Artist quotes
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"When you start with a portrait and search for a pure form, a clear volume, through successive eliminations, you arrive inevitably at the egg. Likewise, starting with the egg and following the same process in reverse, one finishes with the portrait."
"And every true artist is the salvation of every other. But only artists produce for each other the world that is fit to live in."
"A good artist's always got his hand in his zipper."
"One thing that really appeals to me is this idea of music being a living thing that has an evolution that, in a way, enables the artist to sell a process rather than a piece of product."
"That terrible mood of depression of whether it's any good or not is what is known as The Artist's Reward."
"The creative process, so far as we are able to follow it at all, consists in the unconscious activation of an archetypal image and elaborating and shaping the image into the finished work. By giving it shape, the artist translates it into the language of the present and so makes it possible for us to find our way back to the deepest springs of life."
"I think everybody wants to be the best at what they do and for me I was never really there, plus it was in a time that just preceded the insanity of internet promotion around 2005 and 2006. Obviously through the digital revolution things have moved very quickly and a lot of artists got left behind."
"On lady novelists: As artists they're rot, but as providers they're oil wells; they gush. Norris said she never wrote a story unless it was fun to do. I understand Ferber whistles at her typewriter."
"I just didn't wanna put the pressure on myself to be in there [Def Jam South] to work as an artist and to have the hat as the executive with other projects."
"In America idea of freedom isn't actually about freedom. That's about power. The point of an artist is to find out what are the flavors that I must work with. Finding one's freedom is about surrendering to your helplessness."
"I'm competitive with anyone who writes a good song - I don't care if it's a band or solo artist or whoever."
"I, like all artists in Western cultures, am a shaman...come in the guise of a comic...to heal perception by using...'jokes'."
"I would just like to see hip-hop journalism in general take a step up and match the artistry. There have been great writers in music who are the caliber of artist as a writer as the people that they're covering."
"Every artist preserves deep within him a single source from which, throughout his lifetime, he draws what he is, and what he says. When the source dries up, the work withers and crumbles."
"The greatest scientists are artists as well."
"The artist is the only one who knows that the world is a subjective creation, that there is a choice to be made, a selection of elements."
"I eagerly await new concepts and processes. I believe that the electronic image will be the next major advance. Such systems will have their own inherent and inescapable structural characteristics, and the artist and functional practitioner will again strive to comprehend and control them."
"What is it that turns people into artists? It often comes from some kind of pain or angst, a need to understand or express something. It very rarely comes from confidence, being raised by parents who want to hear what you have to say and wants to encourage you."
"To the Young Artists of Italy! The cry of rebellion that we launch, linking our ideals with those of the Futurist poets, does not originate in an aesthetic clique. It expresses the violent desire that stirs in the veins of every creative artist today."
"Christ is more of an artist than the artists; he works in the living spirit and the living flesh, he makes men instead of statues."
