Artist S Life Quotes & Sayings

I am an artist. And An artist is simply a man who is pulled along by a river: on one side sanity lies, and the other madness, yet he will find no peace on either, as the current of his art drags him away from the everyday life on it's banks, where others watch, unable to help him until he reaches the immensity of the ocean. — Felix J. Palma

My dad, the man I loved most in the world, a man who refused to compromise himself for anyone, the man who had showed me by example what it was like to be a true artist, was gone. We had become a loving father and son after a rocky thirty-year start. John Fante's gift to me was his ambition, his brilliance, and his pure writer's heart. He had begun life with a drunken, self-hating father, backing out of the hell of poverty and prejudice. Now he was ending it as the best example of courage and humility I had ever known. John Fante was my hero. — Dan Fante

There comes a moment in a young artist's life when he knows he has to bring something to the stage from within himself. He has to put in something in order to be able to take something. — Mikhail Baryshnikov

What I would say is this: writing poems doesn't make you a poet. ... It is only with poetry, for some reason, that everyone wants to believe they can try their hand at it once in a while and be considered, can call themselves a poet. ... . It's a craft. It's an art. It's a skill. It is not therapy, and it is not compensation for terrible things in one's life. It is a thing in itself. You devote yourself to being an instrument of it, or you wander forever in the belief that it is a form of "self-expression." ... And I explained very clearly my opinion of what I think a poet, an artist is. Someone who puts this thing first. — Franz Wright

Do you know why our poetry today and especially our philosophy are such dead issues? Because they've cut themselves off from life. Now, Greece idealized on life's own level: an artist's life was already a poetic achievement; a philosopher's life was an enactment of his philosophy; and when they were a part of life that way, instead of ignoring each other, philosophy could nourish poetry, poetry express philosophy, and together achieve an admirable persuasiveness. Today beauty no longer acts; and action no longer bothers about being beautiful; and wisdom operates on the sidelines. — Andre Gide

The absence of models, in literature as in life, to say nothing of painting, is an occupational hazard for the artist, simply because models in art, in behavior, in growth of spirit and intellect
even if rejected
enrich and enlarge one's view of existence. Deadlier still, to the artist who lacks models, is the curse of ridicule, the bringing to bear on an artist's best work, especially his or her most original, most strikingly deviant, only a fund of ignorance and the presumption that as an artist's critic one's judgement is free of the restrictions imposed by prejudice, and is well informed, indeed, about all the art in the world that really matters. — Alice Walker

The observation of nature is part of an artist's life, it enlarges his form [and] knowledge, keeps him fresh and from working only by formula, and feeds inspiration. — Henry Moore

I burnt for the more active life of the world--for the more exciting toils of a literary career--for the destiny of an artist, author, orator; anything rather than that of a priest: yes, the heart of a politician, of a soldier, of a votary of glory, a lover of renown, a luster after power, beat under my curate's surplice. I considered; my life was so wretched, it must be changed, or I must die. After a season of darkness and struggling, light broke and relief fell: my cramped existence all at once spread out to a plain without bounds--my powers heard a call from heaven to rise, gather their full strength, spread their wings, and mount beyond ken. — Charlotte Bronte

Every parent is an artist, for the bared canvas of a newborn's soul begs for the artist's touch. And because this is so, a parent must prepare the palette with the utmost care, choose the brushes with poised caution, and mindfully attend to every brushstroke regardless of how slight. And such caution is utterly imperative for the emerging rendering will be both a legacy borne of the parent, and a life lived by the child. — Craig D. Lounsbrough

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. — Sandra Cisneros

THE ARTIST'S LIFE Are you a born writer? — Steven Pressfield

I'm just working with ideas in my head and with drawings that the artists did. And suddenly to see these things come to life in movies - it's just wonderful. — Stan Lee

