Top 100 Quotes About Writers And Artists
#1. Challenge America grants go to the towns and hamlets of this sprawling country, where big touring companies will rarely go, and major actors, actresses, writers and artists may never appear in person.
Louise Slaughter
#2. Apparently, now, though, we writers and artists are not allowed to give offence. We must not question, criticise or insult the other, for fear of being hounded and murdered. These days a writer without bodyguards can hardly be considered serious. A bad review is the least of our problems.
Hanif Kureishi
#3. A lot of writers and artists are like chefs who eat their own cooking in the kitchen and then deliver an empty plate with assurances that it's great.
Peter Schjeldahl
#4. I had the naive, simplistic idea that producers and writers and artists of the time helped in a minuscule way to change the mind-set of America.
M. Ward
#5. It is the duty of every generation of writers and artists to find fresh ways of expressing the habitual circumstances of the human condition. To serve up the lukewarm remains of yesterdays dinner is easy, profitable and popular, (for a while). It is also wrong.
Jeanette Winterson
#6. Talking to all those great writers and artists for the magazine was a form of graduate school for me.
Christopher Bollen
#7. What I've always seen in writers and artists is the courage it takes to make an original work of art. I think the real risks in literature are linguistic and intellectual, and I hope we can highlight those, as well as political courage.
Salman Rushdie
#8. A writer who makes serious money is never taken seriously. Writers and artists are expected to suffer poverty and privation for their art; it's a sign of authenticity.
Jessica Zafra
#9. Writers and artists know that ethereal moment, when just one, fleeting something
a chill, an echo, the click of a lamp, a question - -ignites the flame of an entire work that blazes suddenly into consciousness.
Nadine C. Keels
#10. Many high-functioning multiples are gifted writers and artists, who, as they heal, are able to find an aesthetic outlet for the sealed-off rage and pain they have not allowed themselves to feel.
Marlene Steinberg
#11. The truth is that James, like many other great writers and artists, had chosen his own loyalties and nationality. His true country, his home, was that of the imagination.
Azar Nafisi
#12. There is a line from the Marina Tsvetaeva poem I'm so fond of: "In this most Christian of worlds/ All poets are Jews." What she means is that writers and artists are outside the normal flow of daily life, the normal flow of society in general.
Paul Auster
#13. To a certain extent that happens with all kinds of successful writers and artists and celebrities, but there is also something about the form of memoir that creates an eerie reader space of intimacy that is only "real" in the space of the text.
Lidia Yuknavitch
#14. I don't have a normal job, so I really appreciate having friends who are writers and artists. It's fun to have a group of people you can call in the middle of the day to go for a hike.
Natalie Portman
#15. There was an idea in the air, becoming clearer and stronger, an idea not just in the theories of Karl Marx but in the dreams of writers and artists through the ages: that people might cooperatively use the treasures of the earth to make life better for everyone, not just a few.
Howard Zinn
#16. One would expect writers and artists to understand one another better than anyone else and to be more appreciative of one another's works. That, sadly, is not always the case. Writers rarely say anything positive about each other.
Elif Shafak
#17. I saw that everything famous and beautiful in the world, if we judge by the descriptions and drawings of writers and artists, always loses when we go to see it and examine it closely.
Giacomo Casanova
#18. One of the great things about being involved with comics is that those people are devoted to their characters, writers and artists. The average comic reader isn't casual about their habit.
Charlie Huston
#19. You write five different things, and none of them work, and then suddenly something does, and you ask yourself, 'Why did that last one work?' I think that's the way the artistic mind works. All writers and artists of all kinds often don't know why things work.
Gilbert Morris
#20. I like to blow up this notion that all we have to do as writers and artists is represent reality, which is presumably solid and self-evident, with no negotiation of the gap between myself and the world, between this body and this space, which needs narration to close it.
Aleksandar Hemon
#21. I suppose that was an example of close attention to detail that is common to writers and artists. It is imperative, whether consciously or not, that one observe the vast as well as the infinitesimal in order to create the image or choose accurate words that ring true.
Elizabeth Winder
#22. I think it's very important for writers and artists generally to be witnesses to the world, and to be transparent. To let other people speak ... to travel ... to experience the world. And memorialize it.
Joyce Carol Oates
#23. For writers and artists, it's always a balancing act between wanting to be the center of attention and wanting to be invisible and watch what's going on.
Kate Christensen
#24. Writers and artists never pay attention to advice given by their elders, quite rightly. The only worthwhile advice is the most general: 'Keep trying, don't give up, don't be discouraged, don't pay attention to detractors.' Everyone knows this.
