Old Artist Quotes

#1. I certainly don't want to be an angry old artist.

Joni Mitchell

#2. But I have seen my obstacles: trivialities, learning and poetry. This last needs explaining: the old artist's readiness to dissolve characters into a haze. Characters cannot come alive and fight and guide the world unless the novelist wants them to remain characters.

E. M. Forster

#3. Good art looks new because the artist has recombined something old to make something better.

Walter Darby Bannard

#4. By the time I met Julia Child, her husband, Paul, was little more than a ghost of a man, so diminished by old age and its attendant diseases that it was impossible to discern the remarkable artist, photographer and poet he once had been.

Ruth Reichl

#5. The so-called 'discoveries' of the Impressionists could not have been unknown to the old masters; and if they made no use of them, it was because all great artists have renounced the use of effects. And in simplifying nature, they made it all the greater.

Pierre-Auguste Renoir

#6. I'm 19 years old. I think I'm doing a pretty good job ... Basically from my heart I really just want to say it really should be about to music. It should be about the craft that I'm making. This is not a gimmick and I'm an artist and I should be taken seriously.

Justin Bieber

#7. If a person is open to a new world view, it can often mean that he is not firmly rooted in the reality of the old world view; as a lunatic or alienated artist, his own neurotic traits can become magnified as they tremble with the new energy pouring in from the universal source.

William Irwin Thompson

#8. In 1996, after 29 years as an artist for Marvel Comics, I got fired - 56 years old, two children still in college, and no job.

Herb Trimpe

#9. This is Darrow, Inadequately scrawled, with his young, old heart, And his drawl, and his infinite paradox And his sadness, and kindness, And his artist sense that drives him to shape his life To something harmonious, even against the schemes of God.

Edgar Lee Masters

#10. The childhood years are the best years of your life ... Whoever coined that was an unmitigated fuckwit, a bullshit artist supreme. Life gets better the older you grow, until you grow too old of course.

Keri Hulme

#11. In French, there is an old expression, la patte, meaning the artist's touch, his personal style, his 'paw'. I wanted to get away from la patte and from all that retinal painting.

Marcel Duchamp

#12. When I was 23, I moved to Australia to be with this 43-year-old con artist I fell in love with.

Natasha Leggero

#13. Other [artists'] music is really what you get most inspiration from, whether consciously or subconsciously. I like a lot of old music and a lot of soul music. I also really like a lot of new stuff.

Ben Rector

#14. I'm an old guy, and I was protesting during the Vietnam War. We killed fifty Asians for every loyal American. Every artist worth a damn in this country was terribly opposed to that war, finally, when it became evident what a fiasco and meaningless butchery it was.

Kurt Vonnegut

#15. They understand what their market is and who they should be selling records to, and most importantly, they know the kind of artist that they want to be, but they have to do it themselves. You don't want a 13-year-old singing some awful song from a musical.

Simon Cowell

#16. The mission of the artist in an over-technologi zed society, is to call the old magic back to life.

Tom Robbins

#17. There are two very different types of artists: those I call Old Masters, who work by trial and error and tend to improve with age, and conceptual people, or Young Geniuses, who generally do their best work early in their careers.

David Galenson

#18. This is something that, as artists, we constantly deal with-throwing away the past, slaying the father, and creating the new. This desire to throw away the old rules.

Kehinde Wiley

#19. An artist must find his expression closely linked to his individual experience or else follow in the old grooves resulting in lifeless forms.

Mark Tobey

#20. It should be if you're a good singer and a good songwriter, you should have your spot. You get everybody trying to release the prettiest guy, but that doesn't mean they're the best artist. Most of the time the true artists are just normal old dudes.

Randy Houser

#21. I definitely love music that's coming out now, there's some really exciting fresh artists coming through which is really cool. I guess it's from old and new, where my influences are based.

Ella Henderson

#22. I'm more old school: I want to be like Keith Richards on stage. It's not interesting to see straight-from-runway clothes slapped on an artist. It's more interesting when you see people who have their own style.

Lykke Li

#23. In the attacks on the old ways of doing things on word in particular came into currency. That word was "kitsch." Once introduced, the word stuck. Whatever you do, it musn't be kitsch. This became the first precept of the modernist artist in every medium.

Roger Scruton

#24. I'm 47 years old. I couldn't compete with Beyonce. I'm not competing with anyone. I've already established myself as an artist. I've been in this business for 30 years. There's no reason for me to compete with anyone.

Stephanie Mills

#25. Appalachia is still, for American musicians, a kind of fountain of youth we always go back to, the old home place to a group of artists who represent the quintessence of American independence, fortitude, genius, and madness.

