Top 100 To Be An Artist Quotes
#1. I would say my dream collaboration would probably have to be with Drake. I think he is an amazing artist.
Austin Mahone
#2. Naturally one would rather be a broad artist with power to evoke beauty from every phase of experience
but when one unmistakably isn't such an artist, there's no sense in bluffing and faking and pretending that one is.
H.P. Lovecraft
#3. It was not my dream to be an artist. How could it have been? I thought, artist, much like a leader, was something you either were or weren't. Never something you set out to be.
K'naan
#4. I wanted to be an artist. I was studying art. I wanted to be a great painter. When I went into the Navy, there wasn't much to draw at sea. So I began writing, and I began reading a lot.
Evan Hunter
#5. When you're young and everything dramatic is exciting, you start to believe that hype that, in order to be an artist, you have to suffer. I've graduated from that school.
Lauryn Hill
#6. Ask yourself, are you an artist, or are you an art business? You can be both, but to be successful you need to think and act like a business owner.
Dave Conrey
#7. I think it is your job as an artist to be able to hear a song.
Keifer Thompson
#8. 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
#9. I wanted to be a writer and an artist. Learning to type as quickly as I could think was a needed skill and part of my long self-directed apprenticeship.
Jeffrey Zeldman
#10. The attempt to divide art and politics is a bourgeois which says good poetry, art, cannot be political, but since everything is ... political, even an artist or work that claims not to have any politics is making a political statement by that act.
Amiri Baraka
#11. I had no idea that I could sustain a career as an artist. But, I loved music and wanted to be in the music business.
Ray Stevens
#12. Putting out commercial pieces and promoting them and trying to sell them to people is not necessarily what it means to be an artist.
Sean Lennon
#13. You are an artist," she said. "But then all scientists are artists, my father used to say. You think like an artist, at any rate, and I can see that you want what you create to be a work of art.
Pearl S. Buck
#14. It strikes me that I need to throw out the dictionary the world gave me about what it means to be a mother, a wife, a person of faith, an artist, and a woman and write my own.
Glennon Doyle Melton
#15. There is something very special about this part of the world [U.S], which is the openness and the curiosity and the lack of prejudice and the lack of generally accepted norms as to what art should be and how an artist's career should go and all that.
Esa-Pekka Salonen
#16. I went out of my way to try not to be an artist, because I thought I would end up leading a miserable, obscure life. I tried to escape it for as long as I could, until I had to admit at 25 that that was my path.
Sam Taylor-Wood
#17. My mother encouraged me to be artistic. It was written in a contract at an early age that I would be an artist.
Kurt Cobain
#18. If you have value as an artist it's probably going to be in your capacity to let things inside you get past things that are placed there to keep you from telling the truth. The more you see things as clearly and coldly as you can, the more value you're going to have.
Tony Kushner
#19. Practicality continues to be a challenge for me - it's at odds with being an artist. I actually had a career on stage in New York - not a brilliant career or I'd still be doing it - but I got enough work to keep my agent and my union health insurance.
Debra Dean
#20. I don't want to be an artist, go on tour and make a video and wear sexy clothes. I would just love to make music.
Rashida Jones
#21. To be an artist, you have to nurture the things that most people discard.
Richard Avedon
#22. An artist's passion shouldn't create passion. An artist's supreme virtue is to be detached and cold.
Young-Ha Kim
#23. When I met Steve Kaufman, I thought he was Gene Simmons, but what an artist talent he is. He will be an art force in the art world to deal with.
Roy Lichtenstein
#24. Any artist who respects himself ought to be, and in every sense of the term, an emigre.
Witold Gombrowicz
#25. Before I reached 10 years old, I knew I was going to be an artist.
Howard Terpning
#26. The idea that a poem was a made thing stayed with me, and I decided then that I wanted to be an artist, not just a diarist. So I put myself through a kind of apprenticeship in writing poetry, and I understood even then that my practice as a poet was deeply related to my reading.
