Top 100 Quotes About An Artist
#1. If you find yourself asking yourself (and your friends), "Am I really a writer? Am I really an artist?" chances are you are. The counterfeit innovator is wildly self-confident. The real one is scared to death.
Steven Pressfield
#2. You are an over-excited little man, with a need for self-expression far beyond the scope of your natural gifts. This is not discreditable. Neither does it make you an artist.
Tom Stoppard
#3. When you start to think of the arts as not this thing that is going to get you somewhere in terms of becoming an artist or becoming famous or whatever it is that people do, but rather a way of making being in the world not just bearable, but fascinating, then it starts to get interesting again.
Lynda Barry
#4. There's no diploma in the world that declares you as an artist - it's not like becoming a doctor. You can declare yourself an artist and then figure out how to be an artist.
Kara Walker
#5. I just say I'm an artist who works with pictures and words.
Barbara Kruger
#6. In memory each of us is an artist: each of us creates.
Patricia Hampl
#7. Seizing new ground, making connections between people or ideas, working without a map - these are works of art, and if you do them, you are an artist, regardless of whether you wear a smock, use a computer, or work with others all day long.
Seth Godin
#8. A writer's voice is not character alone, it is not style alone; it is far more. A writer's voice line the stroke of an artist's brush- is the thumbprint of her whole person- her idea, wit, humor, passions, rhythms.
Patricia Lee Gauch
#9. Ultimately, because I'm an artist, I can't ever consider myself a nihilist, so I suppose I'm optimistic.
Marilyn Manson
#10. Every art is a church without communicants, presided over by a parish of the respectable. An artist is born kneeling; he fights to stand. A critic, by nature of the judgment seat, is born sitting.
Hortense Calisher
#11. He who desires nothing, hopes for nothing, and is afraid of nothing, cannot be an artist.
Anton Chekhov
#12. I believe that a truly valuable artist must be an artist who realizes the impossibility of his task -and then continues to do it.
Keith Jarrett
#14. I think the biggest thing that motivates me when I'm choosing a part is a role that will help me continue to grow as a person and as an artist, and a role that will deepen my understanding of humanity, and my connection to it.
Forest Whitaker
#15. I'm not such an artist type that I can't handle the real world. I read the financial pages, because most people don't talk about art.
Caio Fonseca
#16. My definition of an artist is anyone who's ahead of his time and behind on his rent.
Kinky Friedman
#17. Sometime during the mid-50s I said, 'I am an artist.' Before that, for many years, I had said, 'I'm going to be an artist.' Then I went through a change of mind and a change of heart. What made 'going to be an artist' into 'being an artist', was, in part, a spiritual change.
Jasper Johns
#18. Artists shouldn't wait until they are told what their art should be, they shouldn't follow trends or allow other people to influence their work, an artist should only create from the strongest emotions within their heart
Andrew James Pritchard
#19. An odd contradiction, if the layman were correct in his unconscious assumption that an artist begins with reality and ends with art: the converse is true - to the degree that this dichotomy has any truth - the artist begins with art, and through it arrives at reality.
Robert Motherwell
#20. Wanting to work is a luxury; having to work is not. If you're an artist, an actor, and you don't have to work, then you do work that you wanna do.
Steve Guttenberg
#21. An artist has to go to every extreme, to stretch his sensibility through excess and suffering in order to feel and to communicate more.
Sebastian Horsley
#22. I don't think I ever really decided I was an artist. I went to college to learn how to think and look at art. In the end, I developed a more sophisticated misunderstanding of art.
Gavin Turk
#23. Having a great golf swing helps under pressure, but golf is a game about scoring. It's like an artist who can get a two-inch brush at Wal-Mart for 20 cents or a fine camel-hair brush from an art store for 20 dollars. The brush doesn't matter - how the finished painting looks is what matters.
Jerry Pate
#24. I'm not opposed to commerce, even though I'm an artist.
Tracey Emin
#25. I think it's really important as an artist not to be drawn to the haters, because there are so many people who are nice and quiet.
Lisa Yuskavage
#26. A lot of times maturing as an artist is just starting to do the things you like to do.
John Currin
#27. I'm both an artist / filmmaker and a human rights defender.
Pamela Yates
#28. I think the most important thing for an artist is to stay true to who you are. I want to stay as authentic as possible, as that's how we're going with our team.
Daya
#29. You may kill an artist or a thinker, but you cannot acquire his art or his thought. You may put a man do death because he loves his fellow-men, but you will not by so doing acquire the love which made his happiness.
Bertrand Russell
#30. Richard Serra, the great sculptor, personifies an artist for me.
Charlie Rose
#31. I became paralyzed as an artist with writer's block.
David Guterson
#32. An artist who lacks the power of self-criticism accomplishes but little. It is good if your work stands higher than your own opinion of it; bad if it is on the same level. But it is a great disaster if your work stands lower than your judgment of it.
Leonardo Da Vinci
#33. I don't feel like I'm an artist with a capital 'A.'
