New York Artist Quotes

#1. I love a lot of the New York bands, but Patti Smith stands out. I just read 'Just Kids' and it's an inspirational, well-written account of an emerging New York artist in the late seventies.

James Iha

#2. When you live in New York and are an artist and are interested in people, you meet a lot of people.

Molly Crabapple

#3. When I was in art school, there was a stigma attached to coming from comfortable suburbia. If you were from Great Neck, Long Island, you couldn't be a 'real artist', so I found crafty ways of implying that I was from New York.

Laurie Simmons

#4. To the memory of Vincent Van Gogh, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, El Greco, and many others who came before me as well as those who will come after. We are one. Thank you.

Luther E. Vann

#5. 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

#6. Swag defines an artist, period. Lil Wayne has his super-tattooed pierces and dreads swag. Jay-Z has his New York, grown man, Beyonce and 40/40 Club swag.

Soulja Boy

#7. When I was growing up, I fetishised New York City. It was the land of Lou Reed and the Velvet Underground, it was where Leonard Cohen wrote 'Chelsea Hotel', it was CBGBs and all the punk rock clubs. Artists and musicians lived there, and it was cheap and dangerous.

Moby

#8. I went to art school, and I wanted to be an artist since I was 5. I basically moved to New York to do art, and I just sort of fell into doing music at an early age.

Kim Gordon

#9. New York is an incredible place to be an artist, because there are so many incredible people, and ... it's all about the people that you get exposed to.

Dustin Yellin

#10. Spider-Man initially made me want to come to New York and work for Marvel; I wanted to be a comic book artist.

Chris Columbus

#11. The artist's role is to do what is honest for them. So if you're in New York and everyone is looking at the floor, you can look up. It's not your role to follow the others. It's your role to go to your centre and then reflect that, not just to be a mirror to what's happening.

James T. Hubbell

#12. There's a famous artist, Ron English, in New York, that just, or Andy Warhol for that matter, that did pop art that terrorized society. And that's, for the last like 10, 15 years, that's all I wanted to do, is terrorize society and make them look into a mirror and see what the hell we have wrought.

Al Jourgensen

#13. I was a 'runaway girl' from France who married an American and moved to New York City. I'm not sure I would have continued as an artist had I remained in Paris because of the family setup.

Louise Bourgeois

#14. I took guitar lessons and recorded the song in New York. It was kind of a dream. I got to pretend I was a recording artist for a couple days.

Kristen Wiig

#15. The thing about living in New York is that there are other artists; that is the most difficult, I think they are the hardest critics.

Julian Schnabel

#16. I love all types of music. Jazz, classical, blues, rock, hip-hop. I often write scripts to instrumentals like a hip-hop artist. Music inspires me to write. It's either music playing or completely silent. Sometimes distant sound fuels you. In New York there's always a buzzing beneath you.

Chadwick Boseman

#17. I think that, just like the art scene and the music scene is exploding in LA - I mean, let's face it: if you want to be an artist you cannot live in New York anymore because it is too expensive

Jon Bernthal

#18. Art was my little private pleasure. Nobody had seen my art, not even my parents. Andy didn't know about it. My dream was to become a publisher, not an artist lost in New York.

Stephanie Witter

#19. Now almost every artist outside of New York is connected with some school or some museum school, and even in New York the majority are. That's an interesting fact when you take the idea of making money, making a living selling paintings. Only a dozen or two painters do that.

Ad Reinhardt

#20. My whole family is very art-based. My sister runs a gallery, my other sister works for PACE in New York, my other sister is a sculptor. I'd say the ending one is me because that's the artist and the artist feels a lot.

Rose McGowan

#21. I notice I may have somehow mixed up two events, my visit with Rita to Briceland on our way to Cantrip, and our passing through Briceland again on our way back to New York, but such suffusions of swimming colors are not to be disdained by the artist in recollection.

Vladimir Nabokov

#22. I love biographies. I read Patti Smith's 'Just Kids.' I'm into that time frame in New York, the '70s and '80s. In art school, I read 'Close to the Knives,' the autobiography of the artist and AIDS activist David Wojnarowicz.

Barry McGee

#23. I can live in L.A. as a struggling artist. I cannot live in New York as a struggling artist.

Gina Rodriguez

#24. 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

#25. At some future time I shall see New York the artist's ground. I think you will create an American School.

Mary Cassatt

#26. Not even the most powerful organs of the press, including Time, Newsweek, and The New York Times, can discover a new artist or certify his work and make it stick. They can only bring you the scores.

Thomas Wolfe

#27. Herman Melville was supposed to be an accountant. Van Gogh was meant to be an art dealer. I was meant to take the train into New York and work for a bank. To be an artist, you have to say goodbye to your family.

Don McLean

#28. I really love New York, and I've lived here for a long time. I know not just the different neighborhoods but the different kind of class cultures in New York from the up-and-coming, down-and-out kind of artist to the powerful worlds of finance.

Neil Burger

#29. I have a streak in myself, like, I'm an exhibi- tionist. There's a side of me that really wants to show off and share parts of myself with others. I mean, that's why I live in New York, and that's why I'm an artist who shows 10 times a year.

Josh Smith

#30. When I was 18, I lived in Greenwich Village, New York, for nine months. At that time, I wanted to change the world, not through architecture, but through painting. I lived the artist's life, mingling with poets and writers, and working as a waiter. I was intrigued by the aliveness of the city.

Christian De Portzamparc

#31. Think of Florence, Paris, London, New York. Nobody visiting them for the first time is a stranger because he's already visited them in paintings, novels, history books and films. But if a city hasn't been used by an artist, not even the inhabitants live there imaginatively.

Alasdair Gray

#32. I came to New York to be a fine artist - that was my ambition.

David Byrne

#33. The New York Times is the worst newspaper in the world and it's extremely vicious to artists.

James Purdy

#34. Growing up in New York with artist parents - a very liberal environment, where we were always encouraged to challenge the status quo - I think for a long time I confused jingoism with patriotism. And that is a mistake.

Claire Danes

#35. The housing crisis may not be the worst thing that's happened to New York City because it was becoming impossible for some of the young doctors, for some of the young artists, for some of the people that make the city so special to be able to live here.

Juan Enriquez

#36. I stopped drinking and realised New York still has a lot of charm, but it has become so bourgeois and affluent - and I can't really complain because I'm sort of bourgeois and affluent myself, but I like living in a place where artists and musicians and writers can actually pay the rent.

Moby