Paul Burch

#26. To be contemporary actually means to be an artist. [But] I do not feel contemporary in my work. I perceive my work as old-fashioned. It does not have a frame of actuality in our time or locality.

Odd Nerdrum

#27. The artist must ever play and experiment with new means of arranging experience, even though the majority of his audience may prefer to remain fixed in their old perceptual attitudes.

Marshall McLuhan

#28. A great artist can look at an old woman, portray her exactly as she is ... and force the viewer to see the pretty girl she used to be ... more than that, he can make anyone with the sensitivity of an armadillo see that this lovely young girl is still alive

Robert A. Heinlein

#29. When I was very, very young, seven years old, I heard there was school where you could go to learn to draw. That was my absolute driven passion, to become an artist or a painter. So the romantic realist in me, I studied to be a graphic design artist and an art teacher.

David Coverdale

#30. All art is a memory of age-old things, dark things, whose fragments live on in the artist.

Paul Klee

#31. Sometimes, to pursue a new idea, the artist must forfeit his deposit on an old idea.

Robert Breault

#32. I have been in the music industry ever since I was six years old. I have been inspired by so many great artists and of course trying to be original at the same time. I try not to work under boundaries while I'm making music.

Asher Monroe

#33. I'm rather kind of old school, thinking that when an artist does his work, it's no longer his ... I just see what people make of it.

David Bowie

#34. I am a fan before I am an artist. I was that twelve year old girl that looked up to Taylor Swift. I get what that role is as a fan. I think that because I know that, I'm really careful and intentional about what I say and what I put out. I want to be that role for anyone who wants me to be that.

Kelsea Ballerini

#35. Old clothes do not make a tortured artist.

Kevin Rowland

#36. I was certain when I was about 10 years old that I was going to be a special effects artist or a make-up man. I loved that stuff and pursued it for quite some time, actually.

Michael Carbonaro

#37. Jo told me once that she was an old woman everywhere but in her studio. "There I'm only myself," she'd said. Standing in the middle of masterpieces that only Jo had ever seen and touched, I knew what she meant.

Laura Anderson Kurk

#38. The idea of going on tour for the rest of my life with old works is not that exciting. As an artist I definitely think the work in future is going to be better than the work in the past, otherwise why do it?

Damien Hirst

#39. I am shedding.
I am not a new me.
I am my old me in my new me.
I remain, carved with the soul of my knife.
My mess scattered all over my countenance.
I am me.
Take me as I am.

Malebo Sephodi

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

Sophie Swetchine

#41. Can you blame them? We have to filter so much information these days. But it does make it difficult for an artist. I'm 46 years old now. I've had a lot of life experience and my voice has changed. People who expect the same old me are bound to be disappointed.

Kathy Mattea

#42. I'm not deciding what the artist is going to write about because it's the artist. They're gonna have to sing that song for the rest of their life. When they're old and they're 80 and they have their show in Vegas, they're gonna have to sing that song for the rest of their life.

Benny Blanco

#43. Actions speak louder than words, in fact. When we don't take action, we foster the mistaken reality of our old identity.

Eric Samuel Timm

#44. I like coming up with new characters. Whether it's revamping an old character no one likes or just coming up with brand-new stuff, that's kind of what excited me as an artist.

Joe Madureira

#45. Anytime an artist puts your name in a song, it's unbelievable. It never gets old.

Dwyane Wade

#46. The old lessons of submissiveness and fragility made us victims. Women are so much more than that. You can be a businesswoman, a mother, an artist, and a feminist - whatever you want to be - and still be a sexual being. It's not mutually exclusive.

Beyonce Knowles

#47. All the old bogeys of 'dignified subject-matter,' of 'balanced compositions,' of 'correct drawing' were laid to rest. The artist was responsible to no one but his own sensibilities for what he painted and how he painted it.

Ernst Gombrich

#48. It's an old and sad story. The artist lets the bottle or the dope get between him and his art. He spends half his life achieving success and the second half throwing it all away. How many talents have self-destructed before him? How many more will follow in his wake?

H. Joaquin Jackson

#49. Before I reached 10 years old, I knew I was going to be an artist.

Howard Terpning

#50. When I started, I was 23 years old directing my own music videos; I'm co-producing on my album; I'm hands-on with everything. I'm more than just a pretty boy: I'm an artist. I'm not saying I'm a hip-hop music artist, I'm an artiste.

ASAP Rocky

#51. I think every creative impulse that a working writer, or artist of any sort has, comes out of that dark old country where dreams come from.

Anne Rivers Siddons

#52. Our old experiences, memories and fears guide us down the present path. It's not so much that you are the artist; you are the conduit.

Nick Bantock

#53. I always try to act like I'm some old school artist from the 1960s.