Edward Hirsch
#27. 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
#28. Why is an artist an artist? Artists simply do feel and see things in a different way to other people. In a way it's a blessing, but it can also be a terrible curse. There's a great deal of satisfaction to be earned from it but often it's also a terrible burden.
Roger Waters
#29. America is no place for an artist: to be an artist is to be a moral leper, an economic misfit, a social liability. A corn-fed hog enjoys a better life than a creative writer, painter or musician. To be a rabbit is better still.
Henry Miller
#30. My definition of art is whatever an artist calls art. Us speaking could be an artwork, us sitting in the near-dark in your kitchen beside the dirty dishes and smoking, me thinking of what to say next.
Matthew Brannon
#31. It's important for an artist to realize his own style. Copying or letting yourself be influenced by another's work is good for a start, just don't let yourself get stuck with it. Try to evolve and develop your own. Broadening your knowledge in other mediums is important in acquiring inspiration.
Arnold Arre
#32. I always wanted to be an artist, whatever that was, like other chicks want to be stewardesses. I read. I painted. I thought.
Janis Joplin
#33. I suppose for me as an artist it wasn't always just about expressing my work; I really wanted, more than anything else, to contribute in some way to the culture that I was living in. It just seemed like a challenge to move it a little bit towards the way I thought it might be interesting to go.
David Bowie
#34. I wanted to be as invisible as possible as an artist. I wanted to differentiate between myself and who I'm writing about.
Adrian Tomine
#35. I had the most reversed education possible. Every parent wants their son to be a businessman, respectable - me, it was the opposite. When I had an artist career my mum was like, 'Oh finally, I'm proud of you!'
David Guetta
#36. I never thought, "I'm going to be an artist". When I actually began to become successful in the art world I made it a point to say, 'I am a dilettante, I am not a professional artist", which is true.
Yoko Ono
#37. I want to be acknowledged as not just a pretty idol who sings and dances on stage, but as an artist
Choi Soo-young
#38. You get to choose what you want to be. You don't need skills you were born with or permission. If you want to be an artist or whatever, just work harder than everyone else and become an artist!
Dana Schwartz
#39. To be an artist you have to be as much a businessman to succeed, you have to spend an equal amount of time doing business as you spend doing your craft.
Debbie Harry
#40. I'd hate to be a writer forever and never perform, and I'd hate to perform and not write. I get sad if time has passed and I haven't written or made anything. I'm an artist.
Kristen Schaal
#41. When I left school, I wanted to be an artist, specifically a painter.
Jonathan Pryce
#42. I would like to be known as an 'artist'. Whether that be music, acting, sketching, cooking, whatever. I'm interested in all of those things.
Mark Salling
#43. The man who arrives at the doors of artistic creation with none of the madness of the Muses would be convinced that technical ability alone was enough to make an artist ... what that man creates by means of reason will pale before the art of inspired beings.
Plato
#44. Anything can be art: painting stairs, raising a child, or organising a trip to the end of the world. It's the way you live that makes you either an artist, or an art connoisseur, or an unsatisfied critic.
Mykyta Isagulov
#45. A lot of people think that there has to be extreme continuity in an album, but if you look at my background, it's variety! I want to see some variety in an artist, I want to be entertained, I want some depth. Show me some different styles!
Donny Osmond
#46. To be an artist includes much; one must possess many gifts - absolute gifts - which have not been acquired by one's own effort. And, moreover, to succeed, the artist much possess the courageous soul.
Kate Chopin
#47. An artist needs knowledge and the power of observation only so that he can tell from what he is abstaining, and to be sure that his abstention will not appear artificial or false.
Andrei Tarkovsky
#48. I come from a family of lawyers. I was expected to be a professional of some sort, not an artist. I was never uplifted for my art.
Tom Shadyac
#49. About three years ago, I started an exercise in openness and inclusiveness to create new digital tools for magic - tools that could eventually be shared with other artists to start them off further on in the process and to get them into the poetry faster.
Marco Tempest
#50. 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
#51. The only way for me to be an artist is to be honest in my craft. If I veer from that, I'm not giving the investors what they want. Sometimes it's my job as an artist to know what I want to do, even when the fans tell me different.