Joyce Carol Oates
#25. Writers and artists build by hand little worlds that they hope might effect change in real minds, in the real world where stories are read. A story can make us cry and laugh, break our hearts, or make us angry enough to change the world.
Grant Morrison
#26. The simple act of an ordinary courageous man is not to take part, not to support lies! Let that come into the world and even reign over it, but not through me. Writers and artists can do more: they can vanquish lies! ... Lies can stand up against much in the world, but not against art.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
#28. I met Robert Crumb in 1962; he lived in Cleveland for a while. I took a look at his stuff. Crumb was doing stuff beyond what other writers and artists were doing. It was a step beyond Mad.
Harvey Pekar
#29. Women have sat indoors all these millions of years, so that by this time the very walls are permeated by their creative force, which has, indeed, so overcharged the capacity of bricks and mortar that it must needs harness itself to pens and brushes and business and politics.
Virginia Woolf
#30. When one would ask most modern artists, poets, writers and other status quo fueled semi-intellectuals who Machiavelli was - was that an opera singer?
Martijn Benders
#31. So I'm happiest when I'm working with artists and writers, and involved in stories, whether we're talking about animation or movies or comics or television.
Stan Lee
#32. Creative arts, new inventions, and new ideas spring from those blessed with imagination, and magic stimulates imagination. It is no coincidence that many artists, writers, and dancers are interested in magic.
Vivianne Crowley
#33. When you think back in history about producers and artists or writers who've had good synergy, a lot of times they date, or they're married, or there's a friendship and a kinship.
Solange Knowles
#34. The good thing about being undiscovered is that every time you begin a new writing project it feels like this work will be the best one you have done, this one will be better than the last, a higher standard of writing, and that's the way it should be.
Robert Black
#35. People do support themselves as artists and writers, so there's no need to be all doom and gloom about it. You just have to push forward. You have to follow your vision and hope for the best. You have to write for love.
Cheryl Strayed
#36. 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
#37. Dive again and again into the river of uncertainty. Create in the dark, only then can you recognize the light.
Jyrki Vainonen
#38. Conversely, high-reactive children may be more likely to develop into artists and writers and scientists and thinkers because their aversion to novelty causes them to spend time inside the familiar - and intellectually fertile - environment of their own heads.
Susan Cain
#39. He wanted to go home and lock his door and sleep. He was tired of the troubles of real people. He wanted to get back to the people he was inventing, whose troubles he could bear.
James Baldwin
#40. The task of the artist at any time is uncompromisingly simple - to discover what has not yet been done, and to do it.
Craig Raine
#41. To be a writer and political is a dangerous thing. To be a writer and apolitical is even more dangerous. Art is right, left; in truth, it has only one direction and that is forward.
Chris Campanioni
#42. I think Paris smells not just sweet but melancholy and curious, sometimes sad but always enticing and seductive. She's a city for the all senses, for artists and writers and musicians and dreamers, for fantasies, for long walks and wine and lovers and, yes, for mysteries.
M.J. Rose
#43. Even a cup of coffee tastes so much sweeter because you've come once again out of the, literally, out of the edge of death, and that's the condition I suppose that a lot of artists and writers would like to be in.
Christopher Koch
#44. Writers and other artists are mostly just historians, produced by nature to describe, decipher and thus historically represent the universe.
Robert Black
#45. I had this sense that I was part of, sort of a lineage of artists and writers through history that have had mood disorders.
Ellen Forney
#46. I know there are a lot of musicians and a lot of artists, and there are a lot of writers and other people who inspire young people, but I'd like to see somebody in political life be able to connect and make these choices that we need to make in Washington real in terms of people's lives.
John F. Kerry
#47. Growing up, my mom was a painter, my best friend was a painter, my husband is a painter. For a long time I knew artists, and I didn't know any writers.
Holly Black
#48. There is only one thing that you write for yourself, and that is a shopping list.
Umberto Eco
#49. Actually, it's as if [Superman is] more real than we are. We writers come and go, generations of artists leave their interpretations, and yet something persists, something that is always Superman.
Grant Morrison
#50. Science will ... produce the data ... , but never the
full meaning. For perceiving real significance, we
shall need ... most of all the brains of poets, [and]
also those of artists, musicians, philosophers,
historians, writers in general.
Lewis Thomas
#51. If professional religious leaders cannot instruct us in mythological lore, our artists and creative writers can perhaps step into this priestly role and bring fresh insight to our lost and damaged role.
