Top 100 Quotes About The Artist's Life
#1. 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
#2. The artist's life nourishes itself on the particular, the concrete.
Sylvia Plath
#3. The artist's life is to be where life is, active life, found in neither ivory tower nor concrete shelter; he must be out listening to everything, looking at everything, and thinking it all out afterward.
Sean O'Casey
#4. There is an appalling amount of mechanical work in the artist's life ... Talent is mysterious, but the qualities that guard, foster, and direct it are not unlike those of a good quartermaster.
Anne Truitt
#5. Love is the spirit that motivates the artist's journey. The love may sublime, raw, obsessive, passionate, awful. or thrilling, but whatever its quality, it's a powerful motive in the artist's life.
Eric Maisel
#6. The idea of a talent that was bigger than an artist's ability to choose to use it, that would dictate the artist's life more than the artist could dictate, was interesting to me.
Alexander Chee
#8. This is the story of an electrically alive young woman on the brink of her adult life. An artist equally attuned to the light as the shadows, with a limitless hunger for experience and knowledge, completely unafraid of life's more frightening opportunities.
Elizabeth Winder
#9. History has proven that it's impossible to crush the artist. There's always gonna be a need for somebody to write a poem or sing a song about something, about life - that makes it real. There's the word that goes beyond the word.
Mos Def
#10. Artists with the lack of proper education and experience of working from life will copy whatever is visible on the photograph, without knowing what's underneath. As a result, instead of creating the in-depth and full of character portrait, they draw a mask with no soul.
Igor Babailov
#11. A garden is a result of an arrangement of natural materials according to aesthetic laws; interwoven throughout are the artist's outlook on life, his past experiences, his affections, his attempts, his mistakes and his successes.
Roberto Burle Marx
#12. Being an artist is not exactly the most universally respected, or secure thing to do with your life. It can be frightening and you can feel that you're taking a lot of risks just with your own life, and your family's security. But the rewards outweigh those things.
Joan Osborne
#13. I say that I suffer from what Rosalind Krauss was calling the post-medium condition, where an artist essentially employs several mediums in order to bring to life whatever specific ideas that they have. For me it's always been that way.
Rashid Johnson
#14. That's part of the requirement for me to be an artist is that you're trying to share your personal existence with others and trying to illuminate modern life, trying to understand life.
Francis Ford Coppola
#15. As an artist you organize your life so that you get a chance to paint, a window of time, but that's no guarantee you'll create anything worth all your effort. You're always haunt by the idea you're wasting your life.
Chuck Palahniuk
#16. The work of the artist is not so much what you say or what you know, it's recognizing what you know. That's what life is about. That's what photography is about. You see something, or you hear someone say something, and you say That is a truth. You know, deep in you. That's when you start shooting.
Sylvia Plachy
#17. 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
#18. Yes, but the artist?" said Nigel almost fiercely. "He's different, you know he is. He's driven by some compulsion: if he can't do what he knows he has to do with his life he might as well be dead. He's got to break through the world's indifference, or else break himself against it. He can't help it.
Mary Stewart
#19. I'm not the type of artist that's like, 'Let's go out and party and dance your life away!' I think those artists are so cool, but I wanted meaning in my songs and they have messages.
Claudia Lee
#20. This is the artist, then, life's hungry man, the glutton of eternity, beauty's miser, glory's slave.
Tom Wolfe
#21. She pours sugar on her life
and drinks the artist's marrow
in the bone of her glass and she lives.
Kelli Russell Agodon
#22. I'm very happy with my lot. I like the variety I get. You don't want to spend your life repeating yourself. It's true of any kind of artist, you want to explore as wide and far as you can go, so that's what I've been trying to do.
Toni Collette
#23. 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
#24. To be an artist, you don't have to compose music or paint or be in the movies or write books. It's just a way of living. It has to do with paying attention, remembering, filtering what you see and answering back, participating in life.
Viggo Mortensen
#25. The advantage of having an artistic tradition is that the younger artist could see an organic link between the real life of one's country and its art work which is a sublimation of that life.
Kuo Pao Kun
#26. In an artist's life, death is perhaps not the most difficult thing.
Vincent Van Gogh
#27. It's the artist's duty to have an artist's life, somehow to obtain time and freedom and then to muster the desire and discipline to make good work out of the life, whether that goodness is in the world's aesthetics, its radicalism, its candor, its singularity, or its universality.
