Top 100 Writer Artist Quotes
#1. No matter how great a writer, artist, or entrepreneur, he is a mortal, he is fallible. He is not proof against Resistance. He will drop the ball; he will crash. That's why they call it rewriting.
Steven Pressfield
#2. I am deeply in tune with my heart and core, and it's made me a better writer, artist, and most of all woman. It's made me more myself.
Lykke Li
#3. I think that a visual artist's philosophy develops much more freely than a writer's or a thinker's philosophy. It is not so disciplined. The photographer works with both his eyes and his mind.
Manuel Alvarez Bravo
#4. My father had always identified himself as a writer to my mother when they met. When they met, he was writing this great novel, there was no doubt about it. Part of why she left him was this delusion of greatness and identifying it very directly with being an artist.
Nick Flynn
#5. Of the whole public not a handful can understand the artist's point of view or the writer's conscience.
Maxwell Perkins
#7. An author is an artist who paints a picture in the imagination of the reader.
Darrell Case
#8. I think an artist, in my definition of that word, would not be someone who takes sides with the emperor against his powerless subjects. That's different from prescribing a way in which a writer should write.
Chinua Achebe
#9. I don't go around thinking about regret; regret doesn't consume me as a person ... I'm not certain about whether any writer, any artist, any musician, can write without regret, so I don't think perhaps it's even particularly Southern.
Barry Hannah
#10. She was in awe of all his work. 'How do you do it?" she asked.
He smiled and said, 'By loving you.
Kamand Kojouri
#11. If technique is of no interest to a writer, I doubt that the writer is an artist.
Marianne Moore
#12. I get hired as a writer or producer and I do the best I can to bring out that artist. If somebody calls you to do something, you go right for that vision and you're aware of that person's vibe. You're trying to get inside of them.
Lenny Kravitz
#13. I write things down because my thoughts get too heavy in my head and it hurts my neck.
Joyce Rachelle
#14. She's got everything she needs; she's an artist, she don't look back.
Bob Dylan
#15. The thing about being a screenwriter, scriptwriter, scenarist, You get to have multiple personalities and not be charged.
Andrea L'Artiste
#16. If your target as a Muslim artist, writer or speaker is to target only Muslims you need to rethink your plan.
Andre Gide
#17. I think anyone who is an artist or writer or owns their own business or whatever can agree that when you come up with something on your own, it's an addictive feeling.
Brett Dennen
#18. I hate being a writer. i tend to stick my emotions in things that cannot reciprocate. I've become a whore for my craft.
Darnell Lamont Walker
#19. In movies, books & even music, to me, the true artist is the writer. Writers have to begin the creative process by making nothing into something before it can ever manifest into anything.
Chris Mentillo
#20. The other day, when I was deciding where to place a mountain range, how to make a river's flow detour around underground stalactite caves, and what precise color to give the sky at sunset, I realized I was God ... or an artist and a writer.
Vera Nazarian
#21. I am a person before I am anything else. I never say I am a writer. I never say I am an artist ... I am a person who does those things.
Edward Gorey
#22. If you are a writer or any kind of artist, if you change something as fundamental as where you live - the way you live - then I think you change the very instrument that is trying to make the art.
Dani Shapiro
#23. The writer of history is perhaps closer to the artist than the scholar.
Theodor Mommsen
#24. The highest duty of the writer is to remain true to himself and let the chips fall where they may. In serving his vision of the truth the artist best serves his nation.
John F. Kennedy
#26. I think it's really the job of the composer, the artist, the painter, the writer to present people with options. I'm just really reflecting the thoughts and actions around me.
Ian Anderson
#27. To be a writer is to constantly evolve and keep ones imagination expanding and that's what make a great author and artist.
Adona M. Pierre
#28. The French Revolution gave birth to no artists but only to a great journalist, Desmoulins, and to an under-the-counter writer, Sade. The only poet of the times was the guillotine.
Albert Camus
#29. Are you an artist? Look about you. Is there a physical tool whose use you have mastered, a part of your body that responds utterly to your control? Is your motive esthetic? If so, you are an artist. If not, you are probably a writer.
Robert Breault
#30. Gordon Lightfoot looms pretty large in my life as a writer and an artist in general. I never travel anywhere without at least two of his records with me.
Ron Sexsmith
#31. If I were a better artist, I'd be a painter, and if I were a better writer, I'd write books.. but I'm not, so I draw cartoons!
Charles M. Schulz
#32. A writer's voice is not character alone, it is not style alone; it is far more. A writer's voice line the stroke of an artist's brush- is the thumbprint of her whole person- her idea, wit, humor, passions, rhythms.
Patricia Lee Gauch
#33. Even the caged bird flys out when someone opens the door for it
Andrea L'Artiste
#34. In the middle classes the gifted son of a family is always the poorest
usually a writer or artist with no sense for speculation
and in a family of peasants, where the average comfort is just over penury, the gifted son sinks also, and is soon a tramp on the roadside.
