Artist Quotes
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Nature is garrulous to the point of confusion, let the artist be truly taciturn.
Paul Klee
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I wanted to be an artist. I was studying art. I wanted to be a great painter. When I went into the Navy, there wasn't much to draw at sea. So I began writing, and I began reading a lot.
Ed McBain
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One of the most unattractive human traits, and so easy to fall into, is resentment at the sudden shared popularity of a previously private pleasure. Which of us hasn't been annoyed when a band, writer, artist or television series that had been a minority interest of ours has suddenly achieved mainstream popularity? When it was at a cult level we moaned at the philistinism of a world that didn't appreciate it, and now that they do appreciate it we're all resentful and dog-in-the-manger about it.
Stephen Fry
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As an artist, expectations are basically your enemy. If you're truly making something to make it, then you're not thinking about anything else except what you're making.
Kevin Drew
Broken Social Scene
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I equate inspiration with desire – the desire that moves us to be artists in the first place. To attempt to make a painting without this motivation is a waste of time.
Nita Engle
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I think “The Book of Mormon” has made that difference in its field. It changed the game. It’s something that 20 years from now people will still be talking about, hopefully. That’s my goal as an artist, as a creator, as a work for hire, is to choose projects that make people think, make people talk, and make people interested in having a dialogue.
Josh Gad
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Learning how to shine a pair of shoes to me was like if you could do, you were like you were on your way to having abilities and skills as to be able to spit-shine a pair of shoes like they're patent leather. You're a bad dude. To spit-shine a pair of shoes. So, even to that small detail, that aided me and assisted me in becoming the artist that I am. My uncles' sense of style, their type of ties they used. The way they wore their suits, big and huge and baggy. The way they did their haircuts with the side burns. All of that.
Willie Herron
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And it's always the same kind of artist, I think, who has more enjoyment being slightly on the outside of things, who doesn't want to be sucked into the tyranny of the mainstream. Because once you get sucked into that, you're dead as an artist.
David Bowie
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Nowhere does one come to know an artist better than in his prints and the woodcut is the most graphic of the print processes.
Ernst Ludwig Kirchner
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When you work with a major label they create their own message for you and a lot of the time that works great, or at least it did back in the 90's but now it doesn't work, so I think as an artist if you learn your own business, like anybody would when they want to start a little restaurant - they'd figure it out and then build it and they work hard - then it could be your own little business that you grew to as big as you want it to be but you had much more control with how to communicate it and how it's cared for.
Tom DeLonge
Blink-182
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In her dance, she controlled the bright paper birds with invisible wires and threads. She played the human: heavy, tied to earth. Her dances weren't pretty or delightful, but they were magical, [...] They called her a dancer and a puppeteer and an artist. They might have called her a witch, and not the good kind either.
Katherine Catmull
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I don’t put myself on a pedestal, I put the artist on the pedestal. I’m servicing the artist. I want to give you an experience. I want you to walk around and say “I feel happy doing art for a living.” No matter what the ups and down, my job is to make the artists be the best they want to be.
Terrace Martin
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Obviously all writers, all artists, have their own internal critics; as they write they are being self-critical.
Edna Longley
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Make your life your art. It doesn't have to be that you're an artist. I know I talk about art a lot, but I mean a very broad thing with that. You could be a veterinarian, that's your art. Find your art; find your thing you love.
Gerard Way
My Chemical Romance
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Most of the time when I have met artists who have meant a lot to me, the experience has been well above expectation. People like Iggy, Lou Reed, Jerry Lee Lewis, Black Sabbath, Nick Cave, Hubert Selby Jr, Billy Gibbons, Al Pacino, John Lee Hooker, James Brown, Johnny Cash etc. have been really great to me. What strikes me is most of the time, the bigger the celeb/legend, the more polite and cool they are. It's the insecure ones who treat you like they're doing you a favor by shaking your hand.
Henry Rollins
Black Flag
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The greatest artist has no conception which a single block of white marble does not potentially contain within its mass, but only a hand obedient to the mind can penetrate to this image.
Michelangelo
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The artist who pictures sounds as colours, who feels the difference in microns between one sea green and another... is not attending to what the world considers important.
Eric Maisel
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There are different kinds of artists and very often, I'll be very frank with you, I wish I were a different kind.
Wole Soyinka