Karen Armstrong
#52. 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
#53. A lot of artists use memories. A lot of prose writers, a lot of poets, a lot of songwriters, refer back to something. Generally it's all you've got, unless you're brilliant and can write totally in the now.
Paul McCartney
#54. It happens to all writers, all artists, they can live beyond their best work and carry on with disappointment and mediocrity.
Chloe Thurlow
#55. Are artists and writers the only people entitled to lives of their own?
Richard Yates
#56. The minority who actually loves its work seems to be made up chiefly of the writers, dancers, actors and other artists, most scientists above the technician-troll level, computer freaks, and the righteous dope-dealers of California.
Robert Anton Wilson
#57. Philadelphia's a good science-fiction town. There are many professional writers here, like Michael Swanwick, Tom Purdom, Gregory Frost, Victoria McManus and others. There are professional artists such as Bob Walters and Tess Kissinger and Susan McAninley.
Gardner Dozois
#58. I have always noticed that these artists and writers are very unbalanced
Agatha Christie
#59. That friend of hers has got to go, though. You're lucky you got stuck with that Dexter guy instead of her.'
'Yeah, but that Dexter couldn't shut his piehole either,' Marlon says. 'I mean, Christ. Artists and writers - let them kill each other off in cage matches; let God sort 'em out.
Dexter Palmer
#60. The original series of Watchmen is the complete story that Alan Moore and I wanted to tell. However, I appreciate DC's reasons for this initiative and the wish of the artists and writers involved to pay tribute to our work. May these new additions have the success they desire.
Dave Gibbons
#61. Artists and writers have to understand and live the truth that what we are doing is nourishing the world.
Ariel Gore
#62. Vienna is relatively small. And it had wonderful salons, opportunities for people to get together. There was a lot of interaction between scientists and non-scientists, between Jews and non-Jews, between artists, writers and scientists, including medical scientists.
Eric Kandel
#63. Glamour is fueled by the dreams and imagination of mortals. Writers, artists, little boys pretending to be knights - the fey are drawn to them like moths to flame. Why do you think so many children have imaginary friends?
Julie Kagawa
#64. Coaching is my way of helping aspiring and professional writers get the kind of help and guidance that it took me years to piece together. I do workshops and coach people one on one. It's really fun and I'm happy that I can support artists who are looking to move ahead in their work and career.
Steven C. Harper
#65. Ads and logos are our shared global culture and language, and people are insisting on the right to use that language, to reformulate it in the way that artists and writers always do with cultural material,.
Naomi Klein
#66. The greatness of an artist or a writer does not depend on what he has in common with other artists and writers, but on what he has peculiar to himself.
Alexander Smith
#67. Graffiti is like building a career. And there is a dialogue with the other artists out there mostly fellow writers because a lot of people who don't paint just see a blur when they look at it.
KAWS
#68. Writers and musicians know well the importance of extensive reading for successful writing or extensive listening for musical composition. Likewise, visual artists ... understand that successful artistic creativity depends upon extensive visual exposure.
Paul Laseau
#69. I think perhaps I've learned to be myself. I have a theory that all artists who would be important - painters and writers - must learn to be themselves. It takes a very long time.
Margot Fonteyn
#70. A lot of artists start out as failed poets, then move on to being failed short-story writers before they finally break through to the big time and become failed novelists.
Gary Reilly
#71. I spoke fire, laughed smoke, and madness spilled forth from my inspiration.
Arthur Holitscher
#72. It was this feeling for a lot of my characters, who are dissidents or banned artists and writers, that they had had to fight living under so much surveillance, and then suddenly they come to America and they're like, I'm not being surveilled - I'm not even being noticed at all.
Molly Antopol
#73. Too many artists and writers have forgotten their roots. I embrace my fans because, in a way, they're family.
Jim Steranko
#74. It is precisely those artists and writers who are most inclined to think of their art as the manifestation of their personality who are in fact the most in bondage to public taste.
Simone Weil
#75. Just as composers go to concerts and artists visit galleries, writers read. You will learn, in the most enjoyable way, more about style and language from reading good literature than you will ever acquire from workshops and how-to books.
Judith Barrington
#76. If we are artists- hell, whether or not we're artists- it is our job, our responsibility, perhaps even our sacred calling, to take whatever life has handed us and make something new, something that wouldn't have existed if not for the fire, the genetic mutation, the sick baby, the accident.
