Artist Quotes
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I think being an activist and an artist is an interesting contradiction, because so often they are at odds with one another. When you write as an artist you have to clean the palate of your own politics in creating characters and activism is kind of the exact opposite.
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Chocolate and candy. That's what we brought in to our friends. We worked in East Berlin with other artists who were smuggled out to come work in the Western Bloc. It was extraordinary because people in East Berlin just wanted to know what was happening. Music. Fashion. The news. All of the things we get every day.
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The real truthfulness of all works of imagination, sculpture, painting, and written fiction, is so purely in the imagination, that the artist never seeks to represent positive truth, but the idealized image of a truth.
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I so much appreciate it when anybody tries to make something and tries to be an artist - I'm happy to see the work.
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The only thing one can give an artist is leisure in which to work. To give an artist leisure is actually to take part in his creation.
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As my contribution as an artist and a storyteller, I have to have some hope. I have to have some beacon of good at the end of it.
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The literary artist will ... portray what he knows, and little else. Imagination is built upon knowledge, and his dreams will rest upon his facts. He is worth to the world just about what he has learned from it, and no more.
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It ought to be illegal for an artist to marry. If the artist must marry let him find someone more interested in art, or his art, or the artist part of him, than in him. After which let them take tea together three times a week.
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I just look at it as a real group activity when you are making movies. There are so many different artists doing so many different things, and they are all interconnected. So I like to see what everybody else is going to bring to the table before I make up my mind too much about anything.
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Practicality continues to be a challenge for me - it's at odds with being an artist. I actually had a career on stage in New York - not a brilliant career or I'd still be doing it - but I got enough work to keep my agent and my union health insurance.
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A picture is nothing but a bridge between the soul of the artist and that of the spectator.
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I think anyone who is an artist or writer or owns their own business or whatever can agree that when you come up with something on your own, it's an addictive feeling.
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I have no doubt about a photographer in particular and a digital artist in general having become contemporary icons.
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I'm absolute attacking my own instinct for politeness, but I think I admire artists who just speak out or who are strong, so it's very hard.
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You are an artist. What work of art will you leave behind?
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A great artist ... takes what he did not make and makes of it something that only he can make.
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In every society the artist or writer remains an outsider.
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When Allen Ginsberg was still alive, he was was an artist, but he was very local. He was just another wing-nut in the neighborhood and he was very accessible. You'd see him in Tompkins Square Park or in the local delicatessen, in one of the greasy spoon restaurants on First Avenue or a Chinese restaurant.
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Video is a funny thing. It's one thing to be an artist, singer-songwriter, and use words and create pictures in people's minds. And then be asked to do video for it, to actually give a certain visual for your song.
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The growth that an artist seeks is a fine combination of mastering craft, garnering an audience, maintaining one's mental health, and working mightily from a ever-expanding base of experience.
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The artist must express the summation of his feeling, knowing and believing through the unity of his life and work.
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Many artists use their own lives as a kind of case study to examine what it's like to be human.
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I have been in situations where actors are treated like robots: say the lines, say it like this, we don't have time for conversations. That is a terrible position to be in as an artist. You feel used.
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I was thinking that people have to believe you're crazy in order to take you seriously as an artist. If you're wandering the streets, talking in gibberish, nobody ever asks you to change anything about your art because there's no context for people to look at what you do.
