Top 100 Quotes About Great Artists
#1. It's not curators, it's not critics, it's not the public, it's not collectors who find great artists - it's other artists.
David Galenson
#2. I've never been able to understand where great artists come from.
Harold Prince
#3. Recently, the Germans have developed a tendency to prefer the so-called first (youthful) style of great artists to their mature works. Could it be that they do not realize that their aesthetic criteria, generally speaking, are juvenile?
Franz Grillparzer
#5. There are so many great artists and most of them are women, but that's good - the more the merrier!
Rachel Stevens
#6. There are so many great artists that are doing interesting things, that I don't want to focus on boring people.
Kathleen Hanna
#7. Cookery is a wholly unselfish art: as 'art for art's sake' it is unthinkable. A man may sing in his bath every morning without the least encouragement, but no cook can cook just for his or her own sake in a like manner. All good cooks, like all great artists, must have an audience worth cooking for.
Andre Simon
#8. There are so many great artists, I think, who kind of suffer from being icons, legends, acknowledged masters.
Richard Linklater
#9. Austrian public-opinion pollsters recently reported that those held in highest esteem by most of the people interviewed are neither the great artists nor the great scientists, neither the great statesmen nor the great sport figures, but those who master a hard lot with their heads held high.
Viktor E. Frankl
#10. He wasn't, but producers are by definition annoying because they have a different agenda from you. They're trying to stop you spending money and you're trying to not spend money, but at the same time we're great artists.
Michael Apted
#11. 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
#12. The great artists of the world are never Puritans, and seldom even ordinarily respectable.
H.L. Mencken
#13. I believe artists deserve all the help they can get, so they can focus on being great artists.
Janina Gavankar
#14. The great artists ... do not want security, egoistic or materialistic.
Brenda Ueland
#15. Individuality and originality is was separates good and great artists! How much they can move people with what they do! If they can shake the heart with what they do, is the key!
Hiromi
#16. True poets, like great artists, have scarcely any childhood, and no old age.
Sophie Swetchine
#17. Music is art, art is life, and we are who we are, and all of these aforementioned women, unless they should choose not to, will be performing well into the next many decades because they are great artists.
Lara St. John
#18. The works of the great artists are silent books of eternal truths.
Stefan Zweig
#19. Most great artists define a new and unique region of hell.
Scott Miller
#20. I think that most great artists who are extremely known, as I am, would intimidate a lot of people. I don't want to do that to people, but I know I do.
Ray Charles
#21. Now I can't abide rudeness, even in so called great artists. Rudeness and cruelty are the qualities i hate most. Rudeness and cruelty are always connected, I feel. One example out of many is Stalin.
Dmitri Shostakovich
#22. In general, you have great artists who have died far too early and who have left great cultural impact. If you look at people like Vincent van Gogh or Jean-Michel Basquiat-there's a long, long list of artists who have died in tragic circumstances, and far, far too early.
Simon De Pury
#23. Originality is way overrated. To make, you need to take. All great artists do.
Walter Darby Bannard
#24. All great scientists have, in a certain sense, been great artists; the man with no imagination may collect facts, but he cannot make great discoveries.
Karl Pearson
#25. It evoked Picasso and Miles Davis for me - two great artists who totally indulged themselves in their work and who they were, but they certainly didn't give a damn what other people thought.
Rodney Crowell
#26. It seems we would rather have a past filled with great scientists than just great artists and writers who could dream up these wonderful and awe-inspiring creations. It's a strange irony: we're spending our time trying to find the truth in our past, but creating myths of ourselves in the present.
Aditya Iyengar
#27. I have noted that, barring accidents, artists whose powers wear best and last longest are those who have trained themselves to work under adversity. Great artists treasure their time with a bitter and snarling miserliness.
Catherine Drinker Bowen
#29. [Great artists] do not copy what they see, but what they desire.
Theophile Gautier
#30. There were some extremely good teachers there that were great artists really in their own right. It was actually very hard to concentrate on getting down to going any work being an art student especially when it's a flighty thing at best.
Graham Coxon
#31. I gotta say, the Catholic Church has churned out a lot of great artists and directors and actors, so if that's all they do, that's fine by me. If they're good at churning out tortured artists, that's great!
Paul Rust
#32. I think great artists have no time to waste with having disproportionate egos and irrational requests. They're too focused on their work to actually lose themselves in hysterical spirals where they become monsters or tyrants.
Xavier Dolan
#33. I think the great artists, especially in literature, have always thought with the heart.
Douglas Sirk
#34. I cannot be convinced that great artists are moralists. Art is first appearances, then meaning.
