Artist quotes
8.6K quotes on this topic — from poets, philosophers, and thinkers across history.
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"It is very bad for (an artist) to talk about how he (creates). It is not the (artist's) province to explain or to run guided tours through the more difficult country of his work. It's none of their business that you had to learn. Let them think you were born that way."
"Artists aren't looking for you to write them something; they're looking for you to give them something new."
"I'm not looking to be an artist to make money. I'm looking to be an artist."
"I don't care who's playing. Even if it's my favorite artist, I'm probably not gonna go and see him."
"But the one thing you should. not do is to suppose that when something is wrong with the arts, it is wrong with the arts ONLY."
"Artists are the antennae of the race, but the bullet-headed many will never learn to trust the great artists."
"I think another way that you can really harm yourself as an artist is by buying into the mythology that it's really important."
"Salome had but seven veils; the artist has a thousand."
"The writer concerned more with technique than truth becomes a technician, not an artist."
"The unsatisfied yearning of the artist reaches back to the primordial image in the unconscious which is best fitted to compensate the inadequacy and one-sidedness of the present."
"It disturbed me that the music industry had gone down the drain, even though people were listening to more music than ever and from a greater diversity of artists."
"Perceptions are portraits, not photographs, and their form reveals the artist’s hand every bit as much as it reflects the things portrayed"
"It is very common with artists who are of a generation that has already gone by to get overly concerned with, Oh my God I have to sell to the younger generation."
"I didn't want to be an artist."
"I'm one of the artists that even though I love my soulful stuff, I love to turn up and have a good time and that's another side of me. As long as it doesn't veer away from who I am, I'm down with it."
"The influence that Oakland has on my sound is about 90%. There's so many different elements to Oakland. Of course you have the street elements, but then you also have the culture and there's so much culture around. It's a competitive city, it's full of just great artists and talent. It gave me the confidence, the passion, the realness I try my hardest to portray, so it has had about 90% influence on me."
"I'm connecting and that's really what any artist wants at the end of the day which is to connect with their fans and supporters."
"A lot of the songs are pretty unmasked. If you listen to "As Cool As I Am," it's not all that different from what you were hearing from Ani DiFranco and some of the other indie women artists of the time. It was still in that context, still seen as folk music."
"I found collaboration to be a terrible thing in Hollywood because there are so many people involved you have to make a thousand little compromises to every project and every single scene is a committee decision. It's maddening. But with comics you've got an artist and you've got a writer."
"A president cannot meaningfully honor certain token artists while the people at large are so dishonored.'”"
