Top 100 Quotes About A Great Artist
#1. I wish I was a great writer or a great journalist or a great scientist or a great artist; I'm not.
Nicolas Berggruen
#2. 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
#3. 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
#5. A great artist can change society because of the entertaining and mesmerizing quality of his or her art.
Jeffrey Lewis
#7. Becoming a great preacher, like becoming a great artist, requires a life commitment.
Calvin Miller
#8. 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
#9. 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
#10. Be a great artist especially when you draw your life's picture.
Debasish Mridha
#11. A little artist has all the tragic unhappiness and the sorrows of a great artist and he is not a great artist.
Gertrude Stein
#12. 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
#13. A great artist is not one who merely fits into a genre but one who defines the genre.
Vikas Swarup
#14. 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
#16. A great artist is a great man in a great child.
Victor Hugo
#17. 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
#18. 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
#19. 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
#20. 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
#21. 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
#22. [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
#23. 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
#24. 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
#25. 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
#26. A great artist has a unique vision ... obsession. They are someone willing to fail flamboyantly.
Jerry Saltz
#27. poet convinced both of his own talent and of the need to be self-indulgent in order to be a great artist.
Walter Isaacson
#28. 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
#29. 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
#30. 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
#31. [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
#32. A man cannot be wise enough to be a great artist without being wise enough to wish to be a philosopher.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
#33. 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
#34. 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
#35. 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
#36. 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
#37. A great spirit has been amongst us, and a great artist is gone.
Ezra Pound
#38. 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
#39. 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
#40. 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
#41. 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
#42. A great artist ... takes what he did not make and makes of it something that only he can make ...
Stevie Smith
#43. 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
#44. 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
#45. I consider my work great, as I am a great artist.
Pola Negri
#46. 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
#47. 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
#48. 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
#49. 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
#50. 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
#51. 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
#52. 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
#53. 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
#54. 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
#55. 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
#56. 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
#57. 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
#58. A small artist is content with art; a great artist is content with nothing except everything.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
#59. 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
#60. What distinguishes a great artist from a weak one is first their sensibility and tenderness; second, their imagination, and third, their industry.
Salman Rushdie
#61. What if Van Gogh had taken medication for his mental illness? Would the world have been deprived of a great artist?
Peter D. Kramer
#62. 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
#63. 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
#64. 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
#65. A great artist is never a closed subject, but this catalogue is a milestone production, as useful as it is beautiful.
Norbert Lynton
#66. 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
#67. 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
#68. 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
#69. 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
#70. Mother-love is not inevitable. The good mother is a great artist ever creating beauty out of chaos
Alice Randall
#71. 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
#73. The integrity of being an artist for Frank Stella means going into the unknown.A great artist is somebody who's not scared to reinvent themselves and to start all over again. And some artists do it once, twice, three times in their career. He's done it probably a dozen times or more.
Frank Stella
#74. The camera would miss it all. A magnificent picture is never worth a thousand perfect words. Ansel Adams can be a great artist, but he can never be Shakespeare. His tools are too literal.
John Dunning
#75. A great artist paints a picture on the canvas of his mind using the colors of his love and imagination before transferring the image onto a real canvas.
Debasish Mridha
#76. My deepest condolences for DJ AM, you were a great artist and will be severely missed. My thoughts and Prayers to his family and friends.
Shanna Moakler
#78. 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
#79. Being a talented artist is good, it's nice, but it's not the most important thing. I think being a good storyteller, having a good idea, a good gag, is probably more important than being a great artist.
Bill Plympton
#80. A great artist can really enter the logic of any particular mazurka and fully understand the language of Chopin's music.
Rafal Blechacz
#81. My holy of holies are the human body, health, intelligence, talent, inspiration, love, and the most absolute freedom - freedom from force and falsity, in whatever form these last may be expressed. This is the program I would maintain, were I a great artist.
Anton Chekhov
#82. I have never felt more alive than when I watched my children delight in something, never more alive than when I have watched a great artist perform, and never richer than when I have scored a big check to fight AIDS.
Elizabeth Taylor
#83. The key to the mystery of a great artist is that for reasons unknown, he will give away his energies and his life just to make sure that one note follows another ... and leaves us with the feeling that something is right in the world.
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Leonard Bernstein
#85. 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
#86. 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
#87. 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
#88. 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
#89. I get a lot from great '90s artists like Juliana Hatfield, The Pixies, and bands like That Dog and The Breeders.
Margaret Cho
#90. [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
#91. 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
#92. 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
#93. 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
#94. 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
#95. 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
#96. 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
#97. 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
#98. 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
#99. 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
#100. I see artists as a great battalion moving through paint, words, music towards cosmological interpretation.
Lawrence Durrell