I consider being a performer work. I come from a theater family; I've been an actor all my life. I started acting when I was a kid, and I've earned a living as an artist all my life. It's my job in the sense that it's everything I am, the only thing I know how to do. I literally do not have qualifications to do anything else on this planet. Seriously, it's scary. [But] I don't consider it a job [because] it's my religion - it's my faith, it's my family, it's everything to me. — Torquil Campbell

If her artist's eye had given her nothing else, it taught her to see beauty where few others noticed it. — Elizabeth Camden

Ideally there is a type of continuum which flows from life through the artist's sensibility and his materials ... the concreteness of the object and its own life , through the spectator, with his expectations, interpretations, back into life. — Douglas Portway

El duende is literally the goblin wind or force behind a person's actions and creative life, including the way they walk, the sound of their voice, even the way they lift their little finger. It is a term used in flamenco dance, and is also used to describe the ability to "think" in poetic images. Among Latina curanderas who recollect story, it is understood as the ability to be filled with spirit that is more than one's own spirit. Whether one is the artist or whether one is the watcher, listener, or reader, when el duende is present, one sees it, hears it, reads it, feels it underneath the dance, the music, the words, the art; one knows it is there. When el duende is not present, one knows that too. — Clarissa Pinkola Estes

All serious art, music, literature is a critical act. It is so, firstly, in the sense of Matthew Arnold's phrase: "a criticism of life." Be it realistic, fantastic, Utopian or satiric, the construct of the artist is a counter-statement to the world. — George Steiner

To be an artist, you don't have to compose music or paint or be in the movies or write books. It's just a way of living. It has to do with paying attention, remembering, filtering what you see and answering back, participating in life. — Viggo Mortensen

I worked selling tickets for Dodger Stadium; I delivered pizza; I did every job under the sun. It's the part that sucks as an artist. But I've learned at the end of the day you just have to enjoy your life. — Jeremy Luke

Gut level is a good level to deal with life, and for me, I have to say that Buddhism makes sense for me because it's how I'm an artist. — Laurie Anderson

After reading Eminem's autobiography, which I did because I'm so interested in him as an artist, I respect him a lot. Even though he seems angry and mad, he's had to fight so many demons in his life. — Taryn Manning

Each one seems to be, in some way, essentially different from the others, and each is a surprise to me. I think that making books, or any kind of art, might also be like mining. The artist digs into his or her life and imagination and never knows what they'll find. That's the adventure. — Mordicai Gerstein

Perhaps it's good for one to suffer. Can an artist do anything if he's happy? Would he ever want to do anything? What is art, after all, but a protest against the horrible inclemency of life? — Aldous Huxley

They say that art comes from the soul. The more drama in an artist's life, the more he can draw on for his art. Van Gogh and Picasso had troubled souls, but poor Steve Kaufman has been shot once, stabbed 3 times - all by women. That is a lot of drama for great art. — Robin Leach

She had spent her entire life being what everyone wanted her to be. The perfect daughter, the budding artist, the best friend, the first love. She had been so busy meeting everyone's expectations, in fact, that it had taken her years to remember exactly why it was all one big farce. She was not perfect, far from it, and what you saw on the outside was not what you really were getting. Deep down, she was dirty, and this was the kind of thing that happened to girls like her. — Jodi Picoult

I include myself in the posters because I feel like it forms a more intimate relationship between the artist and the person passing by. And it's important to include some vulnerability and use fears and rejections and various aspects from my own life so people look at my work as more than greeting card fodder. — Morley

My life is pretty well at peace, and the profession is more of an avocation. It's a calling, if you like, rather than a job. I do what I feel impelled to do, as an artist would. — Jonas Salk

Art must must carry man's craving for the ideal, must be an expression of his reaching out towards it; that art must give man hope and faith. And the more hopeless the world in the artist's version, the more clearly perhaps must we see the ideal that stands in opposition - otherwise life becomes impossible! Art symbolises the meaning of our existence. — Andrei Tarkovsky

I grew up dancing my whole life, and I always kind of perceived that's what I would do professionally. But when I caught the acting bug, I knew I needed to go with no turning back. — Jacob Artist