Talib Kweli
#52. As an independent artist it is so easy to get caught up in websites, social media, merchandise, when I am going to put out an EP, fining a producer, finding a studio to record in and you have to remember at the end of the day you should be writing music.
Tyler Hilton
#53. I just wanted to be an artist. I didn't care how or what; I just wanted to express my artistic integrity, and I wanted the world to have a vision of what I was seeing in my mind.
Rita Ora
#54. When you give an artist a canvas, you shouldn't tell him exactly how much paint to put on it, or exactly how sharp the images should be. You should let the artist get going.
Reed Hundt
#55. This image of wanting to be an artist - that I would in some way become an artist -was very strong. I knew for a long, long time that that's what I would be. But nothing I ever did seemed to bring me any nearer to the condition of being an artist. And I didn't know how to do it.
Jasper Johns
#56. An artist need not be a minister or a collector in church, but he must have a warm heart for people, and I find it a noble thing that, for example, no winter passed without The Graphic doing something to keep alive sympathy for the poor.
Vincent Van Gogh
#57. The main thing is to be moved, to love, to hope, to tremble, to live. Be a man before being an artist!
Auguste Rodin
#58. If I were related to Monet, I don't know if I would be comfortable becoming an artist because it's too much, the comparison. If I wrote a book and put it out, the comparison to my great-grandfather, the comparison would be hilarious. Every critic, it would be their dream, they'd tear me apart.
Dree Hemingway
#59. Besides me wanting to be an artist, I wanted to be a movie star.
Patti Smith
#60. Seriously, I wanted to be an artist because I saw that it meant endless possibilities. I came from a badly managed family background, so art was a way of reinventing myself.
Sam Taylor-Wood
#61. As an artist I have always tried to be faithful to my vision of life, and I have frequently been in conflict with those who wanted me to paint not what I saw but what they wished me to see.
Diego Rivera
#62. With men one could have clever, uplifting conversations, and men understood the work of an artist; but everything else-idle talk, tenderness, playfulness, love, contentment unmarred by thought-did not flourish among men; for that there had to be women and new places and constantly new impressions.
Hermann Hesse
#63. I always feel as if I stood naked for the fire of Almighty God to go through me
and it's rather an awful feeling. One has to be so terribly religious to be an artist.
D.H. Lawrence
#64. With drama, you need to be laughing, in between takes, 'cause you're going to those recesses of your soul and those dangerous parts. Normally, if you're not an actor or some crazy artist, you don't feel the need to run around in those areas. You keep them separate because it's painful.
Josh Peck
#65. It is perfectly possible to be a professional director or a professional writer and not to be an artist: merely a sort of executor of other people's ideas.
Andrei Tarkovsky
#66. I do have a large audience overseas, and I want to continue to be an international artist.
Neil Diamond
#67. I have no idea how to be an artist and a lover, so I chose the one most likely to make me happy when I'm eighty and gazing back on a long and productive life.
J.C. Lillis
#68. My mum was one of those people who really wasn't allowed to be an artist, because she worked in a factory and she came from the war and all that stuff. She really has an artist's soul.
David LaChapelle
#69. I've got something to live for, because I always wanted to be an artist; I always wanted to be famous.
Daniel Johnston
#70. Care of the soul may take the form of living in a fully embodied imagination, being an artist at home and at work. You don't have to be a professional in order to bring art into the care of your soul; anyone can have an art studio at home, for instance.
Thomas Moore
#71. Life becomes a spectacle and, if you happen to be an artist, you record the passing show.
Henry Miller
#72. An artist is always out of step with the time. He has to be.
Orson Welles
#73. I could play it safe by recording songs that are familiar, but am I expanding myself as an artist by doing covers? It's a catch-22. It's called show business: The word 'business' is in it, and you've got to be a businessman. But then again, you have to be true to yourself as an artist.
Donny Osmond
#74. I always wanted to be an artist, but I didn't really know how someone could make a life out it.
