We Artists Quotes

#1. In order to thrive as artists we need to be available to the universal flow. When we put a stopper on our capacity for joy by anorectically declining the small gifts of life, we turn aside the larger gifts as well.

Julia Cameron

#2. I just close my eyes and act like I'm a 3-year-old. I try to get as close to a childlike level as possible because we were all artists back then. So you just close your eyes and think back to when you were as young as you can remember and had the least barriers to your creativity.

Kanye West

#3. When the show opens, fans can text to a number we flash up on the screen, and then we do a meet-and-greet with 60 to 80 people every night. It's something I love doing, and I would say that's probably more fans than most artists bring backstage after a show.

Luke Bryan

#4. We are all born artists. If you have kids, you know what I mean. Almost everything kids do is art. They draw with crayons on the wall.

Kim Young-ha

#5. I'm so proud that my offspring became a musician. I'm full of awe that we are able to have a whole family live the life of artists.

Maxine Hong Kingston

#6. 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

#7. We're flimflam artists. But remember, sonny, you can't con people unless they're greedy to begin with. W. C. Fields had it right. You can't cheat an honest man.

Sidney Sheldon

#8. There is a great promise for our cultural growth, but this promise is achieved only when our artists recognize that all great art has nationality, an imprimatur achieved with the keenest remembrance of time and place.

F. Sionil Jose

#9. I couldn't do country, with all due respect to all country music artists. My parents dressed me up with a cowboy hat and we'd go to the rodeo when I was younger and it traumatized me for life.

Chris Colfer

#10. If an artist wants to work with me because they feel I've made some credible albums and there've been things that are long-lasting, it's because those artists took the time and we built an idea.

Phil Ramone

#11. I think if the copyright regime focuses on the people we are supposed to be helping, the artists and creators, and builds a system that gives them the freedom to choose and to protect and to be rewarded for their creativity, then we will have the right focus.

Lawrence Lessig

#12. People assume that artists must talk about art and beauty and the sublime whenever we get together, but no, we usually talk about money.

Christopher Bram

#13. What are we artists for? We are for showing you what you've wandered for to find the home of your spirit ...

Hiroko Sakai

#14. We are the visionaries, inventors, and artists. We think differently, see the world differently, and solve problems differently. It is from this difference that the dyslexic brain derives its brilliance.

Tiffany Sunday

#15. The question isn't whether or not to censor artists who espouse misogynistic views. The question is whether or not we support them as listeners and consumers.

Dessa Darling

#16. Once we start collecting, the more you have, the more it gets valuable and that will stop us from responding to the present and taking on new ideas what the artists are doing now.

David Elliott

#17. Artists can color the sky red because they know it's blue. Those of us who aren't artists must color things the way they really are or people might think we're stupid.

Jules Feiffer

#18. Not all of us are painters but we are all artists. Each time we fit things together we are creating - whether it is to make a loaf of bread, a child, a day.

Corita Kent

#19. Great art is always a way of concentrating, reinventing what is called fact, what we know of our existence- a reconcentration ... tearing away the veils, the attitudes people acquire of their time and earlier time. Really good artists tear down those veils

Francis Bacon

#20. Fine artists reflect, and then they act. Fashion photographers - we act, and then we reflect.

Mario Testino

#21. We safeguard the right to attribution very strongly. After all, what we are fighting for is the intent of copyright as it is described in the US constitution: the promotion of culture. Many artists are using recognition as their primary driving force to create culture.

Rick Falkvinge

#22. What is great about art and artists is that we get to ask the questions, even though we may never know the answers.

Dennis Quaid

#23. By August 2008, we had left Voikovskaya and moved into a wooden dacha in the artists' colony of Sokol in north-west Moscow. The house was a haven amid the madness of the city: lily of the valley grew near our front gate, Virginia creeper decked the green picket fence.

Luke Harding

#24. It was a vicious circle, though. The more gratification we found in our own geniuses, the more isolated we grew. Our home was like an artists' colony. We ate together, but otherwise were absorbed in our separate pursuits. And in this isolation, our creativity took on an aspect of compulsion.