Dani Shapiro
#77. I stopped drinking and realised New York still has a lot of charm, but it has become so bourgeois and affluent - and I can't really complain because I'm sort of bourgeois and affluent myself, but I like living in a place where artists and musicians and writers can actually pay the rent.
Moby
#78. Artists and writers have to deal with the element that makes the real real and the dream real while you are dreaming it. That's where stories and poems get their power.
Ben Okri
#79. Novelists and poets are the landscape artists and portrait painters; academic writers are the people with big paint sprayers who repaint your basement.
Paul J. Silvia
#80. Memory is the mother of the muses, prototype Artist. As a rule picks and highlights what is important, omitting what is accidental or trivial. Occasionally, however, is mistaken as all the other artists. Nevertheless it is what I take as a guide page.
Frank Harris
#81. It can pay off, being a hack. Given the depraved state of American culture, a slick dude can make millions being a hack. But even if you succeed, you lose, because you've sold out your Muse, and your Muse is you, the best part of yourself, where your finest and only true work comes from.
Steven Pressfield
#82. I'm kind of hooked to the game of art and literature; my heroes are artists and writers.
Jim Morrison
#83. Teachers have been heroes to me, as well as artists and writers, and I'm honored to be among their ranks. There is always a lot of grousing about the academy. I suppose it comes from our all-American anti-authoritarianism.
Alison Hawthorne Deming
#84. Not only Freud but artists and writers were also interested in the unconscious. It was medicine that made the first steps toward modernity.
Eric Kandel
#85. That's what he disliked about certain artists and writers. They interfered and pointed to everything as if you couldn't see it or read for yourself.
Frank McCourt
#86. Artists, composers and writers...are bent upon capturing and reining in the insights of a fugitive imagination, always inclined to shoot off into the distance, before they can get away, and on bringing them back into the immediacy of material engagement. Like hunters, they too are dream-catchers.
Tim Ingold
#87. I suppose I have become a sort of living monument in Portugal. But I come from a family with roots all over the world, so the idea of patriotism is not very strong in me. My country is the country of Chekhov, Beethoven, Velasquez - writers I like, painters and artists I admire.
Antonio Lobo Antunes
#88. Artists, writers, creatives succumb either to vanity of disappointment.
Chloe Thurlow
#89. The nation that complacently and fearfully allows its artists and writers to become suspected rather than respected is no longer regarded as a nation possessed with humor or depth.
James Thurber
#90. So many of the people I admired - the musicians, the artists, the writers - created their greatest works not during a period of happiness and contentment, but during a period of struggle.
Adam Braun
#91. I will always know the glory of the beautiful and rare, as they will know security from labour and prayer. As they will hear the laughter of the children they gave life, I will know the torments of the song born under knife.
Roman Payne
#92. I've always said I'm more influenced in what I do by artists, and how they work, how they think, and the freedom they're given to work and think, than I really am by other writers.
James Frey
#93. To write a poem you must have a streak of arrogance
not in real life I hope. In real life try to be nice. It will save you a hell of a lot of trouble and give you more time to write.
Richard Hugo
#94. Many artists and writers have used cannabis for creative stimulation - from the writers of the world's religious masterpieces to our most irreverent satirists.
Jack Herer
#95. Not all, but too many of the best writers, composers, and artists of our time begin to be acclaimed only when they no longer have anything to say and take to performing instead of stating.
Clement Greenberg
#96. English teachers, workshops, and myths try to make writers slow down. We are the ONLY ART on the planet that tells young artists to not practice and do less to get better. Head-shaking in its stupidity. And new writers buy into that.
Dean Wesley Smith
#97. Not only was he not mad, but he was a musician, and my favorite men had always been musicians or writers or anything that involved the creative process and behaving like tortured artists ... I found financial insecurity a great aphrodisiac.
Marian Keyes
#98. No, the fault lies with the artists," Claire went on. "The writers, the singers, the tellers of tales. It's them that take the past and re-create it to their liking. Them that could take a fool and give you back a hero, take a sot and make him a king.
Diana Gabaldon
#99. Artists, especially writers, great writers, are the most honest people I know. There are deep confessions in their words. And if we're strong enough to expose the spaces between them, we find truths there also.
Darnell Lamont Walker
#100. At every show, people I've never seen approach me with the same story: how experiencing my work changed their lives and made them artists or writers or law enforcers or attorneys, believe it or not. It's very humbling and gratifying.
Jim Steranko
Famous Authors
Popular Topics
Scroll to Top