My life is at least as intricate as my readers' lives. People say that 'The Artist's Way' changed their lives, but when they talk about 'Floor Sample,' they tell me, 'I was with you all the way.' — Julia Cameron

If you're an artist, you want to draw from real life; you want to draw from experiences, emotion, and it's something that a lot of musicians juggle with. I've always found it so fascinating. — Damien Chazelle

I am just a middle-class farm boy from Dodge City and my grandparents were wheat farmers. I thought painting, acting, directing and photography were all part of being an artist. I have made my money that way. And I have had some fun. It's not been a bad life. — Dennis Hopper

Like a Rubik's Cube, I have many configurations; Do not just assume that you have "figured" me out, just because you've seen one side. — Andrea L'Artiste

The male frog in mating season," said Crake, "makes as much noise as it can. The females are attracted to the male frog with the biggest, deepest voice because it suggests a more powerful frog, one with superior genes. Small male frogs - it's been documented - discover if they position themselves in empty drainpipes, the pipe acts as a voice amplifier and the small frog appears much larger than it really is."
So?"
So that's what art is for the artist, an empty drainpipe. An amplifier. A stab at getting laid. — Margaret Atwood

No-one has the right to terminate a person's life with a gun, a knife, or a makutu (spell). — Theresa Sjoquist

A writer's heart, a poet's heart, an artist's heart, a musician's heart is always breaking. It is through that broken window that we see the world ... — Alice Walker

I think it's much richer and much more fun to be an artist than to be anything else. I can't think of a better life than acting. — Edward Herrmann

The struggle for a life extracts all our attention, and leaves us blind, deaf, dumb and senseless. The writer, the artist, the musician vanishes, without even the charity of a proper cremation. At this point words become formless sounds, and thoughts run out of paper and jump out of the terra firma and fly in the air, forcing us to find someone to share them with, someone who could understand. The fear of wasting words is the worst kind of it, only a writer knows. — Anu Lal

The sad thing is that somehow, it is a type of event that mirrors the artist. You take it into account, and you're reminded in this specific case what the artist's work is about, what his life is like, and how life mirrors art. — Massimiliano Gioni

Any artist, the work you do, if it's a painting or if it's a performance, you hope it translates to a common denominator with the people that they see something in their own life in there. Or they see something in somebody else's life. That's what's fun about sharing art. — Matthew McConaughey

At the core of everything I do, is not my ambition but my desire to make music. Somewhere along the line I stumbled onto something that was bigger, different than anything I had ever imagined, which was actually being involved with other people. I just don't live the average artist's life. — El-P

Of course a miracle may happen, and you may be a great painter, but you must confess the chances are a million to one against it. It'll be an awful sell if at the end you have to acknowledge you've made a hash of it."
"I've got to paint," he repeated.
"Supposing you're never anything more than third-rate, do you think it will have been worth while to give up everything? After all, in any other walk in life it doesn't matter if you're not very good; you can get along quite comfortably if you're just adequate; but it's different with an artist."
"You blasted fool," he said.
"I don't see why, unless it's folly to say the obvious."
"I tell you I've got to paint. I can't help myself. When a man falls into the water it doesn't matter how he swims, well or badly: he's got to get out or else he'll drown. — W. Somerset Maugham

The work of the artist is not so much what you say or what you know, it's recognizing what you know. That's what life is about. That's what photography is about. You see something, or you hear someone say something, and you say That is a truth. You know, deep in you. That's when you start shooting. — Sylvia Plachy

The art, the art of living, involves the act of creation. The work of art is nothing. It is only the tangible, visible evidence of a way of life, which, if it is not crazy is certainly different from the accepted way of life. The difference lies in the act, in the assertion of a will, and individuality. For the artist to attach himself to his work, or identify himself with it, is suicidal. An artist should be able not only to spit on his predecessor's art, or on all works of art, but on his own too. He should be able to be an artist all the time, and finally not be an artist at all, but a piece of art. — Henry Miller

