Artist quotes
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"If the average jazz artist uses his head and at the outset of his career realizes he won't play as well at fifty as he does at twenty-five, he won't be in a line-up outside the Salvation Army when he's fifty."
"My point is that the great challenge of an artist is to balance those two things: to be strong enough to have your own personal vision that you will put on the page or the canvas or the screen, no matter what people say, but it requires a radical sensitivity. You have to be completely open to what the world is telling you, to what your audience tells you. And balancing those two things is nearly impossible."
"If there's something dangerous, sauces are dangerous for the body."
"No, and I never, ever eat in between the meals. I control it well enough and with no pills, and I sleep seven hours a night. I go to bed. I fall asleep, and I wake up seven hours later, and this is the most important."
"I had nearly finished school because I was making effort not that bad on that. But there was a law in Germany after the war. You could not make your final examination before 18, so lots of people who were late because of the way had to do it first."
"I never smoked. I never drank and I never took drugs. The funny thing is, nothing is more boring, people like this. For me, it's OK. But most of my friends, at least they smoke and drink."
"No, I'm not a French designer either. I'm from nowhere. I'm a European, old European is all I am."
"The only artists I have ever known who are personally delightful are bad artists. Good artists exist simply in what they make, and consequently are perfectly uninteresting in what they are. A great poet, a really great poet, is the most unpoetical of all creatures. But inferior poets are absolutely fascinating. The worse their rhymes are, the more picturesque they look. The mere fact of having published a book of second-rate sonnets makes a man quite irresistible. He lives the poetry that he cannot write. The others write the poetry that they dare not realize."
"No artist has ethical sympathies. An ethical sympathy in an artist is an unpardonable mannerism of style."
"Only mediocrities progress. An artist revolves in a cycle of masterpieces, the first of which is no less perfect than the last."
"It is only the unimaginative who ever invents. The true artist is known by the use he makes of what he annexes."
"The only thing that the artist cannot see is the obvious. The only thing that the public can see is the obvious."
"While one should always study the method of a great artist, one should never imitate his manner. The manner of an artist is essentially individual, the method of an artist is absolutely universal. The first personality, which no one should copy."
"For an artist to marry his model is as fatal as for a gourmet to marry his cook: the one gets no sittings, and the other gets no dinners."
"To be an artist includes much; one must possess many gifts - absolute gifts - which have not been acquired by one's own effort. And, moreover, to succeed, the artist much possess the courageous soul."
"I will be developing artists for my new label. The rest is in God's Hands."
"One of life's intriguing paradoxes is that hierarchical social order makes cheap rents and outré artists' colonies possible. Raffish bohemian neighborhoods flourished in the days of racial segregation; under integration the artistic poor have no safe places in which to create.... If America lacks a vigorous culture it is partly because studios and ateliers have become crack houses."
"Local television shows do not, in general, supply make-up artists. The exception to this is Los Angeles, an unusually generous city in this regard, since they also provide this service for radio appearances."
"Citizen's Band radio renders one accessible to a wide variety of people from all walks of life. It should not be forgotten that all walks of life include conceptual artists, dry cleaners, and living poets."
"I was always aware, reading Chesterton, that there was someone writing this who rejoiced in words, who deployed them on the page as an artist deploys his paints upon his palette. Behind every Chesterton sentence there was someone painting with words, and it seemed to me that at the end of any particularly good sentence or any perfectly-put paradox, you could hear the author, somewhere behind the scenes, giggling with delight."
