Artist Quotes
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Any artist who aligns themselves with a politician is making a category error because what politicians do is not on a human scale, it is on a geopolitical scale.
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We all exist in similar systems that mirror and reproduce the same American culture for the most part. What Oscar Wilde said about the lucky author who has a non-literary day job no longer holds, if it ever did. Artists seek validation as much as they seek money. The creation and invention of culture and canon is where most of the trouble lies.
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The artist deals in what cannot be said in words. The artist whose medium is fiction does this in words. The novelist says in words what cannot be said in words.
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Doing representations of real people is not my strongpoint as a visual artist, and I know that.
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What do you say when someone has truly inspired you? How do you express to an artist how deeply their work has affected you?
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Did any artist ever bring more pure joy to more people than Fred Astaire?
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I'm not an artist. An artist makes an object. Me, it's not an object, I work in history, I'm a storyteller.
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I understand that artists and critics make a big deal over the Grammys. But when I go to my shows and I'm selling out arenas in London, and when I'm in Australia and Japan, there aren't any Grammys there. There are human beings who I've touched. There are human beings who are inspired by me, who I love dearly. And that's what my career is based on.
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I think the line is where you're in the studio, you're creating. That belongs to you as an artist. Nothing should taint that. I shouldn't be thinking about what the fans want, I shouldn't be thinking about what the radio wants, what the label wants, what your manager wants, a song for the chicks, a song for the street.
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No one can be an artist without a rich inner life.
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I am an artist and have no right buggering about with verbs and split infinitives, which is what being a writer says to me.
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Self-censorship happens not only in China, or Iran or ex-Soviet places. It can happen anywhere. If an artist penetrates a certain taboo or a certain power through their work, he or she will face this problem. I'm always saying that commercial censorship is our foremost censorship globally today. Why do we still pretend we are free?
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It's like I'm basically an artist. I'm no different from a painter who sits there and loves what he does.
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An artist is born like a priest is born. If they are born an artist, I would tell them art is not a game: it is something very serious which completely requires everything you have to give.
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A good producer brings out the best in the artist he's working with. You shouldn't be able to listen to something and say, 'So-and-so produced this album.'
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I am performing this role of the artist and this role of the 'negress' coming into a white-box institution. It's kind of a self-appointed role: the self-designated negress.
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I was the first artist, I think, to ever do an all-keyboard album. There were things that resembled it, like Stevie Wonder. A lot of his stuff was on keyboards, but he used brass and he used other things as well. I was the first artist, also, to use drum machines. I was really the one who kind of started that whole thing.
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I'd rather be somewhere building a house, if I knew how. The whole idea of being a professional artist is like a demeaning kind of thing.
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It is hard to separate the art from the artist.
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For me Greece is Maria Farantouri. This is how I imagined Goddess Hera to be: strong, pure and vigilant. I have never encountered any other artist able to give me such a strong sense of the divine.
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If it's something quite low-key then I'll often do my own makeup. But for something like a premiere, it's good to have a makeup artist because they know what they're doing.
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Every other artist begins with a blank canvas, a piece of paper the photographer begins with the finished product.
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The reason why I play around with the word legend is because this is my 7th CD and a lot of artists don't even make it that far. Many artists don't even pass three or four.
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Different people have different ways of doing things. For me, becoming a songwriter first and falling in love with the Nashville songwriting community and the process of songs and getting better and putting more in what I wanted to say, was absolutely vital in me even wanting to be an artist.
