Artist Failure Quotes & Sayings

Remember He is the artist and you are only the picture. You can't see it. So quietly submit to be painted
i.e., keep fulfilling all the obvious duties of your station (you really know quite well enough what they are!), asking forgiveness for each failure and then leaving it alone.You are in the right way. Walk
don't keep on looking at it. — C.S. Lewis

Success involves failing first. Ask any successful person. Ask any experienced person, really. It's all part of the creative process, so sit back and allow the artist within you to sprout, blossom and flourish. You must accept that your first, second, and third attempt at something might suck. It's a necessary step in improving your skill. Failure is your teacher, not your judge. — Connor Franta

No man who has managed to keep out of an office can be called a failure in life. — Richard Aldington

I believe the way to write a good play is to convince yourself it is easy to do
then go ahead and do it with ease. Don't maul, don't suffer, don't groan till the first draft is finished. A play is a pheonix and it dies a thousand deaths. Usually at night. In the morning it springs up again from its ashes and crows like a happy rooster. It is never as bad as you think, it is never as good. It is somewhere in between, and success or failure depends on which end of your emotional gamut concerning its value it approaches more closely. But it is much more likely to be good if you think it is wonderful while you are writing the first draft. An artist must believe in himself. Your belief is contagious. Others may say he is vain, but they are affected. — Tennessee Williams

If you look at true artists, if they get really good at something, it occurs to them that they can do this for the rest of their lives, and they can be really successful at it to the outside world, but not really successful to themselves. That's the moment that an artist really decides who he or she is. If they keep on risking failure they're still artists. Dylan and Picasso were always risking failure. — Brent Schlender

I am someone who proudly and humbly affirms that love is the mystery-of-mysteries, and that nothing measurable matters 'a very good God damn'; that 'an artist, a man, a failure' is no mere whenfully accreting mechanism, but a givingly eternal complexity-neither some soulless and heartless ultrapredatory infra-animal nor any understandingly knowing and believing and thinking automaton, but a naturally and miraculously whole human being-a feelingly illimitable individual; whose only happiness is to transcend himself, whose every agony is to grow. — E. E. Cummings

I asked Geertrui the other day what she thought love is-real love, true love. She said that for her real love is observing another person and being observed by another person with complete attention. If she's right, you only have to look at the pictures Rembrandt painted of Titus, and there are quite a lot, to see that they loved each other. Because that is what you're seeing. Complete attention, one of the other ... "but in that case," he said, speaking the words as the thought came to him, "all art is love, because all art is about looking closely, isn't it? Looking closely at what's being painted."
"The artist looking closely while he paints, the viewer looking closely at what has been painted. I agree. All true art, yes. Painting, Writing-literature-also. I think it is. And bad art is a failure to observe with complete attention. So, you see why I like the history of art. It's the study of how to observe life with complete attention. It's the history of love. — Aidan Chambers

The artist lives in an atmosphere of perpetual failure. — Harry Crews

"Failure" isn't a word I really use. I am a very resilient person; I bounce back extremely fast, and I believe in myself and my talent as an artist. — Sebastian Roche

The artist's greatest creation began
the night he washed his memory of his failures
rubbed opium on his lips
drank the wine that women offered him
and lay down and wept. — Roman Payne

The greatest artists like Dylan, Picasso and Newton risked failure. And if we want to be great, we've got to risk it too. — Steve Jobs

Perhaps it would have been possible to see in him a new Prometheus ... the hero who for the good of mankind exposes himself to the agonies of the damned ... undaunted by failure, by an unceasing effort of courage holding despair at bay, doggedly persistent in the face of self-doubt, which is the artist's bitterest enemy ... — W. Somerset Maugham

We didn't have sense enough to take care of it. Now it's torn. And the artist is dead. — Philip K. Dick

Victor Serge died in exile and obscurity, apparently no more than a splinter of a splinter in the Marxist movement. But with the passage of the years, he looms up as one of the great moral figures of our time, an artist of such integrity and a revolutionary of such purity as to overshadow those who achieved fame and power. His failure was his success. I know of no participant in Russia's revolution and Spain's agonies who more deserves the attention of our concerned youth. — I. F. Stone

What an artist does, is fail. Any reading of the literature ... (I mean the literature of artistic creation), however summary, will persuade you instantly that the paradigmatic artistic experience is that of failure. The actualization fails to meet, equal, the intuition. There is something "out there" which cannot be brought "here". This is standard. I don't mean bad artists, I mean good artists. There is no such thing as a "successful artist" (except, of course, in worldly terms). — Donald Barthelme

I don't think there's anything to be afraid of. Failure brings great rewards - in the life of an artist. — Quentin Tarantino

I wanted to be a poet and/or an artist, but I was very lazy (frightened of failure, I guess) and drank too much. — Peter Blegvad

