Artist Quotes
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If I had the capabilities of being something other than I am, I would. It's no fun being an artist. You know what it's like, writing, it's torture.
John Lennon
The Beatles
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There are all these different areas of specialization. That's it. You have to be a specialist nowadays. There's no other way. I was an artist for a long time, but I was always into being a general practitioner. I did a little of this and a little of that. And nothing got me anywhere. You have to specialize. If you don't specialize, it takes you until you're about fifty years old before anybody notices that you're doing anything at all.
Debbie Harry
Blondie
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I am a woman and I am from Mexico, that is true. I am an artist, that is also true. When I work, I hope I'm not a woman from Mexico but an artist in body and spirit.
Andrea Suarez Paz
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The unusual thing about doing street poster art - or something with a conscious social critique in it - is that the artist thinks they're a little in control, focusing and trying to make a specific point. But even then, when you look at it a few years later, you realize you were just working through some of the usual feelings you were going through during that time.
Eric Drooker
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If an artist has no experience before he makes a painting or a sculpture, he is not an artist.
Naum Gabo
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To deceive gracefully is the very essence of social life. One must start by deceiving oneself, and make a lifelong practice of deceiving others; if one does it well enough, in time one might even become an artist, the greatest illusionists of all.
Elspeth Huxley
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Out of the closets and into the museums, libraries, architectural monuments, concert halls, bookstores, recording studios and film studios of the world. Everything belongs to the inspired and dedicated thief…. Words, colors, light, sounds, stone, wood, bronze belong to the living artist. They belong to anyone who can use them. Loot the Louvre! A bas l’originalité, the sterile and assertive ego that imprisons us as it creates. Vive le vol-pure, shameless, total. We are not responsible. Steal anything in sight.
William S. Burroughs
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O, had I but followed the arts!
William Shakespeare
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The artist is an educator of artists of the future who are able to understand and in the process of understanding perform unexpected - the best - evolutions.
Saul Steinberg
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As an artist, you don't think about the parabola or the arc you're describing or where you're going to ultimately end up, you're just kind of crawling around, seeing what's out there.
Michael Nesmith
The Monkees
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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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I'm not God, but I'm working within my own means as an artist and a person, and I possibly have more power than God does, in whatever form he has, if he exists, because I can work without the overarching ambition of wanting to rule over everything. I can work just for the heck of it.
Raymond Pettibon
Black Flag
