Quotes & Sayings About Artists

Times were changing in the world of id. They had finally fired Jason, narrowing the group to Carmack, Romero, Adrian, and Tom. But something else was in the air. The Reagan-Bush era was finally coming to a close and a new spirit rising. It began in Seattle, where a sloppily dressed grunge rock trio called Nirvana ousted Michael Jackson from the top of the pop charts with their album Nevermind. Soon grunge and hip-hop were dominating the world with more brutal and honest views. Id was braced to do for games what those artists had done for music: overthrow the status quo. Games until this point had been ruled by their own equivalent of pop, in the form of Mario and Pac-Man. Unlike music, the software industry had never experienced anything as rebellious as Wolfenstein 3-D. The — David Kushner

Berthe Morisot was a painter full of eighteenth-century delicacy and grace; in a word, the last elegant and 'feminine' artists since Fragonard. — Pierre-Auguste Renoir

I have many intense friendships with artists. I don't mean we have intense one-day conversations but ongoing conversations that last in some cases for years. — Hans Ulrich Obrist

Art is a selective re-creation of reality according to an artists metaphysical value judgments. — Ayn Rand

Edsel is the artist in our family. Art is something I know nothing about. — Henry Ford

By keenly confronting the enigmas that surround us, and by considering and analyzing the observations that I had made, I ended up in the domain of mathematics. Although I am absolutely without training in the exact sciences, I often seem to have more in common with mathematicians than with my fellow artists. — M.C. Escher

I'm a great believer in the hereafter, in karma, in reincarnation. It does make sense. I believe that God is not just a law-giver, but a creative artist. The greatest of all. And what characterises artists is that they want to redo their work. Maybe it didn't come off perfectly, so they want to see it done again, and improved. Reincarnation is a way for God to improve his earlier works. — Norman Mailer

I tried to just do things like make some money, be responsible, help out other artists who I see have had a similar path. — Ariel Pink

I just feel like I'm an artist that still has set a standard for artists that come up to follow and be like ... So, yeah, I guess I'm a legend somewhat, I guess in my own right, but I still got a long ways to go. — Ginuwine

Unlike those in other professions, artists cut the branch they are sitting on. — Sarah Thornton

Street artists need to get back to actually doing things on the streets instead of in the galleries where they all seem to be ending up. I hope this term 'street artist' falls from the face of the earth, in my honest opinion. — Barry McGee

Some artists want to confront. Some want to invoke thought. They're all necessary and they're all valid. — Maya Lin

Too many younger artists, critics, and curators are fetishizing the sixties, transforming the period into a deformed cult, a fantasy religion, a hip brand, and a crippling disease. — Jerry Saltz

Who is willing to be satisfied with a job that expresses all his limitations? He will accept such work only as a 'means of livelihood' while he waits to discover his 'true vocation'. The world is full of unsuccessful businessmen who still secretly believe they were meant to be artists or writers or actors in the movies. — Thomas Merton

Many young artists, they look at the art world and think they can make a lot of money. — James Rosenquist

We live today amid ritualized anithumanisms. Among those intelligent enough to feel despair, some seek salvation in the literary artist. Artists love flattery; and the scam doesn't work without mystifying the process.

The weather is unpredictable, but it is not mysterious.

Wall Street is unpredictable, but it is not mysterious.

Writing is unpredictable, (like street and sky, there are too many variables.) Its mystery vanishes, like a shadow, the moment the light aimed at your characters turns back upon yourself. — Doran Larson

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 had already established, as you know, that it was logically impossible for Kenneth to be distressed by anything that might occur between Ned and myself; but Kenneth, being an artist, has perhaps not studied logic and is unaware of the impossibility. — Sarah Caudwell

When a poet digs himself into a hole, he doesn't climb out. He digs deeper, enjoys the scenery, and comes out the other side enlightened. — Criss Jami

I believe art prefers rules. For some artists, the worst thing you can do is say 'Do whatever you want.' Such permission can be terrifying. I know it is for me. Often it's better if you impose rules or restrictions on a project. Requirements can force you to be creative in unusual ways. — Lisa Mangum

The blood of my motherland waters a magic plant that cures all ills. That plant is art, and sometimes art needs corruption as a kind of fertilizer — Alfred De Musset

An unalterable and unquestioned law of the musical world required that the German text of French operas sung by Swedish artists should be translated into Italian for the clearer understanding of English-speaking audiences. — Edith Wharton

I can't say if I have influenced anything really, maybe a few artists but at the end of the day we are all influenced by various arts and situations around us, etc ... all of us. I don't see or hear from any of the above, sorry ... — Mick Harris

I inhale slowly, soaking it all in. I step forward and backward, my neck twisting and turning, memorizing every corner. I feel an instant connection to this place. Something about being here grabs me and infatuates me. I begin taking mental pictures of the narrow alleys decorated with rows of artists and vendors. I start imagining myself dining at the sidewalk cafes, sitting there with Chad during the summer, spring, winter, and fall. I get this strong desire to take off my shoes and walk barefooted on the cobblestones as if I have found my new home. — Corey M.P.