Alison Bechdel

#25. Ladies and gentlemen, if some of the leading artists in a civilization see a man urinating in another man's mouth and see composition and lighting and do not see their civilization being pissed upon, we are in trouble.

Dennis Prager

#26. We were really poor when I was growing up; my parents, both artists, were bohemians. Life was a desperate struggle, but in service of a high ideal, which is exactly what my photographs are about.

Justine Kurland

#27. One of the best things about Kickstarter and crowdfunding and the collapse of the music business is a lot of artists like me have been forced to face our own weird mess about ourselves and what we thought it meant to become musicians.

Amanda Palmer

#28. What's important about the artists we learn about in art history and see in all the art books is that they have somehow pushed the boundaries of what people think art is or should be, and that's how they've made their work relevant. That's what I'm trying to figure out for myself.

Kadir Nelson

#29. David Cronenberg knows what we actors do as artists.

William Hurt

#30. Artists are a very important part of our society because they make a great contribution to our values. The artist creates a value system that we all grow up on, whether we know it or not.

Roy DeCarava

#31. I'm trying to embrace social media because it gives artists a little more power than we've had in the past.

Billy Porter

#32. 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

#33. We don't have real hours and we don't have a boss, so artists create rules for themselves that they then break. It's transgressive in such a personal way.

Laurie Simmons

#34. We younger Negro artists who create now intend to express our individual dark-skinned selves without fear or shame. If white people are pleased, we are glad. If they are not, it doesn't matter. We know we are beautiful. And ugly too.

Langston Hughes

#35. You know how creative people are, we have to try everything until we find our niche.

E.A. Bucchianeri

#36. I'm pretty hard to impress, and I'm pretty exacting, in terms of what I want from my props department and art department. We spend many, many hours going over visual research and finding the right artists to create the material.

Cary Fukunaga

#37. With the Gap Band coming from Oklahoma, other artists would tease us by calling us cowboys. We didn't grow up on a ranch, but we took that style to the stage. We knew that it was corny, but at least it was ours.

Charlie Wilson

#38. The last thing we discover in composing a work is what to put down first.

Blaise Pascal

#39. Friends, we have now won ... I say to Aymaras, Quechuas, Chiquitaos, and Guaranis: for the first time we are going to be presidents. And I want to say to businesses, intellectual professionals, and artists: do not abandon us.

Evo Morales

#40. When we digital artists talk about painting on the computer, that is exactly what we do. The paints we use are pixels, the brush we use is a pressure sensitive pen. The colors are the same as painters use, and how we get to the final image is the same gut wrenching way.

Donald Lambert

#41. You know, artists don't really have all that much experience of life. We make a huge amount out of the small experience that we do have.

John Banville

#42. I'll bet there are a lot of artists that nobody hears about who just make more money than anybody. The people that do all the sculptures and paintings for big building construction. We never hear about them, but they make more money than anybody.

Andy Warhol

#43. People assume that a lot of pop artists don't write their songs. That, for me, is super frustrating because I think it detracts from some of the art and some of the craft of what we do. I'm at the helm of it, and I think that is what people don't see.

Ricki-Lee Coulter

#44. Comic artists have always been part of my social circle. I just like hanging out with artists, and I always see them at conventions or a store signing or something. "Hey, we should do something together."

Mark Millar

#45. Artists are visionaries. We routinely practice a form of faith, seeing clearly and moving toward a creative goal that shimmers in the distance - often visible to us, but invisible to those around us.

Julia Cameron

#46. For popular purposes, at least, the aim of literary artists should be similar to that of Rubens in his landscapes, of which, without neglecting the minor traits or finishing, he was chiefly solicitous to present the leading effect, or what we may call the inspiration.

William Benton Clulow

#47. As artists, we like night more than day sometimes.

Ang Lee

#48. Hip hop has always been, for us, for artists who are pure to the craft - any place overseas, whether it's Australia, any place in Asia, Germany, Africa, it becomes something where you can still go and work. Hip hop is an import culture. We're spoiled by it here. It's homegrown.