Camille Paglia
#35. If you subtracted all of the great artists who never drank, who never went to excess, you wouldn't have any more art left. What kind of poem are you gonna get out of a glass of iced tea?
David Lee Roth
#36. Very few great artists feel the giant agony of the world.
Edith Hamilton
#37. There are a lot of great artists with great voices who aren't singing what they should be singing.
Natalie Cole
#38. It's often the case that great artists - people like Bruce Springsteen - tend to pick up the subterranean rumblings of profound social change long before the economic statisticians notice them. Changes start long before they become statistics.
Wayne Swan
#39. Great artists are the ones who have put their entire selves out there to be adored, humiliated, to be picked at, cherished, all of those things, and haven't shied away from that.
Carmen Ejogo
#40. Great art comes from great artists. There's a bunch of people that are hurt that still couldn't have made the album that was super-polarizing and redefined the sound of radio.
Kanye West
#41. All great artists draw from the same resource: the human heart, which tells us all that we are more alike than we are unlike.
Maya Angelou
#42. What the really great artists do is they're entirely themselves. They're entirely themselves, they've got their own vision, they have their own way of fracturing reality, and if it's authentic and true, you will feel it in your nerve endings.
David Foster Wallace
#43. The ad business has some of the great artists, but because there are so many, its hard to determine the true gems.
Steve Stoute
#45. 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
#46. Bad artists ignore the darkness of human existence. Good artists often get stuck there. Great artists embrace the full catastrophe of our condition and find beyond it an even deeper truth of peace, healing, and redemption.
Martha N. Beck
#47. Great artists, as history reveals, have been harshly persecuted time and again by the frightened and ill-educated,
Philip Roth
#48. The reason that some singers go on to become great artists has very little to do with their voices, but rather with the fact that they have used their instruments as tools for detailed communication.
Renee Fleming
#49. The errors of God, like those of great artists, or of true lovers, bring forth so many joyful rewards, that at times it is worth wishing for them.
Paulo Coelho
#50. All really great artists, Jackson Pollack, John Cage, Beckett or Joyce - you are never indifferent to them.
Jonathan Safran Foer
#51. What do great artists do when you see a world around you that's in turmoil? Some of the best artists make you feel good (hah), they look to the future.
Nile Rodgers
#52. Great artists are a little too gifted to be bound by boxes and labels, and in saying that, the label 'artist' is to be used lightly.
Criss Jami
#53. I wish I was better at art. I love some of the great artists of the 19th century and, compared to them, I just feel I lack this technique that they had. They have so much skill.
Hayao Miyazaki
#54. It feels like my job is to support people. I support great artists. When I worked with a symphony, I sat in the third chair, not the first chair.
Nile Rodgers
#55. It's about finding great artists and being part of their careers.
Kenneth Edmonds
#56. There's not one major greatest influence on my career. It would be film and great artists and great imagineers - Jim Henson, Walt Disney, Charlie Chaplin, people who understand the joy of the imagination.
Zac Posen
#57. Master Alfred de Musset says great artists have no country. They have also no world! They belong to the space, to the universe, to anything infinite!
Mehmet Murat Ildan
#58. I really tried to work out hard to emulate the look and feel of the character, and did my best to represent the great artists that created him. At the same time, as an actor you have to find what you relate to in the character and make it your own, and hopefully people respond to it.
Daniel Cudmore
#60. I know that some of the great painters and some of the great artists didn't even start to 'peak', as you say, till they were in their fifties and sixties. And God knows, history is full of artistic people that weren't even recognized till they were dead and gone.
Joe Perry
#61. The Rock'n'Blues Fest is my kind of festival series! It's always great playing shows with my brother and, add to that, all the other great artists and their bands and this should make for one historic round of concerts.
Johnny Winter
#62. I've had the honor to be in sessions with great artists.
Sevyn Streeter
#63. The great artists represent you. The great products represent you. They don't tell you who you are. But with them, you require less verbiage.
Andrew Loog Oldham
#64. 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
#65. I think great artists and great engineers are similar, in that they both have a desire to express themselves. In fact some of the best people working on the original Mac were poets and musicians on the side.
Steve Jobs
#66. I like Simon Cowell - look at how many great artists have come out of the U.K. because of him.
George Benson
#67. I have always thought that great artists were those who dared to confer the right of beauty on things so natural that people say on seeing them, Why did I never realize before that that was beautiful too?
Andre Gide
#68. I didn't want to just work within Hollywood when I started a production company. I wanted to be able to collaborate with great artists from all over the world.
Joseph Gordon-Levitt
#69. To try to understand the real significance of what the great artists, the serious masters, tell us in their masterpieces, that leads to God; one man wrote or told it in a book; another, in a picture.
