The Real Artist Quotes

#1. To the real artist in humanity, what are called bad manners are often the most picturesque and significant of all.

Walt Whitman

#2. Art is a vocation, as much as anything in this world. For the real artist, it is the most natural thing in the world, not as necessary as air and water, perhaps, but as food and water. But we really do lead almost a monastic life, you know; to follow it you very often have to give up something.

Katherine Anne Porter

#3. The real artist has no idea that he is sacrificing himself for art. He does what he does for one reason and one reason only-he can't help doing it.

Alma Gluck

#4. A GREAT PAINTER will know a great deal about how he did it, but still he will say, "How did I do it?" The real artist's work is a surprise to himself.

Robert Henri

#5. The real artist is striving to depict his subject's character and to stress the caricature, but at least it is art which is alive.

William Dobell

#6. The forger was too exacting, too superficial. Only the real artist has the false beginning.

Dominic Smith

#7. The real artist while he paints does not think of the sale, only of the need to make a beautiful living thing.

Irving Stone

#8. Unlearning is the choice, conscious or unconscious, of any real artist. And it is the true sign of maturity.

Madeleine L'Engle

#9. It is the artist's job to revere beauty without being enchanted by it, to aim for it but also to aim for truth and goodness - just in case they, and not beauty, are the real things of value.

Eric Maisel

#10. Like the adolescent, the artist is a dreamer and a revolutionary; like the adolescent, he often finds his accomplishment inadequate to his imaginings. But his dream, setting him apart, helps him to escape the burden of the real.

Patricia Ann Meyer Spacks

#11. 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

#12. So few hip-hop artists have ever advanced. Their songs on their seventh, eighth albums sound exactly like the songs on their first album. More than an artist, I'm a real person-and real people grow. And I wanna just sing my growth.

Kanye West

#13. The concentration of a small child at play is analogous to the concentration of the artist of any discipline. In real play, which is real concentration, the child is not only outside time, he is outside himself.

Madeleine L'Engle

#14. I want to be a real artist to consumers. I want to be the real thing for them.

Aaron Carter

#15. The usual criticism of a novel about an artist is that, no matter how real he is as a man, he is not real to us as an artist, since we have to take on trust the works of art he produces.

Randall Jarrell

#16. Allow some warm-up time each day to stimulate your creative flow. A pianist does keyboard exercises. A gymnast stretches. An artist needs to loosen up, too. It takes a few minutes to shift from the real world into a creative mode.

Nita Leland

#17. In the eighteenth century, it was ladies and gentlemen and swings in a garden; today, it may be Campbell's soup cans or highway signs. There is no real difference. The artist still takes his everyday world and tries to make something out of it.

Corita Kent

#18. Just for the record, being smeared with shit and naked in the wilderness, spattered with pink vomit, this does not necessarily make you a real artist.

Chuck Palahniuk

#19. Over the years, I have been a house painter, farm worker, paste-up artist, Easter Bunny, pizza delivery person, homeless shelter staff member, and counselor for adults and kids with mental illness - I quit my last real job in 2000 to work on writing full-time.

Jennifer McMahon

#20. Societies never know it, but the war of an artist with his society is a lover's war, and he does, at his best, what lovers do, which is to reveal the beloved to himself and, with that revelation, to make freedom real.

James Baldwin

#21. My real background was in art studies. At the beginning I was a painter, then I was this graphic designer, then I became an illustrator, then I was a comic artist. But for me it's a different way of expression, a different field of art. They're not separated; everything for me is related.

Marjane Satrapi

#22. TLC was so real and authentic. And that's music as a whole. When it's an artist, and it comes from the heart, and that's really who you are, the fans attach to that.

Drew Sidora

#23. The roots of rap are originally ghetto-ised or extremely working class. So when you're an artist who's making something which isn't how its mainstream appearance should be, there's always these strange questions of authenticity and what you have to do to be 'real' as a rapper.

Zadie Smith

#24. I was working with real artists [in the Rum Diary] , and that's difficult to do and very rare, in this industry, ironically.

Amber Heard

#25. Life is like a jigsaw puzzle; Not a "Box of chocolate" You have to put the pieces together to get the 'real' picture.