Stephanie Mills
#28. You start to become successful, and everybody starts to drive your money train to the bank, and they're not thinking anymore about what you want as an artist or if any of that even matters to you. It genuinely upsets people in my life that I don't care about money, and that's not my problem.
Lady Gaga
#29. The artist's mission must not be to produce an irrefutable solution to a problem, but to compel us to love life in all its countless and inexhaustible manifestations.
Leo Tolstoy
#30. Perhaps it's good for one to suffer. Can an artist do anything if he's happy? Would he ever want to do anything? What is art, after all, but a protest against the horrible inclemency of life?
Aldous Huxley
#31. We're painting the same people all our life - it's just the way we look at them that changes. If you experience trauma, you can speak about it in so many different ways. You can speak about landscape, you can speak about your food; it's always different. Trauma is the beginning of life as an artist.
Christian Boltanski
#32. Measurements are never enough. The artist's eye and desire to breathe life into the subject must be the deciding factors.
David McCullough
#33. It would be narrowness to suppose that an artist can only care for the impressions of those who know the methods of his art as well as feel its effects. Art works for all whom it can touch.
Gordon S. Haight
#34. Words are your paintbrush, and your life is the canvas. You can paint whatever you want to paint; you can even copy another artist's work - but what you express with your paintbrush is the way you see yourself, the way you see the entire reality.
Miguel Ruiz
#35. I paint all the time. Each night I wrestle, I paint my face because I am an artist. It's kind of all coming together where I am able to do everything I really love to do and need in my life.
Jeff Hardy
#36. It's ironic that people speak of artists as dreamers. I think they are the most grounded people around. Conscious and present. As an artist, you really see life, connect with its beauty, and create something that shares those observations with others. You notice things.
Danny Gregory
#37. 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
#38. 'Faith and Will' is aimed at the same readership as 'The Artist's Way.' The book is for spiritual seekers in all walks of life.
Julia Cameron
#39. No-one has the right to terminate a person's life with a gun, a knife, or a makutu (spell).
Theresa Sjoquist
#40. For the artist treating of man's relation to all sides of life there cannot and should not be heroes, but there should be men.
Leo Tolstoy
#41. One of the beauties of art is that it reflects an artist's entire life. What I've learned over the past 30 years is really beginning to inform what I make. I hope that process continues until I die.
Andy Goldsworthy
#42. A writer's heart, a poet's heart, an artist's heart, a musician's heart is always breaking. It is through that broken window that we see the world ...
Alice Walker
#43. The most demanding part of living a lifetime as an artist is the strict discipline of forcing oneself to work steadfastly along the nerve of one's own most intimate sensitivity.
Annie Dillard
#44. Each one seems to be, in some way, essentially different from the others, and each is a surprise to me. I think that making books, or any kind of art, might also be like mining. The artist digs into his or her life and imagination and never knows what they'll find. That's the adventure.
Mordicai Gerstein
#45. Choosing to be an artist . . . is choosing to mine deep caverns. It's like getting lost in the darkness and spending the rest of your life trying to find your way.
Michele Zackheim
#46. For women who have children, the economic difficulty of sustaining a life as an artist maybe makes it impossible. There's no maternity leave, there's no pension.
Elizabeth Price
#47. Is the phrase 'pay' or 'play the piper'
I inquire, why
'Cause I admire a desire to flip the switch
Yeah make a way to face the music like
Life savings for a mosh pit riot
Listen to a mix
Rock the tickets, higher volume
Velocity which shakes a cockpit's pilot
Criss Jami
#48. I don't think there's anything to be afraid of. Failure brings great rewards - in the life of an artist.
Quentin Tarantino
#49. Literature will save me it's the only certainty i am sure of.
Nikki Rowe
#50. Every work of art is aggressive, Isabella. And every artist's life is a small war or a large one, beginning with oneself and one's limitations. To achieve anything you must first have ambition and then talent, knowledge, and finally the opportunity.
Carlos Ruiz Zafon
#51. The clock is ticking and you're hearing the beat. You stop by a museum shop, sign your name on a scuba-diving sheet, and commit yourself to Saturday mornings in the deep end. You're either losing your mind - or gaining your soul. Life is meant to be an artist date. That's why we were created.
