeffer
#96. What I really think about Banksy is I think he's a genius; he's a great artist, and I like his stuff. But he's got to accept it if, from time to time, someone will need to paint over his work.
Boris Johnson
#97. If they're not temperamental, I don't want them. It's in the nature of a great artist to be that way.
Sol Hurok
#98. Mother-love is not inevitable. The good mother is a great artist ever creating beauty out of chaos
Alice Randall
#99. Every day a new picture is painted and framed, held up for half an hour, in such lights as the Great Artist chooses, and then withdrawn, and the curtain falls. And then the sun goes down, and long the afterglow gives light.
Henry David Thoreau
#100. Only the brave should teach ... Teaching is a vocation. It is as sacred as priesthood; as innate a desire, as inescapable as the genius which compels a great artist. If he has not the concern for humanity, the love of living creatures, the vision of the priest and the artist, he must not teach.
Pearl S. Buck
