Artist Quotes
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Those nations of artists, finding their own individualism, and kind of standing against the world: to me that's the ultimate nightmare. I want to get lost and diffused in the world.
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The artist forges himself to the others, midway between the beauty he cannot do without and the community he cannot tear himself away from. That is why true artists scorn nothing: they are obliged to understand rather than to judge.
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The modern artist must live by craft and violence. His gods are violent gods. Those artists, so called, whose work does not show this strife, are uninteresting.
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The man who tells the tale if he has a tale worth telling will know exactly what he is about and this business of the artist as a sort of starry-eyed inspired creature, dancing along, with his feet two or three feet above the surface of the earth, not really knowing what sort of prints he's leaving behind him, is nothing like the truth.
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I think I didn't know what I was creating, as much as I knew what I didn't want to do. And I didn't want my mother's life. She was an unhappy, frustrated artist who always dreamed of a life that was never going to be hers.
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When the woman you live with is an artist, every day is a surprise.
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There comes a time as an artist, can't follow the crowd. You have to do YOU, and make the crowd follow you.
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The history of modern art is also the history of the progressive loss of art's audience. Art has increasingly become the concern of the artist and the bafflement of the public.
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We're all trying to be artists making our own unique statements. I think the only real way to do that is through failure.
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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.
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I think, for some artists, the fear of taking on a political identity stems from not wanting to be pigeonholed as political actor or a political musician. It becomes this thing where somehow your art can no longer exist on its own and be multifaceted.
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There was an Israeli artist who was in grad school with me. I remember trying to get to know him on a more personal level. He had moved to the Fairfax area, not realizing that it's a super Jewish part of L.A. He told me, I don't understand why American Jews feel this connection with me. I was embarrassed because I was feeling that connection with him, too!
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I suppose I could try to be some avant-garde artist if I wanted to, but that doesn't interest me as much.
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The idea of space is given to the artist to change if he can. The subject matter in the abstract is space.
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An artist is a creature driven by demons. He don't know why they choose him and he's usually too busy to wonder why.
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I want to make meaningful music always - I think every artist does. We want our words and melodies to mean something to people, even if it is just one person.
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I'm an artist. And usually when I tell people I'm an artist, they just look at me and say, 'Do you paint?' or 'What kind of medium do you work in?'
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What was the right level of prosperity, the level that banished dire need but did not satiate, the level that did not threaten the artist in the individual? And how did one stop when one arrived at it?
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It is the business of the artist to make humanity aware of itself.
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I had thrown my body in for art... I had thrown myself into this game for art. You know, I was not a very good artist. But this was, like, one thing I could do. (On being photographed nude playing chess with Marcel Duchamp at Duchamp's 1963 retrospective at the Pasadena Museum of Art.)
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Some artists are definitely trying to do different styles. Some, not a lot. But even from what you've seen [of] Outkast, Kanye West, and Lil' Wayne, and different people expressing their way of evolving in hip-hop. In the evolution of hip-hop, they're doing different things. And you've seen hip-hop have more of a global presence and impact on the world.
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For some reason, all artists have self-esteem issues.
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I think the best way to listen to my music is through recording. I would love to be one of those artists where you can go into a coffee shop and watch people pass by and then my music is in their ears. Not necessarily a sensory deprivation thing, but that's cool too. Unfortunately in order to focus on nobody else, you would probably have to go into a dark room and just sit there and listen to it.
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Every artist has a very particular sound and style.