Vincent Van Gogh
#70. Great artists make the roads; good teachers and good companions can point them out. But there ain't no free rides, baby.
Ursula K. Le Guin
#71. I'm doing what great artists before me did, like Judy Garland, Sammy Davis, Eddie Cantor. I'm doing what they were doing, not at their level yet, but one day I will be. I'm just happy to be in their company.
Mike Tyson
#72. All the children of America, up to age seven or eight or nine or ten - they're really great artists. So here we've got this amazing work that very few people pay any attention to, and it's not valued by the culture.
Chris Martin
#73. The great artists of finance like Morgan and Rockefeller weren't deflected. They wanted and got money, just simple money. What they did with it afterward is another matter. I've always felt they got scared of the ghost they raised and tried to buy it off.
John Steinbeck
#74. Young children are developing more of an artistic orientation, and the orientation they develop is so naturally graceful and lively that many great artists have said that they constantly try to recapture it.
William Crain
#75. All great artists know that part of their task is to light up the distance between two human beings.
Nadeem Aslam
#76. It's quite clear : an outsider can, on principle, only value foreign literature that translates well; the truly great artists of language and the fecund experimenters are inaccessible to him; are usually unknown to him in fact !
Arno Schmidt
#77. I think that when you're making your way up in the music industry, you have all these heroes and the reasons why they are your heroes. As soon as you get into the industry, your guidelines change a little bit. For me, my heroes now are great people first and great artists second.
Taylor Swift
#78. You can go down the list of great artists and kind of understand that they are products of their environment. Whether it's U2 or Henry Rollins or myself or Johnny Lydon, they're gonna be products of their environment.
Eddie Vedder
#79. Great artists are like loaded guns. They are dangerous in anybody's hands.
Peter M. Brant
#80. It just makes you a better artist when you're with people who are great artists themselves. Being around Kanye, soaking up all the knowledge, all the stuff he got.
Big Sean
#81. All the great artists of the world slowly slowly start growing a quality of feminineness, grace, elegance, exquisiteness. A certain flavor of softness, relaxedness, calmness and quietness surrounds them. They are no longer feverish. What I am teaching here is really to turn the whole world feminine.
Rajneesh
#82. Practically all great artists accept the influence of others. But ... the artist with vision sees his material, chooses, changes, and by integrating what he has learned with his own experiences, finally molds something distinctly personnel.
Romare Bearden
#83. I love music and musicians. And seeing great artists dropped from labels was really frustrating and sad to me.
Rosanna Arquette
#84. I think the great artists (..) have always thought with the heart.
Douglas Sirk
#85. The great artists do not seek their forms in the midst of the past, but take the deepest soundings they can of the genuine, profoundest of their age.
Franz Marc
#86. 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
#88. That's the thing about great artists: They find the thing that's most obvious to themselves, what's most conscious and natural, and they put it out there and the audience comes.
Steve Vai
#89. Human nature is not amenable to prediction based on the trends or tendencies prevailing at the time. It is amenable to startling creativity of the kind practiced by great artists, directors, writers, musicians, actors, who know how to touch a chord in humans everywhere.
Maurice Saatchi
#90. I think the key to great art and great artists is to just fully be yourself and not be scared of that, and be the extremes of your personality. Show the extremes of your personality and embrace the imperfections. Embrace the things about yourself that you might not like.
King Tuff
#91. Well, first of all it's entertainment. That stops us becoming too pretentious or thinking we're great artists.
Richard Thompson
#92. We've always had a tradition in America of hounding our artists to death. Look at the list of our great artists, you see a continual history of defeat, frustration, poverty, alcoholism, drug addiction. The best poets of my generation are all suicides.
James Dickey
#93. There's lots of things that can't make it in the world that are worth making. There are lots of great artists who never make it, there are lots of great writers who don't get published - is it still worthwhile? Aren't we glad people are still doing it?
Dana Spiotta
#94. Stradivarius, in particular, was the most amazing craftsman and one of the great artists and scientists that ever lived because he figured out something with the sound and the science of acoustics that we still don't understand it completely.
Joshua Bell
#95. When I'm dead and no longer the threat. My comfort is that all the great artists since the beginning of time have always been completely misunderstood and never fully appreciated until they were dead.
Madonna Ciccone
#96. Soul music has so many great artists who put their thing down. That's important.
Raekwon
#97. Great artists need great clients.
I.M. Pei
#98. The great leaders of business, industry, finance, and the great artists, musicians, poets, and writers became great, because they developed the faculty of creative imagination.
Napoleon Hill
#100. I find that the great artists I've met are people who are so playfully invested in their process that, even if it doesn't come out the way they like, they still power through and even take energy from it.
George Saunders
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