John Millington Synge
#35. My words, my writing, my actions - these have never been for myself alone, either directly or indirectly. There is no such thing as an artist who creates art only for himself. That is masturbation.
Pramoedya Ananta Toer
#36. The bourgeoisie's weapon is starvation. If as a writer or artist you run counter to their narrow notions they simplyand silently withdraw your means of subsistence. I sometimes wonder how many people of talent are executed in this way every year.
Robert Louis Stevenson
#37. If you find yourself asking yourself (and your friends), "Am I really a writer? Am I really an artist?" chances are you are. The counterfeit innovator is wildly self-confident. The real one is scared to death.
Steven Pressfield
#38. To note an artist's limitations is but to define his talent. A reporter can write equally well about everything that is presented to his view, but a creative writer can do his best only with what lies within the range and character of his deepest sympathies.
Willa Cather
#40. People will watch you build a house, but won't pass you a brick. And once your home is built, they want to come inside for dinner.
Andrea L'Artiste
#41. I knew I wanted to be a writer at 13. Before that, I told everyone I was going to be an artist.
Siri Hustvedt
#42. The Architect is just one of a series of works which examine the confrontation of innocence and experience, illustrating the complex ethics of power that exist between reader and writer, critic and artist, the human and the divine.
John Scott
#43. You will never know all there is to know. You will learn until your final days. Then you will inspire someone else. This is what an artist does.
Mitch Albom
#44. There's a great social component to being a writer, to being an artist.
Rebecca Makkai
#45. A writer needs a pen, an artist needs a brush, but a filmmaker needs an army.
Orson Welles
#46. You are the song of every bird, you are the poet's every word, every artist's picture, every writer's play.
Dolly Parton
#47. I've always felt that I would rather see an actor, writer, or musician's work, rather than actually know the person. If you know too much about an artist, it somehow lessens their ability to do their work as well.
Christian Bale
#48. I was a visual artist primarily and a writer, even from a very young age.
P.J. Harvey
#49. They are always asking a writer why he does not write like somebody else, or a painter why he does not paint like somebody else, quite oblivious of the fact that if either of them did anything of the kind he would cease to be an artist.
Oscar Wilde
#50. In such a person, sadness breeds purpose; finding inspiration in the darkness and often times, I believe, they will impress a hell onto their own lives in order to re-create it, that others might suffer the experience from the comfort of their armchairs. - Quote from Her Past's Present.
Michael Poeltl
#51. The greatest artists express their inner self; an artist paints her rage; a writer pens his fear; a dancer expresses her sadness through movement; and a musician's loneliness echoes in his performance.
Gerard De Marigny
#52. Books should be like magical jewelled boxes. It's the writer's job to tell the story. My job [the artist] is to make you want to pick up the box, and to peer inside.
Thomas Canty
#53. I would hate to be a new artist or writer in town today. But somehow the cream continues to rise. If there's one who's great, he just jumps out of the pack like you can't believe.
Steven Curtis Chapman
#54. As for work, without it, without painstaking work, any writer or artist definitely remains a dilettante; there's no point in waiting for so-called blissful moments, for inspiration; if it comes, so much the better
but you keep working anyway.
Ivan Turgenev
#55. Think of an economy where people could be an artist or a photographer or a writer without worrying about keeping their day job in order to have health insurance.
Nancy Pelosi
#56. 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
#57. The process in which a writer is compelled to counterfeit his true feelings is exactly the opposite of that which the man of society is compelled to counterfeit his. The artist disguises in order to reveal; the man of society disguises in order to conceal
Yukio Mishima
#58. I feel like the point of being an artist is to have your own voice: to do it the way you would do it and not the way anyone else would do it. If you're a strong enough writer, then that voice is going to come out all the time, and I can't stop it from coming out, no matter what I do.
Jason Robert Brown
#59. If it's your greatest dream, you wouldn't give up so easily.. So do yourself a favour, find it again & start focusing on anything that will help you materialise it, it's not going to be a walk in the park, but it will help you sleep at night; 10 years from now.
Nikki Rowe
#60. I was at a time of my life of making choices, I suppose: am I a writer, am I a visual artist? And when I was a teenager. I thought I would be a film-maker. Am I a musician? If so, what kind of musician am I?
David Toop
#61. A writer writes with his genius; an artist paints with hers; everyone who creates operates from this sacramental center.
Steven Pressfield
#62. I do believe that it takes a strong dose of alienation to make a good artist or writer in the modern world. You can't be too well-adjusted and still have anything interesting to say.
Howard Sounes
#63. The writer, when he is also an artist, is someone who admits what others don't dare reveal.
Elia Kazan
#64. 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
#65. You have to keep doing it,
Even if no one is watching.
The best artists, are those
Who live from their expressions,
Not chasing the impressions.
Nikki Rowe
#66. I've sort of decided that I can settle for being just the artist, arranger, writer and part-time engineer. That seems like enough to do.
Tom Scholz
#67. I am happiest sitting against a tree, with my notebook or sketchpad on my knee, capturing the moment.