Every mother should be a true artist, who knows how to weave into her child's life images of grace and beauty, the true poet capable of writing on the soul of childhood the harmony of love and truth, and teaching it how to produce the grandest of all poems - the poetry of a true and noble life. — Frances Ellen Watkins Harper

It's a shock for me to go through and see all those years of painting my life, which is very personal for me. It's a very difficult thing for an artist to look back at his work. — Andrew Wyeth

I am the same artist with the same nagging questions I had in my early 20's. What's real and what isn't? How do we tell what's real in our lives? How do we see things as they are? What is my role in life? If the Signature hadn't forced the issue by devoting its season to my plays, I could at least believe I had changed. Really, they're all the same! What is SIX DEGREES OF SEPARATION but THE HOUSE OF BLUE LEAVES with money? — John Guare

The greatest artists express their inner self; an artist paints her rage; a writer pens his fear; a dancer expresses her sadness through movement; and a musician's loneliness echoes in his performance. — Gerard De Marigny

Be a great artist especially when you draw your life's picture. — Debasish Mridha

It's interesting how people who were once fairly radical can become, later in life, kind of conservative, and not just in terms of politics - how, if you're an artist, you can start out being somewhat avant-garde and then end up doing landscapes. — Richard Prince

My body is a journal in a way. It's like what sailors used to do, where every tattoo meant something, a specific time in your life when you make a mark on yourself, whether you do it yourself with a knife or with a professional tattoo artist. — Johnny Depp

It's rare that you see an artist in his 30s or 40s able to really contribute something amazing. — Steve Jobs

One of my dad's colleagues said, "She wants to paint with her shit. Maybe we should give her paints." And it worked.' Mary Barnes eventually became a celebrated and much-exhibited artist. Her paintings were greatly admired throughout the 1960s and 1970s for illustrating the mad, colourful, painful, exuberant, complicated inner life of a schizophrenic. — Jon Ronson

'Faith and Will' is aimed at the same readership as 'The Artist's Way.' The book is for spiritual seekers in all walks of life. — Julia Cameron

Artists were always referred to as great artists. I thought that's what the profession was. One word: great-artist. There wasn't one moment in my life when I thought I wanted to be anything else. — Hedda Sterne

To offer the complexities of life as an excuse for not addressing oneself to the simpler, more manageable (trivial) aspects of daily existence is a perversity often indulged in by artists, husbands, intellectuals
and critics of the Women's Movement. — Barbara Grizzuti Harrison

But an artist, he realized. Or rather so-called artist. Bohemian. That's closer to it. The artistic life without the talent. — Philip K. Dick

People see me as pretty low key in a lot of ways. And for me, like, even choosing to be John Legend and to be who I am as a star, as an artist, it's a risk 'cause I - you know, I graduated from college and worked as a management consultant, and I could have had this very kind of buttoned-up life and worn suits to work every day. — John Legend

Born to be a natural artist you love or hate but can't deny
While us minions in our millions tumble into history's chasm
We might have a couple of laughs but we're still wastes of protoplasm — Jeffrey Lewis

It's easy to forget, given her scandal-tinged life and tragic death, how incredibly talented Whitney Houston was. She holds the world record as the most-awarded female act of all time, with over 415 major recognitions during her career. She is the only artist to chart seven consecutive number one songs. — Charles Duhigg

The women used the music to get their men to relate to them better: "talk to me, tell me what's on your mind." Men used the music to get the girls in the mood to make love. So either way you had it, Barry White is the one artist who actually was in your bedroom with you at your most sacred, sensuous moment of your life. — Barry White

As an artist you organize your life so that you get a chance to paint, a window of time, but that's no guarantee you'll create anything worth all your effort. You're always haunt by the idea you're wasting your life. — Chuck Palahniuk

In an artist's life, death is perhaps not the most difficult thing. — Vincent Van Gogh

