Artist quotes
8.6K quotes on this topic — from poets, philosophers, and thinkers across history.
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"My father, George, has also affected the choices in my life regarding films. I like films that take chances or say something different or experiment. Growing up with him, I was surrounded by different artists - not just actors or film-makers but cartoonists, poets, writers."
"An artist's studio should be a small space because small rooms discipline the mind and large ones distract it."
"An artist earns the right to call himself a creator only when he admits to himself that he is but an instrument."
"Added to the moral solitude of the murderer comes the solitude of the artist, which can acknowledge no authority, save that of another artist."
"I've heard many times that with all good artists it's ultimately a self-portrait even if it's an abstraction. I feel my work is very much who I am. I didn't try to make it that way; it just is. It reflects who I am and also my interests."
"One must act in painting as in life, directly."
"It's a poor artist who borrows--a good artist steals."
"I am someone who proudly and humbly affirms that love is the mystery-of-mysteries, and that nothing measurable matters 'a very good God damn'; that 'an artist, a man, a failure' is no mere whenfully accreting mechanism, but a givingly eternal complexity-neither some soulless and heartless ultrapredatory infra-animal nor any understandingly knowing and believing and thinking automaton, but a naturally and miraculously whole human being-a feelingly illimitable individual; whose only happiness is to transcend himself, whose every agony is to grow."
"Artistic tricks divert from the effect that an artist endeavors to produce, and even excellent elements such as bullets, arrows, brackets, ornate initials, are at best superficial ornamentation unless logically employed."
"If you're any good as an artist, you have to be doing something nobody else has interest in. Nobody would be interested in my work except a few crazy people."
"Most artists come in and out of the country, they stay may be 2 weeks - or a month max and then they leave."
"There's such a freedom about being an artist... You're not accountable - you're this renegade thing."
"A good martial artist does not become tense, but ready."
"When the writer (or the artist in general) says he has worked without giving any thought to the rules of the process, he simply means he was working without realizing he knew the rules."
"The 1960s were about releasing ourselves from conventional society and freeing ourselves."
"I'm one of those people who thinks you can have a happy life and still be an artist"
"On the whole, money does artists much more good than harm. The idea that one benefits from cold water, crusts and debt collectors is now almost extinct, like belief in the reformatory power of flogging."
"Pain is such an important thing in life. I think that as an artist you have to experience suffering."
"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."
"Data is what distinguishes the dilettante from the artist"
