Artist quotes
8.6K quotes on this topic — from poets, philosophers, and thinkers across history.
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"These are very difficult times for new artists. Back in the day, a hit song could really seep into a person's DNA with radio and MTV. A hit today is not the same as a hit twenty years ago. Now there is so much competition, it is very hard to reach the people. The music scene is so overly saturated. There are no gatekeepers like there used to be."
"The worst thing that being an artist could do to you would be that it would make you slightly unhappy constantly."
"To me, what makes an artist is a unique personality that they're not afraid to let show."
"To walk with nature as a poet is the necessary condition of a perfect artist."
"The fact that no one understands you doesn't mean you're an artist."
"Organic buildings are the strength and lightness of the spiders' spinning, buildings qualified by light, bred by native character to environment, married to the ground."
"Artists and religionists are never far apart, they go to the sources of revelation for what they choose to experience and what they report is the degree of their experiences. Intellect wishes to arrange — intuition wishes to accept."
"The mind is essentially a survival machine. Attack and defense against other minds, gathering, storing, and analyzing information - this is what it is good at, but it is not at all creative. All true artists, whether they know it or not, create from a place of no-mind, from inner stillness."
"It is a mistake to talk about the artist looking for his subject. In fact, the subject grows within him like a fruit and begins to demand expression. It is like childbirth. The poet has nothing to be proud of. He is not master of the situation, but a servant. Creative work is his only possible form of existence, and his every work is like a deed he has no power to annul. For him to be aware that the sequence of such deeds is due and ripe, that it lies in the very nature of things, he has to have faith in the idea; for only faith interlocks the system of images for which read system of life."
"It is the artists of the world, the feelers and the thinkers who will ultimately save us; who can articulate, educate, defy, insist, sing and shout the big dreams."
"These critics with the illusions they've created about artists - it's like idol worship. They only like people when they're on their way up... I cannot be on the way up again."
"I imagined myself as Frida to Diego, both muse and maker. I dreamed of meeting an artist to love and support and work with side by side."
"THING TO TRY: If you are asked to describe a suspect to a police sketch artist, describe in precise detail, the features of the police sketch artist. This is one of the rare instances where two people can do one self-portrait."
"Doing graphic novels is cool! It's fun! You get to write something, and then see it visually page by page, panel by panel, working with the artist, you get to see it fleshed out."
"It is only too true that a lot of artists are mentally ill - it's a life which, to put it mildly, makes one an outsider. I'm all right when I completely immerse myself in work, but I'll always remain half crazy."
"The noir hero is a knight in blood caked armor. He's dirty and he does his best to deny the fact that he's a hero the whole time."
"Good artists copy, great artists steal."
"There is no greater harm than that of time wasted."
"The marble not yet carved can hold the form of every thought the greatest artist has."
"A plagiarist steals from one person. A true artist steals from everybody."