I've never believed that they're separate. Leonardo da Vinci was a great artist and a great scientist. Michelangelo knew a tremendous amount about how to cut stone at the quarry. The finest dozen computer scientists I know are all musicians. Some are better than others, but they all consider that an important part of their life. I don't believe that the best people in any of these fields see themselves as one branch of a forked tree. I just don't see that.People bring these things together a lot. Dr. Land at Polaroid said, "I want Polaroid to stand at the intersection of art and science," and I've never forgotten that. I think that that's possible, and I think a lot of people have tried. — Steve Jobs

Satisfaction of one's curiosity is one of the greatest sources of happiness in life.
Linus Pauling — Linus Pauling

How lucky am I to be blessed with such a loving family? You and Lindsay are my greatest life's work and I am proud artist. — Jacquelyn Ayres

Do not leave your reputation to chance or gossip; it is your life's artwork, and you must craft it, hone it, and display it with the care of an artist. — Robert Greene

Roth Unbound is filled with intelligent readings and smart judgments. Because of the author's sympathy and sharp mind, it offers real insight into the creative process itself, and into Philip Roth's high calling as a great American artist. The book is, in some ways, a radical rereading of Roth's life and his work. It is impossible, by the end, not to feel a tender admiration for Roth as a novelist and indeed for Claudia Roth Pierpont as an empathetic and brilliant critic. — Colm Toibin

Snow-melt in the stream: Mama Nature turning winter's storms into nourishment for the soil, fecundity, and beauty. This is what I must now learn to do with the stormy weather I've been passing through: turn it into beauty, turn it into art, so new life can germinate and bloom.
One example of a creative artist who does this is my friend Jane Yolen, who wrote her exquisite book of poems The Radiation Sonnets while her husband was undergoing treatment for the cancer that would eventually claim his life. This is what all artists must do: take whatever life gives us and "alchemize" it into our art (either directly and autobiographically, as in Jane's book, or indirectly; whatever approach works best), turning darkness into light, spinning straw into gold, transforming pain and hardship into what J.R.R. Tolkien called 'a miraculous grace. — Terri Windling

As an artist, I move along in my life, into whatever things I'm doing, and I hear things where it's like, "Oh, that'd be a great [song] title! I'll use that!" So I keep a running list of titles on my computer. I've got these words and phrases that just sustained my interest. So I'm a step ahead, really, with the titling! — Andy Summers

I'm not a model, I'm an artist. In one of my videos, I'm doing this shot of me with no make-up on where I've just woken up, and I don't think a lot of people would be comfortable enough to do that. But that's the way I look. This is who I am. Let's enjoy it. Let's just live life to the full while we're all here. — Jessie J.

It starts off like climbing a tree or solving a puzzle - poetry, if nothing else, is just fun to write. But deeper into each and every piece, you no longer hesitate to call it work. It's passion. A poet's sense of lyrical accomplishment is then his food and water, his means of survival. — Criss Jami

What a writer does is to try to make sense of life. I think that's what writing is, I think that's what painting is. It's seeking that thread of order and logic in the disorder, and the incredible waste and marvelous profligate character of life. What all artists are trying to do is to make sense of life. — Nadine Gordimer

I say that I suffer from what Rosalind Krauss was calling the post-medium condition, where an artist essentially employs several mediums in order to bring to life whatever specific ideas that they have. For me it's always been that way. — Rashid Johnson

Do you know the reason why poetry and philosophy are nothing but dead-letter nowadays? It is because they have severed themselves from life. In Greece, ideas went hand-in-hand with life; so that the artist's life was already a poetic realisation, the philosopher's life a putting into action of his philosophy; in this way, as both philosophy and poetry took part in life, instead of remaining unacquainted with each other, philosophy provided food for poetry, and poetry gave expression to philosophy - and the result was admirably persuasive. Nowadays beauty no longer acts; action no longer desires to be beautiful; and wisdom works in a sphere apart. — Andre Gide

Far from the richest rapper, but my biggest personal achievement thus far in my life has been retiring my mom early from her job at the Post Office. It's a tiny payback for the sacrifices she made that allowed me to chase a far-fetched dream of becoming a successful artist. I'm forever grateful, — J. Cole