I firmly believe artists should be paid for what they create. — Mark Hoppus

The problem doesn't lie with the great teachers. Great teachers strive to create linchpins. The problem lies with the system that punishes artists and rewards bureaucrats instead. Here — Seth Godin

Artists have a responsibility to speak and to act when governments fail, and if we don't do that, we really deserve the world we get. — Alice Walker

Like books, artists have their fates. — Norbert Lynton

The works of the great artists are silent books of eternal truths. — Stefan Zweig

Artists are controlled by the life that beats in them, like the ocean beats on the shore. — Dorothea Lange

Some artists, such as Jack Kirby, need no plot at all. I mean I'll just say to Jack, "Let's let the next villain be Dr. Doom" ... or I may not even say that. He may tell me. And then he goes home and does it. He's so good at plots, I'm sure he's a thousand times better than I. He just makes up the plots for these stories. All I do is a little editing ... I may tell him that he's gone too far in one direction or another. Of course, occasionally I'll give him a plot, but we're practically both the writers on the things. — Stan Lee

We are like artists by nature, constantly we're trying to add beauty to movements. — Renzo Gracie

For me the journey of making a film is a journey of discovery as to what that film is. I mean what I do is what other artists do, painters, novelists, people that make music, poets, sculptors, you name it. It's about starting out and working with the material and discovering through making, working with the material the artifact. — Mike Leigh

Other artists - poets, painters, sculptors, musicians - produce something which lives after them and enshrines their memories in positive evidences of their divine mission; but we, - we strut and fret our hour upon the stage, and then the curtain falls and all is darkness and silence. — Charlotte Saunders Cushman

I just feel passionately about a few things and particularly about helping artists get off the ground. — Jane Badler

By translating their inner turmoil or understanding into art, artists challenge the accepted notions of reality and create new ones. — Wes Nisker

I think most artists will experience a lot of negative people on Twitter but, thank God, I've got so many followers that I'm not able to see them that much. I'll see some from time to time but, for the most part, I always focus on something good. — Nicki Minaj

I find in all the artists that I admire most a disturbing element, a distortion, giving evidence of a struggle ... In great art, this conflict is hidden, it is unresolved. All that is bursting with energy is disturbing - not perfect. — Henry Moore

I have a feeling a lot of artists' work got lost [because of AIDS]. Howard was fortunate because his family and friends supported him, but a chilling thing I remember was these guys at St. Vincent's [Hospital] who would call out for someone to listen to them, just for a moment. They were dying alone. Who knows what happened to their work? It's been a process to follow the thread to find out everything Howard did. It's getting over that shock. — Aaron Brookner

... consider the meaning of these images. Every time you're working with them, ask yourself: what do they mean? And, even more important, what do they mean to me? The more specific and personal something is, the more its universality emerges. — Fiona Wood

We used to manage quite well when she was away sitting for artists, because in those days we lived mostly on bread, vegetables and eggs; but now that we can afford some meat or even chickens, I keep coming to grief. I scrubbed some rather dirty-looking chops with soap which proved very lingering, and I did not take certain things out of a chicken that I ought to have done. Even — Dodie Smith

A government which is not liked by the artists is certainly a bad government, because artist sees very well what is behind the masks! — Mehmet Murat Ildan

The Tonys are the once-a-year shot for all of these shows and artists who work so diligently every single performance but only for a thousand or so people at a time. This gives them the opportunity to perform to millions of people. — Neil Patrick Harris

I have nothing against people getting their band back together, but the artists I love marked a time in my life, and to merge that time with now can be personally depressing. — Babatunde Adebimpe

Many people think voice over artists just read, there's much more to it. Without acting beats, scene study and improving skills, you won't make it. — Tara Strong

When I hear artists or authors making fun of businessmen, I think of a regiment in which the band makes fun of the cooks. — H.L. Mencken

I think it would be bad for culture and the art if artists and people who develop the apparatus to support those artists don't get paid. — Lyor Cohen

For the novelist or poet, for the scientist or artist, the question is not where do ideas come from, the question is how they come. The how is the mystery. The how is fragile. — E.L. Konigsburg

After a certain high level of technical skill is achieved, science and art tend to coalesce in esthetics, plasticity, and form. The greatest scientists are artists as well. Remark — Albert Einstein

You witness the artists acting as witnesses, but they provide a point of view that's less monolithic. It's less official in a certain way. Many artists are speaking in the first person singular, as a reaction to dubbed-over media commentary. The thought is: "Enough with how we're represented by the media. Let me tell the story." — Massimiliano Gioni

