"Artists have a right to be modest and a duty to be vain."
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Artist quotes
Artist
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Artist quotes (page 64 of 431)
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"An artist should make concessions to the listener. That is why Bruckner dedicated one of his symphonies to the Good Lord."
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"The true artist is known by what he annexes, and he annexes everything."
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"I don't think people are born artists; I think it comes from a mixture of your surroundings, the people you meet, and luck."
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"The states of birth, suffering, love, and death, are extreme states: extreme, universal, and inescapable. We all know this, but we would rather not know it. The artist is present to correct the delusions to which we are all prey in our attempts to avoid this knowledge." - James Baldwin, "The Creative Process"
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"God made the world as an artist and that is why the world must learn from its artists."
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"I want to be an artist, not an erotic freak. I don’t want to be sold to the public as a celluloid aphrodisiac."
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"The soul of the artist cannot remain hidden."
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"Art like life, should be free, since both are experimental."
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"... everyone's free to embark on either a great clipper or a little fishing boat. An artist is an explorer who oughtn't to shrink from anything: it doesn't matter whether he goes to the left or the right -- his goal sanctifies all."
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"Every true artist does feel, consciously or unconsciously, that he is touching transcendental truths; that his images are shadows of things seen through the veil. In other words, the natural mystic does know that there is something there, something behind the clouds or within the trees; but he believes that the pursuit of beauty is the way to find it; that imagination is a sort of incantation that can call it up."
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"Everything is there: the love of Art."
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"If you participate in life, you don’t see it clearly: you suffer from it too much or enjoy it too much. The artist, to my way of thinking, is a monstrosity, something outside nature. All the misfortunes Providence inflicts on him come from his stubborness in denying that maxim."
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"Reveal art; conceal the artist."
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"It's easy to look down from the summit you've reached, or even the summit I've reached, and talk about the responsibilities of the artist, but most people are just trying to get their foot in the door and make a living."
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"It should be not only a synergy, but a complicity between the viewer and the artist, and so I'm wide open to that."
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"You may cut off the heads of every rich man now living--of every statesman--every literary, and every scientific authority, without in the least changing the social situation. Artists, of course, disappeared long ago as social forces. So did the church. Corporations are not elevators, but levellers, as I see them."
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"The artist beholds in nature more than she herself Nature is conscious of."
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"The finest and healthiest thing about science is, as in the mountains, the brisk air blowing around in it.--The spiritually delicate (such as artists) shun and slander science owing to this air."
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"Ballet dancers are a self-chosen elite. To survive and surmount years of disciplinary preparation and seasons of even more arduous performance requires rigid determination and almost mindless self-abnegation. One other factor is difficult to predetermine: without a certain admixture of hysteria - sometimes masking as self-obsession, sometimes even counterfeiting incipient madness - performers, at once acrobats, artists, and animals, make little public impression."
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