Eric Whitacre
#34. Artists don't really want to be marginalized. They believe that everybody should be able to appreciate the experience that an artist gives them, an experience that connects us to each other in a deep way.
Eric Fischl
#35. Above all, Danny Boyle's 'Slumdog Millionaire' is the work of an artist at the peak of his powers. India is his palette, and Mumbai - that teeming 'maximum city', with 19 million strivers on the make, jostling, scheming, struggling and killing for success - is his brush.
Shashi Tharoor
#36. I became an artist because I couldn't become anything else.
Mati Klarwein
#37. He was an artist when he saw society: it never crossed his mind that society had to be like this; had any right, had any business being like this. A car in the street. Why? Why cars? This is what an artist has to be: harassed to the point of insanity or stupefaction by first principles.
Martin Amis
#38. I grew up with an artist father, and my parents' friends were also mainly artists or writers, so he connects what I do with his example.
Jonathan Lethem
#39. Technology is technology and then art form and people's creativity is another thing. Anything that helps an artist do anything - great! Technology for technology sake doesn't mean much to me anyway.
Tim Burton
#40. I just asked myself, what piece of that man's soul did he just chew off and swallow to get next week's assignment? You know, just to live, just to work as an artist, or to feed the family?
Paul Haggis
#41. No great artist ever sees things as they really are. If he did, he would cease to be an artist.
Oscar Wilde
#42. Certain jobs [films] are for the business really, because they get an audience, they get a global audience. Certain jobs are as an artist. If I can keep moving forward and strike some form of balance between them two, then I'm going to feel content.
Jack O'Connell
#43. In order to work and to become an artist one needs love. At least, one who wants sentiment in his work must in the first place feel it himself, and live with his heart.
Vincent Van Gogh
#44. To say that an artist sells out means that an artist is making a conscious choice to compromise his music, to to weaken his music for the sake of commercial gain.
Ken Burns
#45. Artists no longer starve in garrets. Some people may think this is not wholly a good thing, that being an artist has become too comfortable, at least in the West. I'm not sure I agree. It's a mark of civilization to encourage the arts and the life of the mind.
J.M. Coetzee
#46. 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
#47. The more one suffered and lived, the more one had known of joy and grief, the deeper the response must be if an artist were great enough to summon it.
Rachel Field
#48. Only by pairing knowledge with inspiration will art evolve. Without these conditions any musician will remain a flawed artist, if one may speak of an artist at all.
Hector Berlioz
#49. This was my first encounter with art as art (he saw 'Pinky' painted by Sir Thomas Lawrence and 'The Blue Boy painted by Thomas Gainborough) ... somebody actually MADE those paintings ... (it) was the first time I realized you could be an artist.
Robert Rauschenberg
#50. Show me a Scorsese film, and I'll show you a movie where he's taken risks. It's just his nature. He's an artist, and artists take risks. He always does what he believes in.
Irwin Winkler
#52. I think being an activist and an artist is an interesting contradiction, because so often they are at odds with one another. When you write as an artist you have to clean the palate of your own politics in creating characters and activism is kind of the exact opposite.
Eve Ensler
#53. I think it's helped me evolve all around, as an artist and as a person. I think we need something, need something to believe in. We need something that makes us pay attention to these humbling experiences.
Ryan Montgomery
#54. The art of an artist must be his own art. It is ... always a continuous chain of little inventions, little technical discoveries of one's own, in one's relation to the tool, the material and the colors.
Emil Nolde
#55. The procedure was that an artist got a mural and then he would have anywhere from two to ten assistants depending on the size of the mural and how many assistants he needed, or she needed.
Lee Krasner
#56. With an artist no sane man quarrels, any more than with the colour of a child's eyes.
George Santayana
#57. I hate to say I'm a photographer, because I learned photography as I went along. But I also hate to say I'm a painter, a draftsman, even an artist. I think it's good when you're confused about what you are; it means you haven't defined yourself as an artist yet.
Vik Muniz
#58. The world doesn't need an artist who shows reality as it is.
Marina Abramovic
#59. One is a criminal to some people and an artist to others. I can understand that. In a legal sense, I am a convicted criminal.
Wolfgang Beltracchi
#60. As a citizen, hopefully I'm humanist. As an artist, I'm free.
Patti Smith
#61. By stripping down an image to its essential "meaning", an artist can amplify that meaning in a way that realistic art can't.
Scott McCloud
#62. Generosity is a two-edged virtue for an artist - it nourishes his imagination but has a fatal effect on his routine.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
#63. How does an artist know when the line that he just painted is good or not good? That's the catch. De Kooning was the greatest of my contemporaries in art, and he knew when he'd done a good line. When he didn't, he threw it away. I wish I'd thrown away some of mine.
Philip Johnson
#64. I think there's a great strength in having the courage and also having the support to do what you want to do when you're an artist in any way, shape or form.
Dave Gahan
#65. Is it my role as an artist to say something, to express, to be expressive? I think it's my role as an artist to bring to expression, it's not my role to be expressive.