Julia Margaret Cameron
#52. It's getting too late in my life to care about the small things. It's getting too late to not be brave, to not live my life fully, to not try to be an artist. Trivial things like how nice your hotel room is, or if you have to be naked for a while, they fade away.
Helen Hunt
#53. The more life you have, the more it's in your pores, the more able you are to be creative as an artist.
Lesley Manville
#54. Any artist, the work you do, if it's a painting or if it's a performance, you hope it translates to a common denominator with the people that they see something in their own life in there. Or they see something in somebody else's life. That's what's fun about sharing art.
Matthew McConaughey
#55. I've seen so many versions of you. With me. Without me. Artist. Teacher. Graphic designer. But it's all, in the end, just life. We see it macro, like one big story, but when you're in it, it's all just day-to-day, right? And isn't that what you have to make your peace with?
Blake Crouch
#56. I mean, reality sucks. The world is a cancer, and shits so bad it's scary. Everything's filthy. But you know what? One day, it's not going to be here. So be glad you know what life is. You're alive. Live.
Mitch Lucker
#57. I believe in the energy of art, and through the use of that energy, the artist's ability to transform his or her life, and by example, the lives of others.
Audrey Flack
#58. I remind myself that traveling through life as an artist requires one to distill things slowly. To be inquisitive, inventive, and patient - a lot of things get discarded along the way. It's a little like boiling sea water to get at the salt.
James Nares
#59. The reading eye must do the work to make them live, and so it did, again and again, never the same life twice, as the artist had intended.
A.S. Byatt
#60. The ability to draw from life determines the artist's skill. This is why live drawing classes have always been at the top of the curriculum for properly structured academic workshops.
Igor Babailov
#61. The sad thing is that somehow, it is a type of event that mirrors the artist. You take it into account, and you're reminded in this specific case what the artist's work is about, what his life is like, and how life mirrors art.
Massimiliano Gioni
#62. The observation of nature is part of an artist's life, it enlarges his form [and] knowledge, keeps him fresh and from working only by formula, and feeds inspiration.
Henry Moore
#63. 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
#64. I like life, it's wonderous and chaotic and somewhere in the middle I've created a safe place to do my thing in the world ~ I can't ask for much more & I am already so thankful when everything I got
Nikki Rowe
#65. When you're an artist, your personal life and your professional life kind of blend together. I'm writing from home so I don't have an office or anything. I don't know where to draw the line between "Okay, let's stop now and watch American Idol."
Daryl Wein
#66. I don't think I want to transition into being a recording artist for the rest of my life or anything like that, but it's something I'd like to try.
Laura Osnes
#67. Writing changed my life. It has an existential dimension, and that's the same for every writer. Every artist has a moment of awakening, of happening upon an idea that grabs hold of you, regardless of whether you are a painter or a writer.
Imre Kertesz
#68. As artists get wealthier and more famous, often their work gets worse ... I'm fascinated by the decline of artists. I suspect I'll be in decline myself. It's a fact of life.
Martin Parr
#69. The power of creativity does not just lie in an artist's work, but also in how he or she continues to create regardless of the obstacles life places in the way.
Sharon Louden
#70. New songs are why artists go on the road. That's why I go on the road. It's a three-prong play. Writing: You're intrigued. Recording: It brings it to life. And then you want to share it.
Jon Bon Jovi
#71. I'm just working with ideas in my head and with drawings that the artists did. And suddenly to see these things come to life in movies - it's just wonderful.
Stan Lee
#72. Show me the artist anywhere who's had an utterly stable mental life, and I'll buy you hot dinners for the rest of your life.
Mark Haddon
#73. I am not one of those artists who is cemented in one way. I am able to, you know, make the happy, jovial, lighthearted music too. We need that in life too. So it's like that to me.
Jimmy Cliff
#74. Ideally there is a type of continuum which flows from life through the artist's sensibility and his materials ... the concreteness of the object and its own life , through the spectator, with his expectations, interpretations, back into life.
Douglas Portway
#75. No matter how screwed up the artist might be, there's still the chance that they can produce art that people like us hang on our wall and talk about long after their death. That the sum is greater than one part. That maybe one incident does not a life make.
Charles Martin
#76. To offer the complexities of life as an excuse for not addressing oneself to the simpler, more manageable (trivial) aspects of daily existence is a perversity often indulged in by artists, husbands, intellectuals
and critics of the Women's Movement.