Talib Kweli

#49. As artists we are here to make you uncomfortable with the complexity of your reality.

Junot Diaz

#50. I came of age at the end of the 1960s, just when video was also coming into the world. Companies such as Sony and Panasonic were starting to market it and we artists immediately knew how it could be used.

Bill Viola

#51. Every dream, every vision is a masterpiece canvas on the wall of our minds. So as artists we should make an effort to bring the artwork to the the exhibition.

Euginia Herlihy

#52. Much of the blame is the malarkey that artists have created to glorify war, which as we all know, is nonsense, and a good deal worse than that - romantic pictures of battle, and of the dead and men in uniform and all that. And I did not want to have that story told again.

Kurt Vonnegut

#53. The only thing the Pop Artists had in common is that we all had been commercial artists in some manner. Lichtenstein was a draftsman; I was a billboard painter, but we didn't work together. I didn't meet Andy Warhol until 1964.

James Rosenquist

#54. The irony is that musical artists have enormous public voices, but behind the scenes we're voiceless, actually.

Sinead O'Connor

#55. Maybe the way we have learned to look has changed in the last 25 years, and the exotic is much more acceptable. There are many artists now, younger artists, who work out of the exotic.

Anish Kapoor

#56. Whether we are poets or parents or teachers or artists or gardeners, we must start where we are and use what we have. In the process of creation and relationship, what seems mundane and trivial may show itself to be a holy, precious part of a pattern.

Luci Shaw

#57. Our job as actors, especially in front of a camera, is almost like textile artists. We spend so much time getting the right texture of yarn, and working out the color scheme, and binding off the weave, and making it just right.

Anthony Heald

#58. Actors in general are pretty good bullshit artists; we're good at just chewing the fat, interacting with people. So we're good ambassadors for movies.

John C. Reilly

#59. If we artists are to survive this period at all - we will survive as spokesmen, never again as entertainers.

Rico Lebrun

#60. We will be soldiers, so our sons may be farmers, so their sons may be artists

Thomas Jefferson

#61. 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

#62. 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

#63. Artists get to step outside their comfort zone a 'lil bit and we get some great songs!!

Matt Squire

#64. By art alone we can get out of ourselves, find out what another person sees of this universe which is not the same as ours ... Thanks to art, instead of seeing only one world, we see it multiplied, and we have as many different worlds at our disposition as there are original artists.

Marcel Proust

#65. In our culture, imitation-based experience dominates reality-based experience. I find this an awful thing. But there are artists who know from the bottom of their souls that art is about the experience of reality. The reason we have art is because you can't get a real experience from the world.

Richard Tuttle

#66. 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

#67. The truth is, we haven't really figured out yet how artists are going to thrive in modern mass societies. We're all experiments.

Brad Holland

#68. The universe constantly and obediently answers to our conceptions; whether we travel fast or slow, the track is laid for us. Let us spend our lives in conceiving then. The poet or the artist never yet had so fair and noble a design but some of his posterity at least could accomplish it.

Henry David Thoreau

#69. There was a great sense of community mainly among the women artists at the time because we felt left out. I still know most of the women that I knew then, the ones that are still alive.

Michelle Stuart

#70. Artists cannot be micro-managed. We can take heart that everything we do is different from the last thing we did - or indeed everything that's ever been done. That knowledge is the key to sound mentoring.

Robert Genn

#71. We will certainly see teachers, journalists, artists and poets in space. Whatever it takes to the be the best is what it will take to get you into space.

Eugene Cernan

#72. June Jordan once said something which is just wonderful. I'm paraphrasing her-that her function as a poet was to make revolution irresistible. Well o.k. that is the function of us all, as creative artists, to make the truth, as we see it irresistible.

Audre Lorde

#73. In changing times, we should all lend our support to the independent retailers. Without independent retailers, many of the biggest names in music would still be undiscovered. They break new artists and movements. We all know the industry is changing, but we can't forget where we came from.

