Artist quotes

Artist

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Artist quotes (page 57 of 431)

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Yoko Ono Artist, Musician, Activist
Artist

"In the '60s, people were still very protective of each field that they belonged to. Avant-garde artists didn't know about rock or pop or jazz. And the jazz people of course didn't want to know about any other music. They were all just kind of protecting their territory."

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Artist

"I see more and more that my work goes infinitely better when I am properly fed, and the paints are there, and the studio and all that... I wish I could manage to make you really understand that when you give money to artists, you are yourself doing an artist's work, and that I only want my pictures to be of such a quality that you will not be too dissatisfied with your work."

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Ray Charles Musician, Singer
Artist

"I think that most great artists who are extremely known, as I am, would intimidate a lot of people. I don't want to do that to people, but I know I do."

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Sarah Thornton Sociologist
Artist

"The term bohemian has a bad reputation because it's allied to myriad clichés, but Parisians originally adopted the term, associated with nomadic Gypsies, to describe artists and writers who stayed up all night and ignored the pressures of the industrial world."

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Thomas King Author, Professor
Artist

"Eden Robinson is one of those rare artists who comes to writing with a skill and maturity that has taken the rest of us decades to achieve."

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Tom Robbins Novelist, Essayist
Artist

"If there’s a thing, a scene, maybe, an image that you want to see real bad, that you need to see but it doesn’t exist in the world around you, at least not in the form that you envision, then you create it so that you can look at it and have it around, or show it to other people who wouldn’t have imagined it because they perceive reality in a more narrow, predictable way. And that’s it. That’s all an artist does."

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Toni Morrison Novelist, Essayist
Artist

"This is the time for every artist in every genre to do what he or she does loudly and consistently. It doesn't matter to me what your position is. You've got to keep asserting the complexity and the originality of life, and the multiplicity of it, and the facets of it. This is about being a complex human being in the world, not about finding a villain. This is no time for anything else than the best that you've got."

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Thomas Mann Novelist
Artist

"There were profound reasons for his attachment to the sea: he loved it because as a hardworking artist he needed rest, needed to escape from the demanding complexity of phenomena and lie hidden on the bosom of the simple and tremendous; because of a forbidden longing deep within him that ran quite contrary to his life's task and was for that very reason seductive, a longing for the unarticulated and immeasurable, for eternity, for nothingness. To rest in the arms of perfection is the desire of any man intent upon creating excellence; and is not nothingness a form of perfection?"

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Seth Godin Author, Entrepreneur
Artist

"Being an artist isn't a genetic disposition or a specific talent. It's an attitude we can all adopt. It's a hunger to seize new ground, make connections, and work without a map. If you do those things, you're an artist."

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Artist

"It's interesting how people who were once fairly radical can become, later in life, kind of conservative and not just in terms of politics - how if you're an artist, you can start out being somewhat avant-garde and then end up doing landscapes. Sometimes the opposite can happen, but it's usually the other way around."

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Sidonie Gabrielle Colette Author, Actress
Artist

"As for an authentic villain, the real thing, the absolute, the artist, one rarely meets him even once in a lifetime. The ordinary bad hat is always in part a decent fellow."

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Simon Rich Writer
Artist

"I wanted to be an artist after all, and my teachers told me these were the best authors the 20th century had to offer. But these books sucked. They were so boring and sloppy and plotless. And Bob Dylan's lyrics seemed nonsensical to me - almost like he had just gotten high and written down whatever random thoughts occurred to him."

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