Barbara Grizzuti Harrison
#77. [in the true mad north] of introspection,
where 'falcons of the inner eye'
dive and die, glimpsing in their
dying fall, all life's memory of existence.
Lawrence Ferlinghetti
#78. I was trying to focus on Margaret's trajectory as an artist, as a woman and an artist. Hopefully Cavendish experts won't be angry at me for anything I've left out. I feel like all the major movements of her life are there.
Danielle Dutton
#79. Vermeer's skill was in combining few colors, mixing little and using layers of lakes and varnishes to build up the illusion of life
Frank Wynne
#80. Art doesn't begin with a brush and a palette, but with the artist's ability to perceive life. You have to learn how to live before you can learn how to paint.
Dean Mitchell
#81. Satisfaction of one's curiosity is one of the greatest sources of happiness in life.
Linus Pauling
Linus Pauling
#82. I completely believe that - literature for me is a way of life. That's probably true of all writers or all artists. I think in the end this kind of activity absorbs one in such a way that it becomes one's way of life.
Mario Vargas-Llosa
#83. At the core of everything I do, is not my ambition but my desire to make music. Somewhere along the line I stumbled onto something that was bigger, different than anything I had ever imagined, which was actually being involved with other people. I just don't live the average artist's life.
El-P
#84. I understand that in our work - doesn't matter whether it's acting or writing - what's important isn't fame or glamour, none of the things I used to dream about, it's the ability to endure.
Anton Chekhov
#85. As an artist I just can't think of a better life than the one I've been blessed with. It's just a great ride.
Robert Redford
#86. The life of an artist is not so romantic as some might suppose.
Kyle Muntz
#87. Hopefully, you will glimpse something of your own life's journey and with Elemental's Power of Illuminated Love, possibly recognize and celebrate something you had not been able to recognize or celebrate before.
Luther E. Vann
#88. Artist Allen Crawford brings Whitman's undying text to new life in gorgeous hand-lettering and illustrations, transforming the 60-page poem originally published in 1855 as the centerpiece of Leaves of Grass into a breathtaking 256-page piece of art.
Maria Popova
#89. There comes a moment in a young artist's life when he knows he has to bring something to the stage from within himself. He has to put in something in order to be able to take something.
Mikhail Baryshnikov
#90. I would love to do Broadway the rest of my life! Because it's challenging, because it makes me grow as an actor, as an entertainer, as an artist, and that's what I need; that's what I'm hooked on.
Ricky Martin
#91. For me there's several components to picture-taking and it starts with my goals as an artist. It's capturing I guess the inner life of my subject and then it is giving them their idealized version of themselves.
Carol Friedman
#92. Your greatest creation is your creative life. It's all in your hands. Rejection can't take it away; reviews can't take it away. The life you create for yourself as an artist, may be the only thing that's really yours. Create a life you can center yourself in calmly as you wait for your work to grow.
Sara Zarr
#93. Weirdism is definitely the cornerstone of many an artist's career.
E.A. Bucchianeri
#94. MTV has always given artists a platform to get their stories and music out to their fans and this series reveals the unknown side of T.I.-one of the world's greatest artists at the most precarious time in his life.
T.I.
#95. I think I was very lucky to have grown up with an artist's studio in the house. It was a kind of life that was possible. Yeah, it made it kind of harder because the standards were higher, but there was no pressure.
Caio Fonseca
#96. No work of art is more important than the Christian's life, and every Christian is called to be an artist in this sense ... The Christian's life is to be a thing of truth and also a thing of beauty in the midst of a lost and despairing world.
Francis Schaeffer
#97. It's called "being an artist" for a reason; it's something YOU ARE. It's how you live. It's WHO you are. How you spend your life and what you leave behind.
Charlotte Eriksson
#98. It was Sophie ( Sophie Arp Tauber, woman artist and later Arp's wife) who, by the example of her work and her life, both of them bathed in clarity, showed me the right way. In her world, the high and the low, the light and the dark, the eternal and the ephemeral, are balanced in prefect equilibrium.
Hans Arp
#99. Ok! So that's the spice. Typical gossips for or against a qualified newcomer!
Koral Dasgupta
#100. Do not leave your reputation to chance or gossip; it is your life's artwork, and you must craft it, hone it, and display it with the care of an artist.
Robert Greene