I hate artists who are not of their time. — Guillaume Apollinaire

What makes someone an artist? I don't think is has anything to do with a paintbrush. There are painters who follow the numbers, or paint billboards, or work in a small village in China, painting reproductions. These folks, while swell people, aren't artists. On the other hand, Charlie Chaplin was an artist, beyond a doubt. So is Jonathan Ive, who designed the iPod. You can be an artist who works with oil paints or marble, sure. But there are artists who work with numbers, business models, and customer conversations. Art is about intent and communication, not substances. — Seth Godin

I kind of rode this weird line between athlete and artist. It was a little different because most of the athletes were total jocks, and most of the artists dressed in black and were kind of considered a little on the fringe. But I hung out with both crowds in my high school. — Terry Crews

There's a reason for the word heartbeat not be called beat of heart. The perfect woman only needs a good beat. The heart will follow. Emotions, when put in equilibrium with reason, create more miracles than any emotion, no matter how strong, deprived from reason. This is why it's much easier to love a woman that can play the drums or any other instrument with rhythm, than one that believes in unreasonable magic, simply because there's more magic in reason than in the lack of it. You see, loving someone that you truly want to love, someone you admire, someone you want to spend your time with, helping, sharing and growing together, makes much more sense than expecting someone to love you for no reason than your will, needs and desires. And when humans understand this, they will understand love, find it easily and never lose it again. — Robin Sacredfire

There are two kinds of artists left: those who endorse Pepsi and those who simply won't. — Annie Lennox

Kids are real artists. They'd rather paint the outside of the box than being stuck inside. — Shawn Lukas

There's no such thing as sculpture or art or anything, it's just a bit of - it's just words, you know, and actually saying everything is art. We're all art, art is just a tag, like a journalists' tag, but artists believe it. — John Lennon

Of course, growing up, I was a big fan of rap so that was something that I got into. I was a fan of a lot of artists. You can be a fan, but at the same time, you gotta carve your own swagger and carve out your own style. — Kirko Bangz

There's something pleasing about large, well-lit spaces. I love that dealers are willing to take massive chances in order to give this much room to their artists. Most of all, I love that more galleries showing more art gives more artists a shot. — Jerry Saltz

The thing about living in New York is that there are other artists; that is the most difficult, I think they are the hardest critics. — Julian Schnabel

I don't believe in the creativity of the curator. I don't think that the exhibition-maker has brilliant ideas around which the works of artists must fit. Instead, the process always starts with a conversation, in which I ask the artists what their unrealized projects are, and then the task is to find the means to realize them.
pg 10 — Hans Ulrich Obrist

Tips can make someone a better writer but not necessarily a good writer. That's a larger package - a matter of character. Golfing is more than keeping the left arm straight. Every good golfer is a complex engine that runs on ability, ego, determination, discipline, patience, confidence, and other qualities that are self-taught. So it is with writers and all creative artists. If their values are solid their work is likely to be solid. — William Zinsser

[My mother] would have me smothered like the Princes in the Tower if I showed any inclination for being an artist. She thought all artists little better than lunatics. — Francis Meadow Sutcliffe

Some artists are told what to like and told definitions of what the music business is. That's a problem. Music is artistry, and you want your music heard, your act known. But artists don't know. They are ignorant the minute they sign a contract. — Chuck D

I often wondered why I was attracted to certain landscapes and not others and why my photographs (and depictions by other artists) looked the way they did, Archetypes imprinted on my mind started me on a search ... — John Pfahl

Wordy! I enjoy description - I like words, and words are the tools that writers use, just like paint is the tool that artists use. I think words are fun, and I have a lot of fun using them. I know that a lot of kids think my stories start very slowly, and I expect that's true. But that's the way I like to read stories, so when I'm writing them I can do what I want! I say that to kids in schools, and they are very generous - they say, That's true. You can do what you want. It's your story. — Natalie Babbitt

Artists never seem to get bored with life. — John Kurtz

Part of what made the Macintosh great was that the people working on it were musicians, poets, and artists, and zoologists, and historians. They also happened to be the best computer scientists in the world. But if it hadn't been computer science, these people would have been doing amazing things in other fields. — Steve Jobs

One is either an artist or one is not. It is not something one becomes. It is something that one is from birth. We do not study to be artists. We study to become more proficient. To understand more. — Edward Swift

So, I mean, there's still vast swaths of the city that are suffering from a lack of jobs and poor housing and poor public schools, but they are building momentum - you know, techies, foodies, artists, musicians, all coming to Detroit. So there is this vibrancy. You see it in the newspapers every day - some story about the new Detroit. — David Maraniss

I am a famous artist. I make millions. But I frequently see debut shows of unknown artists with prices that are double of mine ... what they're really doing is barely getting by and helping me sell 1,000 paintings a year effortlessly, because they make my paintings look like such a bargain. Thank you to all the egotistical art students! — Mark Kostabi