Andrea L'Artiste

#26. I like to work in the real world, so I do a lot of searching or just simple looking. But I'm not above tweaking reality and making something up. I don't think there are any rules in art. It's not so much what you see as it is the significance you, the artist, see in it.

Keith Carter

#27. There is a strong feeling in the Middle West that the artist is not pulling his own weight no matter how hard he may work, that the other people are doing the real stuff.

Kurt Vonnegut

#28. I've gradually fooled myself into becoming a real painter ... I really just like to sit in my air-conditioned Rome painting studio surrounded by Medieval and Renaissance architecture and to hold a tube of Alizarin Madder Lake in my artist's hand and marvel at the shiny goop inside.

Mark Kostabi

#29. Regular people don't even realize how much artists mean to them. Artists represent a lot to the average person. People listen to music all day on their iPods, so as artists, we become a real fixture in people's lives. As an artist, you can't take it personal. It's like your big brother teasing you.

Nicki Minaj

#30. 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

#31. I feel like artists that are always quite sad in real life always make really happy music, and artists who are really bouncy and bubbly always make really sad music.

Marina And The Diamonds

#32. If the person or artist doesn't touch it, and if the camera stays relatively far away from it, it doesn't really have to be real.

James Pearse Connelly

#33. Art is not to be taught in Academies. It is what one looks at, not what one listens to, that makes the artist. The real schools should be the streets.

Oscar Wilde

#34. The art does not always mimic the artist. You never know the real person until you slide beneath their surface

Lisa Renee Jones

#35. "A real work of art destroys, in the consciousness of the receiver, the separation between himself and the artist."

Leo Tolstoy

#36. 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

#37. The real purveyors of the news are artists, for artists are the ones who infuse fact with perception, emotion, and appreciation ... We are beginning to realize that emotions and imagination are more potent in shaping public sentiment and opinion than information and reason.

John Dewey

#38. I would say that for the younger musicians, technical proficiency is necessary and a given these days. But the study and the way you function in society, your beliefs and the way you live, that is where you will find a real musician, a real artist.

David Finckel

#39. The real is the poem. Hence, for the poet - our figure for the writer as artist - to write is to get real.

Gemino H. Abad

#40. The artist draws a picture of a rose very nicely with all attention and artistic sense, and yet it does not become as perfect as the real rose. If that is the real fact, how can we say that the real rose has taken its shape without Intelligence behind the beauty?

A.C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada

#41. The artist dreams of works of real breadth; but, limited by his personality and the nature of his medium, limited by inner disturbances and loss of purpose, he often works more narrowly than he'd intended.

Eric Maisel

#42. I dislike the word 'emerging artist.' Emerging connotes to me an alligator coming up from the water. I consider all artists to be artists, not rising, emerging, amateur, beginning, but the real thing.

Jack White

#43. I wanted to be an artist, even at the age of 15, and people used to laugh at me. It was the late '90s, the time of pop stars and navel-dancing, where you were showing your midriff. I wanted to be a real singer.

Duffy

#44. One of the things that makes Wittgenstein a real artist to me is that he realized that no conclusion could be more horrible than solipsism.

David Foster Wallace

#45. The real con artist is Senator Marco Rubio.Who was elected in Florida and who has the worst voting record in the United States Senate. He doesn't go to vote. He's absent.

Donald Trump

#46. Finding your place as an artist is the hardest thing. You come out of college with what feels like a Mickey Mouse degree that qualifies you for nothing in the real world.

Sam Taylor-Johnson

#47. The artist is a strange being. I think it's safe to say that a real artist is conscious of having a personal singularity that is partly a blessing and partly a curse. An artist enjoys and suffers from isolation. As solitude, isolation can nurture. It can also destroy.

Peter Schjeldahl

#48. The real wonders of life lie in the depths. Exploring the depths for truths is the real wonder which the child and the artist know: magic and power lie in truth.

Anais Nin

#49. In every human being there is the artist, and whatever his activity, he has an equal chance with any to express the result of his growth and his contact with life. I don't believe any real artist cares whether what he does is 'art' or not. Who, after all, knows what art is?

Robert Henri

#50. Napster is great so long as they put out tracks on there that have been officially released. I don't really mind people downloading my music; I also see it as a compliment. And if you are a real music lover, you want to have the original CD anyway 'cause then you feel more connected to the artist.

