"People think I'm an artist because my films lose money."
Artist quotes
Artist
8.6K quotes on this topic — from poets, philosophers, and thinkers across history.
Explore further
Topics related to Artist
Browse quotes that often appear alongside artist — connected by shared ideas and recurring themes.
Quote collection
Artist quotes (page 57 of 431)
Follow a thought to its author, or read the full quote page.
"Artists are people who are not at all interested in the facts - only in the truth."
"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."
"My life was pretty rough."
"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."
"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."
"do what only a true artist can do ... pounce upon the forgotten butterfly of revelation"
"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."
"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."
"The mission of the artist in an over-technologi zed society, is to call the old magic back to life."
"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."
"The function of the artist is to provide what life does not."
"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."
"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?"
"I think that's the role of an artist, right? To touch someone and make us stretch out just a little bit more."
"If you are wiling to do something that might not work, you are closer to being an 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."
"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."
"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."
"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."