Danny Brown

#54. Not all writers are artists. But all of us like the idea of somebody in the year 2283 blowing the dust off one of our books, thumbing through it and exclaiming, Hey, listen to what this old guy had to say back in the twentieth century!

William Attwood

#55. The artist is still a little like the old court jester. He's supposed to speak his vicious paradoxes with some sense in them, but he isn't part of whatever the fabric is that makes a nation.

William Faulkner

#56. Our souls as well as our bodies are composed of individual elements which were all already present in the ranks of our ancestors. The "newness" in the individual psyche is an endlessly varied recombination of age-old components.

Carl Jung

#57. People don't understand what music really is. I've been a musician since I was 6 years old. I got my first piano, was playing recitals at 8, 10 I picked up a guitar, 12 I picked up my first Pearl Master drum set. I was an artist before I was an 'artist.'

Mitchel Musso

#58. To my mind, it is the duty of the younger Negro artist, if he accepts any duties at all from outsiders, to change through the force of his art that old whispering 'I want to be white,' hidden in the aspirations of his people, to 'Why should I want to be white? I am a Negro - and beautiful!'

Langston Hughes

#59. What to paint was a problem for the war artist ... the old heroics, the death and glory stuff, were gone forever ... the impressionistic technique I had developed was now ineffective, for visual impressions were not enough.

A. Y. Jackson

#60. The rise of the Internet has caused the demise of the record labels, and has destroyed the music business of old, but it's also created new opportunities for young artists.

Judy Collins

#61. Imagine being 30 years old, thinking you were a media titan, and now you are labeled a 'scam artist.'

Jason Calacanis

#62. Listen up and I'll tell a story about an artist growing old. Some would try for fame and glory; others aren't so bold.

Daniel Johnston

#63. Though the cross of Christ has been beautified by the poet and the artist, the avid seeker after God is likely to find it the same savage implement of destruction it was in the days of old. The way of the cross is still the pain-wracked path to spiritual power and fruitfulness.

Aiden Wilson Tozer

#64. I want to prove to people who sit on a couch and don't do anything but criticize other people that, if you're a true athlete or martial artist, you're not old until you can't get up and walk around anymore.

Herschel Walker

#65. The old-fashioned idea that the simple piling up of experiences, one on top of another, can make you an artist, is, of course, so much rubbish. If acting were just a matter of experience, then any busy harlot could make Garbo's Camille pale.

Helen Hayes

#66. I'm 45 years old. I used to be a club girl, but that's not my world anymore. That doesn't mean I can't make music that excites. I think it's inspiring to see an artist you grew up with take another crack.

Shirley Manson

#67. This is the second Old Master I have encountered that has the signatures of another artist forged over it. A painting that has been created by another artist entirely. It's like they played mix and match.

Dayna S. Rubin

#68. The popular mythology of creative genius depends on beloved stereotypes of the artist in youth and old age: the misunderstood upstart who forces us to see the world afresh; and the revered sage who shows us depths of insight attainable only through a lifetime of hard-won experience.

Martin Filler

#69. Artists of all sorts remain youthful for so long, and in many cases attain a grand old age. The explanation is that they live in an almost permanent condition of stimulation and excitement.

Egon Friedell

#70. When I came up, there was room for the new and the old. For every new artist, an old one didn't have to be pushed out.

Charley Pride

#71. I'm happy to entertain kids you know. It's my biggest pleasure to like see a twelve year old picking up a book that I did and dreaming about being a comic book artist. That's what the magic is, everything else is just production and a job.

Marko Djurdjevic

#72. After touring with David Bowie last year, I was inspired to look at what I wanted to do as an artist, and I realized I wanted to go back to the music I fell in love with when I was eight years old.

Emm Gryner

#73. When I was 9 years old, I really wanted to be in the show business. I really wanted to be an artist. I would grab a wooden spoon and I would start singing, even if it was for my uncles and my aunts. And I would just sing any lah-lah song.

Ricky Martin

#74. I like all the old-fashioned icons. My friends are artists, so they make me up to look like certain people. I am more inspired by people like Jane Fonda or Brigitte Bardot - people who did something as activists.

Pamela Anderson

#75. On my solemn oath, Edmund, I'd gladly face not having an acre of land to call my own, nor a penny in the bank, I'd be willing to have no home but the poorhouse in my old age, if I could look back now on having been the fine artist I might have been.

Eugene O'Neill

#76. What is a portrait good for, unless it shows just how the subject was seen by the painter? In the old days before photography came in a sitter had a perfect right to say to the artist: "Paint me just as I am." Now if he wishes absolute fidelity he can go to the photographer and get it.

Aubrey Beardsley