We can either own our circumstances and be creative in them, or we can throw up our hands and say, I cannot be held accountable because the conditions are not ideal. — Patti Digh

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

Realism is condemned by those artists whose poverty of technique does not permit them to express it. — Walter J. Phillips

Eden Robinson is one of those rare artists who comes to writing with a skill and maturity that has taken the rest of us decades to achieve. — Thomas King

You don't need as much as some of the other artists but you do sing with your eyes close and it gives the illusion that you singing in your sleep and number one places around the country, you have to have your eyes open. You can close your eyes for a certain gesture or whatever but your eyes are the mirrors of your soul ... — Maxine Powell

Our culture is intent on taking the lines out of people's faces - surgically, with costly creams, and with fear and trembling - when, in fact, the opposite should be the case. As artists know, if there is anything behind a face, that face improves with age. — Karen DeCrow

Often the inspiration to write music comes from the voices in your head. You're not crazy. Just be thankful they are not making you rescue people in 20-degree weather at 2:30 in the morning in the forest. — Shannon L. Alder

I've always been singing. Since day one. I started doing musical theater and you have to sing in musical theater and so that's where I got most of my training. So singing on stage, you just inevitably, when you're around other vocal artists, you get better at singing. — Zac Efron

When you actually meet the devil and he offers you a deal most artists eventually negotiate. — Marc Maron

The motives behind scientism are culturally significant. They have been mixed, as usual: genuine curiosity in search of truth; the rage for certainty and for unity; and the snobbish desire to earn the label scientist when that became a high social and intellectual rank. But these efforts, even though vain, have not been without harm, to the inventors and to the world at large. The "findings" have inspired policies affecting daily life that were enforced with the same absolute assurance as earlier ones based on religion. At the same time, the workers in the realm of intuition, the gifted finessers - artists, moralists, philosophers, historians, political theorists, and theologians - were either diverted from their proper task, while others were looking on them with disdain as dabblers in the suburbs of Truth. — Jacques Barzun

Of all the artists on Death Row, none of them went bankrupt. — Suge Knight

So I guess the complete lack of any new developments is what struck me. That and the fact that much of the good we had done for the artists' side of the industry with G.O.D. had been just as quickly undone by the big boys. — Mike Wilson

The artists who endure are the ones who stay focused even after they have reached the top of their profession. — Simon Cowell

I'm not one of those playwrights who says, 'Show up, hit your marks, and don't talk to me!' I always want to hear from the other artists involved, whether it's the director, the lighting tech, or the actors. — Pearl Cleage

Advice to artists: always take the opportunity to shut up. — Bill Jay

The air of Paris is quite different from any other. There's something about it which thrills and excites and intoxicates you, and in some strange way makes you want to dance and do all sorts of other silly things. As soon as I get out of the train, it's just as if I had drunk a bottle of champagne. What a time one could have surrounded by artists! How happy those lucky people must be, the great men who have made a name in a city like Paris! What a wonderful life they have! — Guy De Maupassant

One mentions many artists who are actually art works of nature. — Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel

I like collaborating, but I felt I should do my first single by myself so people don't think I'm leaning on other artists to be a success. — Missy Elliot

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

Huskies get in trouble. Huskies are well-known to be escape artists. Why? Because they were bred to go long-distance. They're not bred to be in the backyard and just look beautiful because they have blue eyes. — Cesar Millan

All artists are willing to suffer for their work. But why are so few prepared
to learn to draw? — Banksy

The invitation for artists to compete to see who can be the most charitable is a wonderful thing. — Bruce Cockburn

It is not that complexity is overrated, but is is overcomplicated; it is not that obscurity is too obscure, it's that the underside grows grungy if it isn't exposed to the change of air;
it is not that the language is exhausted, it is that we run down; it's not that the edge won't cut anymore, it is that the cuts are getting thinner;
it's not that art is artificial, it is that the artists get outright seditty; it's not that literary reputations are not inevitable, it's that they are invented;
not that theories are not beautiful, but that they are feeble — C.D. Wright

Talking to all those great writers and artists for the magazine was a form of graduate school for me. — Christopher Bollen

Lenny Kravitz is one of my favorite musical artists. — Lawrence Jackson

There are female artists I can look at that I find more in common with than the male artists, because they're blending the pop, dance and theatricality ... but currently there aren't a lot of guys who go there. — Adam Lambert

I like adding little elements into the final mix. I'm more fond of the '70s glam than '80s. I have that style of vocals ... there are a lot of pop artists who are using the glam vibe in their music. I'm part of that wave. — Adam Lambert

It's not the struggle that makes us artists, but Art that makes us struggle. — Albert Camus

Artists want to sell their work, sure. But they aren't out there asking questions about what people want and what they don't want, now are they? — Michael Scott