Evie is our beautiful, dark-haired, green-eyed child,' I say. I can hear the tremor in my voice. 'Like many seven-year-old girls, she's obsessed with princesses. We think she looks more like a fairy. She loves Lego and painting. She laughs easily. She has pretend tea parties in a tree in our garden and invites all her dolls. She wants to be an artist when she grows up. Please find her. Please bring her back to us. We miss her beyond measure. She is the love of our life. — Sanjida Kay

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

To A Young Beauty
Dear fellow-artist, why so free
With every sort of company,
With every Jack and Jill?
Choose your companions from the best;
Who draws a bucket with the rest
Soon topples down the hill.
You may, that mirror for a school,
Be passionate, not bountiful
As common beauties may,
Who were not born to keep in trim
With old Ezekiel's cherubim
But those of Beauvarlet.
I know what wages beauty gives,
How hard a life her servant lives,
Yet praise the winters gone:
There is not a fool can call me friend,
And I may dine at journey's end
With Landor and with Donne. — W.B.Yeats

Art doesn't begin with a brush and a palette, but with the artist's ability to perceive life. You have to learn how to live before you can learn how to paint. — Dean Mitchell

This is the story of an electrically alive young woman on the brink of her adult life. An artist equally attuned to the light as the shadows, with a limitless hunger for experience and knowledge, completely unafraid of life's more frightening opportunities. — Elizabeth Winder

Your greatest creation is your creative life. It's all in your hands. Rejection can't take it away; reviews can't take it away. The life you create for yourself as an artist, may be the only thing that's really yours. Create a life you can center yourself in calmly as you wait for your work to grow. — Sara Zarr

It is only too true that a lot of artists are mentally ill - it's a life which, to put it mildly, makes one an outsider. I'm all right when I completely immerse myself in work, but I'll always remain half crazy. — Vincent Van Gogh

I think it's harder than ever to be an artist. I think that you end up, especially as a middle-aged person, you pay such big consequences for saying, 'I'm just going to devote my life to making art,' or 'I'm going to devote my life to writing novels.' You end up with no resources. — Dana Spiotta

In this image (watching sensual murder through a peephole) Lorrain embodies the criminal delight of decadent art. The watcher who records the crimes (both the artist and consumer of art) is constructed as marginal, powerless to act, and so exculpated from action, passive subject of a complex pleasure, condemning and yet enjoying suffering imposed on others, and condemning himself for his own enjoyment. In this masochistic celebration of disempowerment, the sharpest pleasure recorded is that of the death of some important part of humanity. The dignity of human life is the ultimate victim of Lorrain's art, thrown away on a welter of delighted self-disgust. — Jennifer Birkett

There are actually two separate issues here. The first is whether (as ancient philosophers and Nietzsche assume) only the privileged elite can live a worthwhile life. The second is whether it's possible to fulfill the roles of both serious artist and upstanding citizen. It seems to me that philosophy can dissect both questions, by delineating clearly the anatomy of the good life and the structural conditions of the roles. — Philip Kitcher

What attracted me was less art itself than the artist's life and all that it meant for me: the idea of creativity and freedom of expression and action. I had been attracted to painting and drawing for a long time, but it was not an irresistible passion; what I wanted, at all costs, was to escape the monotony of life. — Pierre Bonnard

I remind myself that traveling through life as an artist requires one to distill things slowly. To be inquisitive, inventive, and patient - a lot of things get discarded along the way. It's a little like boiling sea water to get at the salt. — James Nares

Another year is fast approaching. Go be that starving artist you're afraid to be. Open up that journal and get poetic finally. Volunteer. Suck it up and travel. You were not born here to work and pay taxes. You were put here to be part of a vast organism to explore and create. Stop putting it off. The world has much more to offer than what's on 15 televisions at TGI Fridays. Take pictures. Scare people. Shake up the scene. Be the change you want to see in the world. — Jason Mraz