Julie Mehretu
#75. As an architect you are a builder. You are of course more than a builder. You need to be a militant, you have to be a poet, you have to be a visionary, you have to be an artist. But certainly you have to be a builder. Everything starts from there.
Renzo Piano
#76. 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
#77. A defective voice will always preclude an artist from achieving the complete development of his art, however intelligent he may be ... The voice is an instrument which the artist must learn to use with suppleness and sureness, as if it were a limb.
Sarah Bernhardt
#78. There ought to be an artistic depot where the artist need only hand in his artwork in order to receive what he asks for. As things are, one must be half a business man, and how can one understand - good heavens! - that's what I really call troublesome.
Ludwig Van Beethoven
#79. An artist ... must actively caress wonder: for fascination, like the desire to play, can be eradicated by the rigors of living.
Eric Maisel
#80. 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
#81. I didn't want to pretend to be a conceptual artist that charges $10,000 for an experience. It's just not what I am. I'm a photographer and I make prints. And people buy a print, and I understand that. But I'm uncomfortable with buying an experience.
Alec Soth
#82. As artists, we have an opportunity to help the public evolve, raise consciousness and awareness, teach, heal, enlighten and inspire in ways the democratic process may not be able to touch. So we keep it moving.
Lauryn Hill
#83. I only really started to go to plays and to be interested in drama 20 years ago when as an artist I was already well-rounded. I think I'm more disciplined today.
Pete Townshend
#84. My mom and I were super tight. I think she really wanted me to be an artist, you know? She used to like to tell people she wanted to be Beethoven's mother. That was her thing. She wanted to be the mother of this person.
Harry Connick Jr.
#85. To be first-rate at anything you have to stake your all. Nobody's an artist 'on the side'.
Eleanor Clark
#86. People expect me to be dark and gloomy, then write that I'm a jolly chap, and after all, that is what I am. I think it's a case of an absolute romantic naivety that there should be a parallel between the work and the artist.
Michael Haneke
#88. It's wonderful to make a lot of money, to be able to take care of my family, to have the facilities I have and really support the people the studio's involved with. But at the end of the day I'm quite simple as an artist-it's really about the power of art.
Jeff Koons
#89. I love art. My sister is an artist and my mother is a painter, so it is very much in the family. I haven't ever wanted to be a fine artist myself - my sister robbed me of my artistic talent, I think.
Douglas Booth
#90. I so much appreciate it when anybody tries to make something and tries to be an artist - I'm happy to see the work.
Laurie Anderson
#91. I think it's the pain and suffering that drive you to become an artist. The art itself should be the pain, sort of exorcising every demon and making you feel like you're a person that matters.
Marilyn Manson
#92. It wasn't that I wanted to be an artist. But when I took my first drawing class with the painter Doug Ohlson, I could never finish a drawing.
Lynne Tillman
#93. I put myself in the place of the listener when editing my writing. The last thing that I want to do is be preached at and told who to be or what to think when listening to an artist. However, I do want to be inspired. There's a fine line.
Macklemore
#94. His problem was the eternal question: What should he be? Inventor, scientist, artist - the energy he felt surging through him, an energy far more than physical and yet pervading the restlessness of his body, was a burden to him until he could find the path for its release.
Pearl S. Buck
#95. I suppose I felt doomed to be an artist early on because of the way I drew all over the books that I needed for school, from ancient history to math. I was more interested in drawing in the margins than actually doing the work.
Nancy Spero
#97. I never considered myself an artist. I aspire to be an artist, but I never thought I had the depth or substance or gift to be an artist. I do think I have some talent, but it doesn't go as far as being an artist.
Woody Allen
#98. Me being able to be acting and doing other things has opened me as an artist, and I think even more from a visual standpoint.
Common
#99. When people have told me that because I am a Catholic, I cannot be an artist, I have had to reply, ruefully, that because I am a Catholic I cannot afford to be less than an artist.
Flannery O'Connor
#100. If I'm smart as an artist, I wouldn't be a snob and turn it down, because I'd look at it and go, this is great stuff, but I definitely do want to experiment in other genres, or make films in other genres.
James Wan
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