Gorilla Zoe

#74. The reason actors, artists, writers have agents is because we'll do it for nothing. That's a basic fact - you gotta do it.

Morgan Freeman

#75. Actually, we didn't tour that much back in the 70s because we had all these other artists under our hat. My touring was really limited. I tour more now than I did back then.

Harry Wayne Casey

#76. I hope and believe we are paving a better future for female artists to come.

Paula Cole

#77. The thing I like about the band [Dead Child] is that there's no pretense. We aren't even trying to be artists or poets.

David Pajo

#78. 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

#79. We're committed to giving the independent artists we support the best stage to share their mind-blowing work with audiences.

Jane Rosenthal

#80. Artists shows us what we blind to.

Baris Gencel

#81. We eat up artists like there's going to be a famine at the end.

Nikki Giovanni

#82. We have artists with no scientific knowledge and scientists with no
artistic knowledge and both with no spiritual sense of gravity at all,
and the result is not just bad, it is ghastly.

Robert M. Pirsig

#83. We do have Museums of African American Art in the United States, and there is a National Museum of Women's Art. However, I believe Latinos are best served by displaying their art next to the art of other groups, particularly North American, European, and even Asian artists.

Mari Carmen Ramirez

#84. As a community of artists, we might just keep safe each other's love affair.

Sara Genn

#85. [Art] would have helped us survive in the Pleistocene - in the period, say, 1.6 million years ago until fairly recently. The kind of imaginative abilities that artists have and that we all have in the appreciation of art - to appreciate Jane Austen, the late quartets of Beethoven.

Denis Dutton

#86. I don't think successful musicians were really put on this planet in order to have a great time, pat themselves on the back and say, 'Oh, what a clever boy I am!' I think that, like most artists, we were put on the planet to suffer just a little. And we do.

Ian Anderson

#87. Ruefully admitting we can neither remain children nor all become artists still less saints and mystics, we turn back, regretfully, but massively, to the time-ridden world.

Alan McGlashan

#88. We [artists] aren't people, not the way most people are. We're just ... carriers. Little boats bringing goods from foreign lands.

Sam Starbuck

#89. My parents divorced. There was the usual awkward business of going between them, but I was mostly with my mother. She remarried to a Greek painter Nico Ghika, so we were always around artists and intellectuals.

Jacob Rothschild

#90. Anytime I get to be around the fans it's always a good time, especially during Music Fest. CMA puts together an event that allows artists to make that personal connection with the fans and it's wonderful. I look at it as our chance to give back to them and let them know we appreciate their support.

Billy Currington

#91. I think Prince should open up a little more to other artists. Just because we love Prince. Especially the old stuff - we love him to death. But if he opened up he would be something to deal with. Imagine Kanye West producing a Prince track? It would be banoodles!

Jamie Foxx

#92. 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

#93. The trouble is that we have a bad habit, encouraged by pedants and sophisticates, of considering happiness as something rather stupid. Only pain is intellectual, only evil interesting. This is the treason of the artist; a refusal to admit the banality of evil and the terrible boredom of pain.

Ursula K. Le Guin

#94. Bless the poets, the workers for justice, the dancers of ceremony, the singers of heartache, the visionaries, all makers and carriers of fresh meaning - We will all make it through, despite politics and wars, despite failures and misunderstandings. There is only love.

Joy Harjo

#95. 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

#96. I see everybody arguing about what the value of music should be instead of what I think the bigger conversation is, which is that music has value, it's subjective and we're moving to a new era where the audience is taking more responsibility for supporting artists at whatever level.

Amanda Palmer

#97. 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

#98. We were all miners in our family. My father was a miner. My mother is a miner. These are miner's hands, but we were all artists, I suppose, really. But I was the first one who had the urge to express myself on paper rather than at the coalface.

Alan Bennett

#99. If we treat each other as if we are geniuses, poets and artists, we have a better chance of becoming that on stage.

Del Close

#100. I think we should throw money at artists, not at girls who take their clothes off because they made a bad choice in life.

Darnell Lamont Walker