Tiesto

#51. You are divine, you are perfect, but as an artist, you create your own story and you have the illusion that the story is real. You live your life by justifying that story. And by justifying the story, you are wasting your life.

Miguel Ruiz

#52. Kill him, you must kill him Jacky, and her, too. Because a real artist must suffer. Because each man kills the thing he loves.

Stephen King

#53. I cannot with any real integrity perform songs I've done for 25 years. I don't need the money. What I need is to feel that I am not letting myself down as an artist and that I still have something to contribute.

David Bowie

#54. Every artist I suppose has a sense of what they think has been the importance of their work. But to ask them to define it is not really a fair question. My real answer would be, the answer is on the wall.

Paul Strand

#55. Creativity is not enough ... the skill of the true artist is to show the real in the light of the ideal and so transfigure it.

Roger Scruton

#56. A lot of artists come into the game with a radio record, but they don't establish the fans as fans of their style of music. It's just that they're a fan of that song, and after that song plays out, it's real hard for 'em.

Nipsey Hussle

#57. Any magazine-cover hack can splash paint around wildly and call it a nightmare, or a witches sabbath or a portrait of the devil; but only a great painter can make such a thing really scare or ring true. That's because only a real artist knows the anatomy of the terrible, or the physiology of fear.

H.P. Lovecraft

#58. The real truthfulness of all works of imagination, sculpture, painting, and written fiction, is so purely in the imagination, that the artist never seeks to represent positive truth, but the idealized image of a truth

Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton

#59. I don't know what else I would do. I love entertaining people, I love communicating, I love an audience. I'm a real artist, right from the bottom of my toes to the top of my head.

Suzi Quatro

#60. My name came from me wanting a 'double-letter' artist name. In search of the ultimate L-word to put in front of my real name Luke, I heard Snoop Dogg rapping in Gin and Juice 'Laaaaiiidbackk ... ' and I was sold!

Laidback Luke

#61. I think so much of art is unconscious anyway, the artist doesn't know the real reason they're doing it. They're just kind of going along with it intuitively.

Eric Drooker

#62. A brilliant mind was first a listener that observed the actions of the people that loved and hated them, then found a way to express their feelings, when real communication was lost.

Shannon L. Alder

#63. As an adult (after college) and as an artist I thought about what was real, what sustained me - it was Christian Science. I was using that when I didn't know it. Saying yes to the Light and your better instinct.

Alfre Woodard

#64. Sometimes films might not work, but you as an actor should keep working. Because no matter how much you panic about how your film didn't work, eventually, when you step out in the real world, there are people who value you as an artist.

Kangana Ranaut

#65. Real life, life finally uncovered and clarified, the only life in consequence lived to the full, is literature. Life in this sense dwells within all ordinary people as much as the artist. But they do not see it because they are not trying to shed light on it.

Marcel Proust

#66. Folk rock was my real roots. I did a few gigs as a folk artist, in the style of Fairport Convention.

Alan Parsons

#67. I try to keep my ear to the streets without sacrificing who I am as an artist. If a song needs a drum machine I'll use a drum machine. If it needs a drummer, I'll use a real drummer.

Teena Marie

#68. One of the beauties of being an artist is that you can create a whole new world, with circumstances that are better in your invented world than they are in the real world.

Maurice Sendak

#69. The obedient in art are always the forgotten ... The country is glorious but its beauties are unknown, and but waiting for a real live artist to splash them onto canvas ... Chop your own path. Get off the car track.

A. Y. Jackson

#70. Art is real and imaginary, two worlds rolled into one - the fulfillment of the artist's insatiable soul.

Edward J. Fraughton

#71. If I'm not putting out music, I'mma be producing for everybody. I got an artist named Mike Slice. He's nice, and he's real good. I'm doing a bunch of production for all the artists in the industry because I'm as much as a producer as I am an artist.

Warren G

#72. Beyonce is a beautiful, elegant woman who is also a wonderful dancer. And her voice is sublime. Just like her husband, Jay-Z, Beyonce has real talent. They are both the kind of truly great artist who will be remembered by history. Their child will be lucky to have such talented parents.

Azzedine Alaia

#73. I just look at it as a real group activity when you are making movies. There are so many different artists doing so many different things, and they are all interconnected. So I like to see what everybody else is going to bring to the table before I make up my mind too much about anything.

