Artist Quotes
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As an artist I have always tried to be faithful to my vision of life, and I have frequently been in conflict with those who wanted me to paint not what I saw but what they wished me to see.
Diego Rivera
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When one is an artist, what else can he be?
Ignacy Jan Paderewski
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Banksy's a very selfish, driven, paranoid artist. For good reasons.
Ben Eine
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What makes someone an artist? I don't think is has anything to do with a paintbrush. There are painters who follow the numbers, or paint billboards, or work in a small village in China, painting reproductions. These folks, while swell people, aren't artists. On the other hand, Charlie Chaplin was an artist, beyond a doubt. So is Jonathan Ive, who designed the iPod. You can be an artist who works with oil paints or marble, sure. But there are artists who work with numbers, business models, and customer conversations. Art is about intent and communication, not substances.
Seth Godin
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We eat up artists like there's going to be a famine at the end.
Yolande Cornelia "Nikki" Giovanni, Jr.
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Others may be able to accept standards from another, but an artist is a person who decides.
William Stafford
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You can't steal an artist's songs and also tell him he can't license that music to a commercial.
Jack White
The White Stripes
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I think music should be free. I think all communication should be free. I think people should respect artists, and there should be a certain respect for artists who give their music away for free. If your music winds up on Napster and you approve of it, then the person downloading your music should at least go to your concert, should at least purchase your songs.
Lawrence "Kris" Parker
Boogie Down Productions
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Just black executives have a bias against older artists. We don't respect our elders. That's not because of white people. That's because of black leadership. We just have that problem, and it's something that I am going to spend the rest of my life trying to conquer.
Lawrence "Kris" Parker
Boogie Down Productions
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No one is an artist unless he carries his picture in his head before painting it, and is sure of his method and composition.
Claude Monet
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The artist of today is more than an improved camera, he is more complex, richer, and wider. He is a creature on the earth and a creature within the whole, that is, a creature on a star among stars.
Paul Klee
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I like people like Robert De Niro and Anthony Hopkins. And Gianfranco Zola, who played for Chelsea and Italy. He's an artist with his feet.
Phil Daniels
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Virtually every subject is most effectively learned directly from the greatest thinkers, historians, artists, philosophers, scientists, prophets and their original works. Great works inspire greatness. Mediocre or poor works inspire mediocre or poor learning. The great accomplishments of humanity are the key to quality education.
Oliver DeMille
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To be an artist you must learn the laws of nature.
Auguste Renoir
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Nature has mysterious infinities and imaginative power. It is always varying the productions it offers to us. The artist himself is one of nature's means.
Paul Gauguin
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...why did Plato say that poets should be chased out of the republic? Precisely because every poet and every artist is an antisocial being. He's not that way because he wants to be; he can't be any other way.... and if he really is an artist it is in his nature not to want to be admitted, because if he is admitted it can only mean he is doing something which is understood, approved, and therefore old hat - worthless. Anything new, anything worth doing, can't be recognized.
Pablo Picasso
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The idea that musicians/artists have a responsibility to be community leaders or "role models" is problematic to me because I really believe that some of the most exciting art is not community-minded at least in any obvious or direct way, which is not to say that it is not ethical or consciousness-changing.
Kathleen Hanna
Bikini Kill
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No muse shoots darts of insight into the unsuspecting artist.
Eric Maisel
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The real world with its common logic pushes us toward catastrophe. The artists seek in his work to free himself from this weight. Art is being transformed into politics, love into trade, education into an apparatus for stifling the mind. In the midst of such horrors, clearly only the dream within me has life. But how do other people live? -There is color, virginal expression - new, without a cage, without routine, without limit, a bath of sun and light. We must realize that nothing man does is of any value. The trouble is that people want to be paid. Only sick men can be artists. Their suffering pushes them into the accomplishment of deeds which reinvest the world with meaning. The sensitive man or the artist can only be a sick man in our civilized life, so full of lies. To think of art as a profession, how appealing! – Painting is man in the face of his downfall.
Bram van Velde
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I was associated with the Artist Placement Group in the early 1970s and David Hall, the video artist, was an Artist Placement Group artist. I was completely broke at that time, and he said to me, "Come and do some teaching" - he was head of department at Maidstone College of Art. And I went and did a couple of teaching days and practically the only person who showed up was David Cunningham [Flying Lizard's main man], with all of this finished work
David Toop
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If a man becomes more mature due to certain episodes in his life, it gives him the opportunity to look at life in a much more deep way. I believe the artist and the man work parallel, with the same feelings, the same soul, the same sensitivity.
Jose Carreras
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It was never my goal to capitalize on punk. I could never make it as a commercial artist. I didn't back then and I still don't have the temperament and don't care for drawing or painting or making art for any other purposes other my own.
Raymond Pettibon
Black Flag