I think you are talented and passionate, Isabella. More than you think and less than you expect. But there are a lot of people with talent and passion, and many of them never get anywhere. This is only the first step for achieving anything in life. Natural talent is like an athlete's strength. You can be born with more or less ability, but nobody can become an athlete just because he or she was born tall, or strong, or fast. What makes the athlete, or the artist, is the work, the vocation and the technique. The intelligence you are born with is just ammunition. To achieve something with it you need to transform your mind into a high-precision weapon. — Carlos Ruiz Zafon

The life of reality is confused, disorderly, almost always without apparent purpose, where in the artist's imaginative life there is purpose. There is determination to give the tale, the song, the painting, form - to make it true and real to the theme, not to life ...
I myself remember with what a shock I heard people say that one of my own books, Winesburg, Ohio, was an exact picture of Ohio village life. The book was written in a crowded tenement district of Chicago. The hint for almost every character was taken from my fellow lodgers in a large rooming house, many of whom had never lived in a village. The confusion arises out of the fact that others besides practicing artists have imaginations. But most people are afraid to trust their imaginations and the artist is not. — Sherwood Anderson

... Have you ever reflected that posterity may not be the faultless dispenser of justice that we dream of? One consoles oneself for being insulted and denied, by reyling on the equity of the centuries to come; just as the faithful endure all the abominations of this earth in the firm belief of another life, in which each will be rewarded according to his deserts. But suppose Paradise exists no more for the artist than it does for the Catholic, suppose that future generations prolong the misunderstanding and prefer amiable little trifles to vigorous works! Ah! What a sell it would be, eh? To have led a convict's life - to have screwed oneself down to one's work - all for a mere delusion!...

"Bah! What does it matter? Well, there's nothing hereafter. We are even madder than the fools who kill themselves for a woman. When the earth splits to pieces in space like a dry walnut, our works won't add one atom to its dust. — Emile Zola

For some reason I can't explain, artist and musicians tend to look younger than our age. Being in music, you need this youthful sense of discovery and wonder for what you're doing and keep your imagination open. That's a youthful way of looking at life and I think that reflects in how you age. — Joshua Bell

The goal of the artist is not to resolve life's mysteries, but to deepen them. — Jerry Uelsmann

Creativity is not linear, just like the earth is not flat ... If you keep going long enough you will always get back to where you started from. That is when you have lived a full life. That is the artist's path. — Nikki Sixx

Human, you are a machine, an organism, an animal, a primate, an artist, an athlete, a thinker, a sponge, a spirit, a comedian, a connoisseur, a cycle of breath in and breath out, an inventor, an expressor, an orator, a lover, an explorer, a creator, evolved. Your mind paints the flowers and the sky using the mind's eye as a paintbrush and light as paint. Splashing life across the blank canvas of reality. That's what you do. Every moment of every day. — Laren Grey Umphlett

I try and absorb all the things that I respect in the artist's I've worked with.When we work with someone on, Live From Daryl's House, we really get inside their music which gives me an even broader idea of the writing process. I think I'm always learning from everything in life. There are really songs everywhere. — Eliot Lewis

The artists who have inspired me the most in my life are the ones who have really had something to say and stand up for. That, to me, is part of being an artist-having the voice to express things that need to be verbalized and brought to light. Unfortunately, I don't think that's a priority for people, because the few artists who do have the nerve to take a stand for what they believe get shut down in a way. — Alicia Keys

We all lead double lives. It's a privilege for the artist and a curse for the ordinary man. One has to get used to it."
"It's a terrible thing to know too much. In life, our words are improvisations and our actions careless mistakes that end up by becoming habits. Fate beign the distraction of the gods, I distract myself by evading questions that I never asked myself in the past. We are in the hands of the improbable, are we not, my dear Cosette?"
- Monsieur Verjat- — Victor Hugo

Words are your paintbrush, and your life is the canvas. You can paint whatever you want to paint; you can even copy another artist's work - but what you express with your paintbrush is the way you see yourself, the way you see the entire reality. — Miguel Ruiz