Michael Shannon

#74. 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

#75. The true work of art is born from the 'artist': a mysterious, enigmatic, and mystical creation. It detaches itself from him, it acquires an autonomous life, becomes a personality, an independent subject, animated with a spiritual breath, the living subject of a real existence of being.

Wassily Kandinsky

#76. I'm really excited to be chosen as a VEVO LIFT artist. It's a great opportunity to reach millions more music fans with my sound and let them see the real Rita.

Rita Ora

#77. Many of us believe that 'real artists' do not experience self-doubt. In truth, artists are people who have learned to live with doubt and do the work anyway.

Julia Cameron

#78. I was so absolutely riveted, I felt I was looking into the eyes of the artist. Art just closed the gap of time and space. The 16th century became as real to me as the 20th. It was something magical.

Betty Churcher

#79. We do live, all of us, on many different levels, and for most artists the world of imagination is more real than the world of the kitchen sink.

Madeleine L'Engle

#80. The artist's work constitutes the only satisfactory relationship he can have with his fellow men since he seeks his real friends among the dead and the unborn.

Lawrence Durrell

#81. I think that fame only goes to your head if you are not a real artist. If you are a real artist and a good person who loves what they are doing, you are going to be the same person.

Lady Starlight

#82. To please God ... to be a real ingredient in the divine happiness ... to be loved by God, not merely pitied, but delighted in as an artist delights in his work or a father in a son- it seems impossible, a weight or burden of glory which our thoughts can hardly sustain. But so it is.

C.S. Lewis

#83. As for an authentic villain, the real thing, the absolute, the artist, one rarely meets him even once in a lifetime. The ordinary bad hat is always in part a decent fellow.

Colette

#84. My graffiti really comes more from a May '68, sort of Situationist vibe than the hip-hop world. I think a real graffiti artist would find me a poser.

Mike Mills

#85. What an artist learns matters little. What he himself discovers has a real worth for him, and gives him the necessary incitement to work.

Emil Nolde

#86. The young artist ... will discover out of ordinary things the meaning of ordinariness. He will not try to make them extraordinary. Only their real meaning will be stated.

Allan Kaprow

#87. The real reality is there, but everything you KNOW about "it" is in your mind and your
to do with as you like. Conceptualization is art, and YOU ARE THE ARTIST

Gregory Hill

#88. What stop-motion does best is present real objects magically brought to life in a very imperfect situation; the hand of the artist is there, the electricity of someone touching, massaging and torturing themselves to get life out of an inanimate object.

Henry Selick

#89. All real philosophers have been artists in the realm of concepts.

Rudolf Steiner

#90. I don't have stylistic loyalty. That's why people perceive me changing all the time. But there is a real continuity in my subject matter. As an artist of artifice, I do believe I have more integrity than any one of my contemporaries.

David Bowie

#91. The real tough thing is working with actors. I'm a designer and used to working with artists, so there is some familiarity with the personalities that come up, but actors are their own animal.

Rick Heinrichs

#92. There is no one harder to live with than an artist. Therefore an artist is a real gift because he or she raises the sanctity of everyone else in the community.

David Steindl-Rast

#93. Don't worry if people think you're good. Make this your experience. And find out what makes you unique as an artist. You don't get the opportunity to do that as much in the real world.

Matt Bomer

#94. It always felt like you were trying too hard to look like the audience or something. That whole thing about the artistic integrity, which, of course, I've never bought into - with any artist. It's just not a real thing.

David Bowie

#95. The artist's imagination may wander far from nature. But as long as it is a living, moving power in his brain, isn't it just as real as any other natural phenomenon? The artist justifies his existence only when he can transform his imagination into truth.

Bill Vaughan

#96. Sam Wood, the director, made most of his money as a real estate agent; there was nothing of the temperamental artist about him.

Gloria Swanson

#97. In the history of everyone in whom the artist-within has survived conditioning, schooling, training - there are (persons) influences that have kept him alive, awake .. who have encouraged him without even trying - just by being. They have been One's real teachers.

Frederick Franck

#98. 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

#99. Nature is the best and really the only real vocabulary that an artist can legitimately work with.

Nelson Shanks

#100. God is really only another artist. He invented the giraffe, the elephant and the cat. He has no real style, He just goes on trying other things.

Pablo Picasso