Failure is the most important part of an artist's training, and one you cannot afford to do without. — Gustav Holst

The war between the artist and writer and government or orthodoxy is one of the tragedies of humankind. One chief enemy is stupidity and failure to understand anything about the creative mind. For a bureaucratic politician to presume to tell any artist or writer how to get his mind functioning is the ultimate in asininity. — Helen Foster Snow

There is no such thing as failure for an artist, unless failure is the refusal to attempt, the unwillingness to dream. — Laurence Overmire

Everyone who loves life is an artist at heart. Although it is sometimes difficult to love our world and our lot in life, failure to find the ability to love life and express appreciation for our world is tantamount to not existing at all. — Kilroy J. Oldster

Artists know failure. It is not tragic that they know failure; it is only tragic if they know failure and little else ... — Eric Maisel

To be an artist is to fail, as no other dare to fail ... failure is his world and the shrink from it desertion — Marcel Proust

What then is to be the lot of Rossetti's fame and influence? 'An amateur who failed in two arts', it is true; yet it hardly harms Rossetti or touches his standing. On the contrary, it defines both very brilliantly. The small word 'failed' is a small word and little more to artists who are forever going on until they give up over a game that must be lost. Every artist, when confronted by the immensities of art, which is life, must confess to failure. A failure is a thing very relative. — Ford Madox Ford

Failure and its accompanying misery is for the artist his most vital source of creative energy. — Montgomery Clift

I had to come to terms with my failure as an artist ... I had to find a way for myself. — Tracey Emin

Failure would only be if you had somewhere stopped growing. As far as I can see the whole duty of the artist is to keep on growing ... — May Sarton

I'm not an artist, and I want to take risks, and when the possibility of failure occurs, it's because the idea is all exciting or interesting as a high wire act, and sometimes you've got to fall off, just by virtue of the fact that you're constantly trying to evolve and do new things. — Peter Morgan

The truth is, anyone who puts so much of herself and her life into art as you do must naturally fear any failure in that art as a potential threat to your life. And so you protect your art more than you protect your health or the common forms of happiness the rest of us have. And you probably have this in common with every artist you admire. — Arthur Phillips

The rocket was beautiful. In conception it had been shaped by an artist to break a chain that had bound the human race ever since we first gained consciousness of earth's gravity and all it's analogs in suffering, failure and pain. It was at once a prayer sent heavenward and the answer to that prayer: Bear me away from this awful place. — Michael Chabon

At times failure is very necessary for the artist. It reminds him that failure is not the ultimate disaster. And this reminder liberates him from the mean fussing of perfectionism. — John Berger

But there's no way round it-commercial success is a mark of failure for a graffiti artist. We're not supposed to be embraced in that way. When you look at how society rewards so many of the wrong people, it's hard not to view financial reimbursement as a badge of self-serving mediocrity. — Banksy

The industrialist (your boss, perhaps) demands that everything be proven, efficient, and risk free. The artist seeks none of these. The value of art is in your willingness to stare down the risk and to embrace the void of possible failure. — Seth Godin

All of us have failed to match our dream of perfection. I rate us on the basis of our splendid failure to do the impossible. If I could write all my work again, I'm convinced I could do it better. This is the healthiest condition for an artist. That's why he keeps working, trying again: he believes each time that this time he will do it, bring it off. Of course he won't. — William Faulkner

An artist's domain was private, a haven for practicing and experimenting, the one place where failure was still allowed. — Emma Raveling

He who is discouraged after a failure is not a real artist. — Auguste Rodin

You can't expect everyone to laugh or applaud you for doing edgy things. Sometimes you'll miss. But I think comedians are artists and there's a value in failure. It kind of works both ways between comedians and audiences. The audience has to understand that comedians are going to sometimes tell a joke that doesn't work out with dark subjects, and the comedian has to understand that sometimes they 'll fail and it's not the audience's fault for not getting it or loving it. — Anthony Jeselnik

The higher the artist, the fewer the gestures. The fewer the tools, the greater the imagination. The greater the will, the greater the secret failure. — Ben Okri

To be an artist was to have failure as your constant bedfellow. — M. Thomas Gammarino

That a viewer does not see what the artist intended does not make the composition a failure ... In reality all artists speak first to themselves and then to an audience. — Mike Svob

Advice? Fail constantly. Because the word doesn't mean what you think it means, especially when you're an artist. I use the word artist to mean everything from songwriting to writing a novel to even writing video games. Anything that tells a story, which is almost any medium. Gotta take risks, you gotta go through multiple drafts which means you have to FAIL, a lot. So you won't always get the reaction you always want from every single person, so when you lose that fear of failure, when you stop even thinking of it as failure, and you push yourself farther, you'll take bigger risks, and eventually, after about six or seven hundred rejections, you'll find success. And you'll find a way of conveying what you really want to say, in the best manner. — Victor Giannini