"The easy part of being an artist is figuring out the message that everyone else is ready to hear. The hard part is waiting for the proper lull to make the announcement."
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Artist quotes
Artist
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Artist quotes (page 60 of 431)
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"Prior to my father's death, I was having a hard time committing to a career as an artist, but that's not because of who he was - it was because of who I am. It's true, though, that I felt I shouldn't compete with him, and that those feelings went away after he died."
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"An artist cannot do anything slovenly."
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"Very sacred is the vocation of the artist, who has to do directly with the works of God, and interpret the teaching of creation to mankind. All honor to the man who treats it sacredly; who studies, as in God's presence, the thoughts of God which are expressed to him; and makes all things according to the pattern which he is ever ready to show to earnest and reverent genius on the mount."
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"I'm aware of what I am, but I focus so much on myself as a musician and as an artist that I don't even notice that I'm the only female on a festival bill. I'm just like "oh I'm playing this festival."I haven't been very deeply involved in this greater outreach because my approach to equality is integration. I'm not into separatism, or an all-female festival. It's good and empowering but it doesn't allow for the bigger picture to get accomplished. We all need to be at the same festival - that's always been my approach."
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"And the camera position, the organization, looking for repeating forms, shapes, trying to set up a visual rhythm seemed to come very natural. All of a sudden I was in a forest of aluminum and steel rather than a forest that we might think of in a traditional sense."
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"The artist in his calling of interpreter creates because he must. He is so much of a voice that, for him, silence is like death"
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"If you go to a master to study and learn the techniques, you diligently follow all the instructions the master puts upon you. But then comes the time for using the rules in your own way and not being bound by them....You can actually forget the rules because they have been assimilated. You are an artist. Your own innocence now is of one who has become an artist, who has been, as it were, transmuted.... You can't have creativity unless you leave behind the bounded, the fixed, all the rules."
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"The one thing I'm jealous of a signature-artist situation is that if you just do one thing and slight variations on it, you wouldn't have to kill yourself to get a show done. I'm sick of killing myself."
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"All great artists draw from the same resource: the human heart, which tells us that we are all more alike than we are unalike."
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"The best of artists hath no thought to show which the rough stone in its superfluous shell doth not include; to break the marble spell is all the hand that serves the brain can do."
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"I think most artists start off playing in front of people and are used to doing it before they go out. I kind of did it the opposite. The thing got blown sky high and I'm on TV on "Good Morning America" doing my first performance in front of everybody. I think it was backward and from that, what I got out of it, the end is what I wanted, which was headlining my own tour, having people come because they loved my record and loved my music."
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"There are clear differences between child and adult artistic activity. While the child may be aware that he is doing things differently from others, he does not fully appreciate the rules and conventions of symbolic realms; his adventurousness holds little significance. In contrast, the adult artist is fully cognizant of the norms embraced by others; his willingness, his compulsion, to reject convention is purchased, at the very least, with full knowledge of what he is doing and often at considerable psychic cost to himself."
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"Artists use frauds to make human beings seem more wonderful than they really are. Dancers show us human beings who move much more gracefully than human beings really move. Films and books and plays show us people talking much more entertainingly than people really talk, make paltry human enterprises seem important. Singers and musicians show us human beings making sounds far more lovely than human beings really make. Architects give us temples in which something marvelous is obviously going on. Actually, practically nothing is going on."
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"I'm an old guy, and I was protesting during the Vietnam War. We killed fifty Asians for every loyal American. Every artist worth a damn in this country was terribly opposed to that war, finally, when it became evident what a fiasco and meaningless butchery it was. We formed sort of a laser beam of protest. Every painter, every writer, every stand-up comedian, every composer, every novelist, every poet aimed in the same direction. Afterwards, the power of this incredible new weapon dissipated."
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"Fiction is based on reality unless you're a fairytale artist."
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"I'm an artist first and foremost. So things are gonna go up and down and sideways and whichever way all through life."
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"In his garden every man may be his own artist without apology or explanation. Here is one spot where each may experience the "romance of possibility"."
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"You learned people and artists have, no doubt, all sorts of superior things in your heads; but you're human beings like the rest of us, and we, too, have our dreams and fancies."
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"The artist labors while he may, But finds at best too brief the day; And, tho' his works outlast the time And nation that they make sublime, He feels and sees that Nature knows Nothing of time in what she does, But has a leisure infinite Wherein to do her work aright."
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