Fennel Hudson
#68. I think every creative impulse that a working writer, or artist of any sort has, comes out of that dark old country where dreams come from.
Anne Rivers Siddons
#69. I know who I am and what I'm doing in my life and what I've accomplished and continue to accomplish as a performer, as a writer, as an artist, as a person, as a human being.
Justin Bieber
#70. I wear a lot of different hats - from writer to producer and artist. We all do 5 or 6 jobs, everything from creating our own graphic design to actually recording and the whole bit.
William Bell
#71. Pretty much every artist in Scotland - musician, writer, poet, actor - they're all part of a thing called the National Collective.
Roddy Woomble
#72. 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
#73. And remember whatever discipline you're in, whether you're a musician or a photographer, fine artist or a cartoonist, writer, a dancer, a singer, a designer... whatever you do, you have a thing that's unique. You have the ability to make art.
Neil Gaiman
#74. Because there are hundreds of different ways to say one thing, I, being a writer, songwriter, and poet, speak childishly and incoherently. In speech there is so much to decide in so little time.
Criss Jami
#75. You have a strange relationship with calamity when you're a writer: you write about it; as an artist, you objectify and fetishize it. You render life into material, and that's a creepy thing to do.
Tony Kushner
#76. I'd really want to - just from my own experience as an artist working with a writer, I'd want to do everything I could to tailor it to the artist I was working with.
David Finch
#77. The primary dues a writer or any artist pays is to remain sentient, and to forfeit the illusionary luxury of such anesthetics as avoidance, numbness, and denials.
Vanna Bonta
#78. It was not cool to be that fun, bubbly kid, so I would just go off on my own and sing and make up songs, and that's how I think I developed into the kind of artist and writer that I am.
Elle Varner
#79. The writer of fiction is not a scholar but an artist impacted emotionally by characters from life, who then strives to present these in his works. These characters present us with human truth but do not necessarily represent social truth.
Alaa Al Aswany
#80. An artist can go paint, and a writer can go write, but an actor needs to get hired, needs somebody to say, 'Here, come and do this,' That's the hard part.
John Glover
#81. Creating a world within the imagination one day at a time through words and colors.
Peggy A. Borel
#82. I am an artist and have no right buggering about with verbs and split infinitives, which is what being a writer says to me.
Ralph Steadman
#83. I feel like I'm a secondary artist, a kind of a conduit for the writer, and if it's a good writer, then I have a great road map.
Mamie Gummer
#84. I see the game now. You can't write with ink, and you can't write with your own heart's blood, but you can write with the heart's blood of some one else. You have to be a cad before you can be an artist.
O'Henry 'The Plutonian Fire' (1905)
O. Henry
#85. But if you have a point of view and you're an artist or a writer, it's kind of crazy to not take advantage of that, especially if you can do something that's entertaining as well. I've done a number of things like that over the years.
David Lloyd
#86. I've learned over the years that the best way to develop as an artist is to make things. So I tell young artists it's not enough to be an actor anymore, you have to be a filmmaker/writer/director. There's no excuse for waiting around for a job. You have to be active and make things.
Liane Balaban
#87. 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
#88. No one would have the courage to walk up to a writer and ask to look at the last few pages of his manuscript, but they feel perfectly comfortable staring over an artist's shoulder while he is trying to paint.
Robert Genn
#89. Any director or writer or artist has the right to do what they want to do - freedom of expression is something I celebrate.
Birgitte Hjort Sorensen
#90. A writer or any suffering artist-to-be is just an instrument too finely set to the human condition [ ... ]
Gary Shteyngart
#91. Is the biographer an artist who can and should exist on equal terms with the dramatist, fiction writer and poet? The short and robust answer is, 'Certainly not.'
Tom Paulin
#92. I am convinced that each work of art, be it a great work of genius or something very small, has its own life, and it will come to the artist, the composer or the writer or the painter, and
say, "Here I am: compose me; or write me; or paint me"; and the job of the artist is to serve the work.
Madeleine L'Engle
#94. Thackeray's a good writer and Flaubert is a great artist. Trollope is a good writer and Dickens is a great artist. Colette is a very good writer and Proust is a great artist. Katherine Anne Porter was an extremely good writer and Willa Cather was a great artist.
Truman Capote
#95. The writer concerned more with technique than truth becomes a technician, not an artist.
Edward Abbey
#96. 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
#97. He traced her arched eyebrow. "Every morning when I wake up with you at my side, you're more beautiful than yesterday.
Lindsay McKenna
#98. I've often been given the career advice to not wear too many hats, which, of course, has just encouraged me to wear other hats, such as being a writer, being a curator, or just doing anything outside of the definition of an artist.
Matthew Brannon
#99. Any mystery writer is both magician and moralist ... two species of artist in short supply.
Sue Grafton
#100. I do think there's a difference when you see a book where you can tell the creator's doing something they really love or are really passionate about as opposed to an artist or a writer who is just doing a particular job or trying to sell a product or trying to cash in on a popular trend.
Mike Mignola
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