Anish Kapoor
#66. My words, my writing, my actions - these have never been for myself alone, either directly or indirectly. There is no such thing as an artist who creates art only for himself. That is masturbation.
Pramoedya Ananta Toer
#67. I think for an artist it's really important to have experiences, and I've had a lot of those. It's definitely inspired my lyrics and my style, even down to what I wear.
Neon Hitch
#68. Taste! It doesn't exist. An artist makes beautiful things without being aware of it.
Edgar Degas
#69. Talent is so loaded a word, so full to the brim with meanings, that an artist might be wise to forget about it altogether and just keep on working.
Eric Maisel
#70. It's been so long now and so much has happened that I am able now to look back with much less emotion and my take on Andy as an artist now comes down to a simple sentence: he made religious art for a secular society which is why it has so much appeal.
Bob Colacello
#71. From the moment you are born, you could die. I think as an artist it is important to meditate on that.
Marina Abramovic
#72. It'd be crazy to say just because an artist is not successful that means he's not talented. I don't think anybody really believes that, but sometimes it feels that way.
Oscar Isaac
#73. When I first made photographs, they were too plain to be considered art and I wasn't considered an artist. I didn't get any attention at all. The people who looked at my work thought, well, that's just a snapshot of the backyard. Privately I knew otherwise and through stubbornness stayed with it ...
Walker Evans
#74. You just have to know that the more successful you get as an artist, the less of a normal life you have. It's a trade-off.
Solange Knowles
#75. Ever since I was a kid, I might have been eleven or twelve. I'd be telling anyone who would listen that when I grew up, I wanted to be an artist.
Graeme Base
#76. The philosophers write about things as they are and as they appear to be, but as an artist I find that appearance is everything.
Gary Inbinder
#77. The deepest and most sincere feeling I get is when I meet an artist and they have that steel in their eyes and they have that fire and that passion and all they want is to be a star and to hear themselves on the radio.
L.A. Reid
#78. Magical realism allows an artist like myself to inject layers of meaning without being obvious. In American culture, where there is freedom of expression, this approach may seem forced, unnecessary and misunderstood. But this system of communication has become very Iranian.
Shirin Neshat
#79. You're telling me that because of the Internet, and the availability of every experience, every whim, every tool, sudden everyone's an artist? But here's the thing: if everyone's an artist, then no one is.
Meg Wolitzer
#80. An artist finds his happiest combination in a play of complementary colors. They are direct contrasts yet do not jar; they awaken the beholder, but do not disturb him.
Charles E. Burchfield
#81. To be an artist is first to be a manual laborer.
Irving Stone
#82. I am powerless against the great magazines - I am an artist, and I will always be that.
Werner Bischof
#83. Of course, the kids who had never heard of a person called Ben E. King were then aware of the name associated with the song. That gave a tremendous lift to me as an artist.
Ben E. King
#84. For an artist, there's nothing better than having the opportunity to create a world that doesn't- but could- exist.
Christophe Lautrette
#85. Usually, the extras have a different mentality. I had the mentality of an artist, because I was a 'ballet-rina.' But most extras are out to make a fast buck for nothing. They're 'atmosphere.'
Teri Garr
#86. I'd say, if you want to be an artist, start with your art; start with making great music and it will, hopefully, eventually cut through all of the nonsense that is out there.
Queen Latifah
#87. Raw is a good place for an artist. It's where the truth comes out.
Keith Urban
#88. The most important thing an artist
can discover is a love of process.
Kody Chamberlain
#89. An artist feels vulnerable to begin with; and yet the only answer is to recklessly discard more armour.
Eric Maisel
#90. I think it's natural for an artist to explore as they evolve.
Miguel
#91. I'm a fashion designer. What I do is artistic, but I'm not an artist because everything I do is destined to be sold. That's not to say that you can't be an artist and a fashion designer. I think some designers are artists.
Tom Ford
#92. As an artist, as I design and lay out a page, the less-important things, things I want you to spend less time looking at, I draw them very small, maybe even silhouette them. The more-important pivotal scenes, I draw them larger, maybe even a double-page spread.
Jim Lee
#93. When you live in New York and are an artist and are interested in people, you meet a lot of people.
Molly Crabapple
#94. An artist who makes pictures that look good but express nothing is like a writer whose words sound good but have no meaning.
Gerald Brommer
#95. Life is different than it was in the Nineties. I'm a dad, and there are other things I have to get done in an afternoon than just being an artist.
Chris Robinson
#96. As an artist, one doesn't know what is real. And so there's a search and a process of trying to locate something that feels or appears or somehow resonates with us on a deeper level. This is why art is such an interesting business to be in.
Chris Martin
#97. In my previous life, I was an artist. I still paint. I love art.
Edi Rama
#98. The usual relationship between an artist and his painting is like the relationship with the father, or a husband's with his wife. But mine is a relationship with a stranger ... with the chance acquaintance.
Ilya Kabakov
#100. I went to a public school in Oak Harbor, Ohio, and it's a very rural community. I was an artist kid, and I just didn't fit in very well.
Crystal Bowersox
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