Artist quotes
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"I'll bet there are a lot of artists that nobody hears about who just make more money than anybody. The people that do all the sculptures and paintings for big building construction. We never hear about them, but they make more money than anybody."
"I always wished I had died, and I still wish that, because I could have gotten the whole thing over with."
"I'll bet there are a lot of artists that nobody hears about who just make more money than anybody."
"Many artists give up after a while."
"The best thing about being an artist, instead of a madman or someone who writes letters to the editor, is that you get to engage in satisfying work. Even if you never publish a word, you have something important to pour yourself into."
"You simply keep putting down one damn word after the other, as you hear them, as they come to you. You can either set brick as a laborer or as an artist."
"I wonder if the artist ever lives his life--he is so busy recreating it."
"Photographers and artists contribute a lot to the world and have a right to exist in relative security and comfort."
"I think there's a great storytelling tradition in the restaurant business that tends to attract people with an oral tradition of bulls - ting and bollocking. Creative people, people for whom the 9-to-5 world is not attractive or impossible. It seems that way. There are a lot of stories in the business, and a lot of characters - and it seems to attract its share of artists and writers and people who hope to do something creative in their lives."
"You have your own perceptions as an artist because you're put on this planet to create mystery, but you're put here to unravel mysteries too."
"Stalin said artists are the engineers of human souls. I wanted to show what happens to the soul when the engineers get through with it."
"The good bodybuilders have the same mind ... that a sculptor has. If you analyze it, you look in the mirror and you say, okay, I need a bit more deltoids ... so that the proportion's right, and ... you exercise and put those deltoids on, whereas an artist would just slap on some clay on each side."
"The composer reveals the innermost nature of the world, and expresses the profoundest wisdom in a language that his reasoning faculty does not understand, just as a magnetic somnambulist gives information about things of which she has no conception when she is awake. Therefore in the composer, more than in any other artist, the man is entirely separate and distinct from the artist."
"A man of intellect is like an artist who gives a concert without any help from anyone else, playing on a single instrument--a piano, say, which is a little orchestra in itself. Such a man is a little world in himself; and the effect produced by various instruments together, he produces single-handed, in the unity of his own consciousness. Like the piano, he has no place in a symphony; he is a soloist and performs by himself--in soli tude, it may be; or if in the company with other instruments, only as principal; or for setting the tone, as in singing."
"Sometimes in this country, we don't focus a lot on people's experience and their resume. Mitt Romney would be the most experienced executive to be nominated since 1952. The fundamental task for the next president is going to be fixing things, cleaning things up, being a turnaround artist, if you will."
"Burmese authors and artists can play the role that artists everywhere play. They help to mold the outlook of a society - not the whole outlook and they are not the only ones to mold the outlook of society, but they have an important role to play there. And I think if they take up this role seriously and link it to the kind of changes were wish to bring about in our country they could be a tremendous help."
"I always find it fascinating to ask people, why they've chosen to live their life as an artist? Why be an actor, a singer, an author, a filmmaker? I've heard such inspiring answers to that question."
"I think it's very hard to go into the same business as your family when you're an artist."
"There's only one passion in most artists more violent than their desire for admiration: their fear of identifying the nature of such admiration as they do receive."
"An artist reveals his naked soul in his work."
