Artist Quotations

Contrary to general belief, an artist is never ahead of his time but most people are far behind theirs.

Nobody, I think, ought to read poetry, or look at pictures or statues, who cannot find a great deal more in them than the poet or artist has actually expressed. Their highest merit is suggestiveness.

I love Los Angeles. I love Hollywood. They're beautiful. Everybody's plastic, but I love plastic. I want to be plastic.

As every divided kingdom falls, so every mind divided between many studies confounds and saps itself.

I really love New York, and I've lived here for a long time. I know not just the different neighborhoods but the different kind of class cultures in New York from the up-and-coming, down-and-out kind of artist to the powerful worlds of finance.

We're waiting for the pendulum to swing back again, which I am absolutely confident it will.

All my siblings became artists. One's a novelist, my brother is a painter, my sister was a costume designer.

Hands are the tool of the painter, the artist.

The history of the music industry is inevitably also the story of the development of technology. From the player piano to the vinyl disc, from reel-to-reel tape to the cassette, from the CD to the digital download, these formats and devices changed not only the way music was consumed, but the very way artists created it.

A great artist is always before his time or behind it.

I suppose I have become a sort of living monument in Portugal. But I come from a family with roots all over the world, so the idea of patriotism is not very strong in me. My country is the country of Chekhov, Beethoven, Velasquez - writers I like, painters and artists I admire.

I'm trying to deal with ideas about histories, fame, hearsay, and how public identities are constructed.

To restrict the artist is a crime. It is to murder germinating life

Artists like Bach and Beethoven erected churches and temples on the heights. I only wantedto build dwellings for men in which they might feel happy and at home

Many fail to realize this great recording industry was built by so-called jazz artists. And at the other end of the spectrum, a base in European classical music as well.

An artist's sphere of influence is the world.

I just think you can't shut your life off to just, you know, one thing. You gotta be open-minded. Explore things. Feed your artist.

I am uncompromising to the point of huge dissension in the studio. And it's served me very well. My theory and my philosophy is, 'Compromise breeds mediocrity.' Obviously, you have to pick your battles, and the more success an artist has, the more they want to be involved in their own career, which is not necessarily a good thing.

Every picture shows a spot with which the artist has fallen in love.

There are two kinds of artists in this world; those that work because the spirit is in them, and they cannot be silent if they would, and those that speak from a conscientious desire to make apparent to others the beauty that has awakened their own admiration.

Just as the bird sings or the butterfly soars, because it is his natural characteristic, so the artist works.

The gummy bears tattoo was my idea. It's my son's favorite candy. The sketch was my other son's idea. It's a self-portrait of himself. I just showed the artist his sketch and had him tattoo it on my forearm. It looks like a stick person with big hair. It's pretty funny.

Originality depends only on the character of the drawing and the vision peculiar to each artist.

I'm a martial artist, and I don't train because I have a fight; I train because it's my lifestyle, and I'll train every day if I'm not hurt.

This is what I like about being a designer: You can't really get it until you see it.

For me rappers and dancers are poets and artists and often times the most interesting performances are given by them.

Artists are, above all, men who want to become inhuman.

The artist is not responsible to any one. His social role is asocial... his only responsibility consists in an attitude to the work he does.

When I started getting so many haters and closed doors, I decided to prove that it could be done. I was a divorced single mother of three at the time and a size 12 - not your typical model artist that labels feel work for the music industry.

I am not a black artist, I am an artist.

The Internet has been a great outlet for storytelling. After all, there are web-based shows that have started online and have then gotten picked up. I think it's a great opportunity for artists to get through the network roadblock. It just allows us another venue to be creative in.

The press will naturally come and go as it has done with all artists, from David Bowie to Neil Young to U2.

The danger for any artist whose work is both recognizable and critically acclaimed is complacent repetition - the temptation to churn out easily identifiable, eagerly welcomed, and readily salable designs.

I think I can see people wanting to hear more music-music now as opposed to all hip-hop. You know, which I have nothing against hip-hop. I think some of it is really good. But on the other hand, some of the real great artists are just being lost because they're not getting the airplay or anything to make them inspired to record again.

If you're an original thinker, you are going get told 'no' a lot, and you have to be able to hear 'no' many times from the bankers and trust that at some point, someone is going to recognize that you are an artist and not a can of soda.

It is hard to describe the thrill of creative joy which the artist feels when the conviction seizes her that at last she has caught the very soul of the character she wishes to portray, in the music and action which reveal it.

Divine fires do not blaze each day, but an artist functions in their afterglow hoping for their recurrence.

However, the radio and national media depend much more on the hype from a good record label, and from a " buzz " about a band, then from just one or two good shows. There are a lot of artists that have a ton of good press going for them, and still do not make it big in the US.

Those artists who say that somehow therapy or analysis will thwart their creativity are completely misinformed. It's absolutely the opposite: it opens closed doors.

Artists teach critics what to think. Critics repeat what the artists teach them.

I think about that "empty" space a lot. That emptiness is what allows for something to actually evolve in a natural way. I've had to learn that over the years - because one of the traps of being an artist is to always want to be creating, always wanting to produce.

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

I work hard. I focus on myself and putting food on my dinner table before anything else. I don't worry about other artists. Worrying about the next person in a negative way is the wrong way to be.

I don't work from drawings. I don't make sketches and drawings and color sketches into a final painting.

The thing to judge in any jazz artist is, does the man project and does he have ideas.

I believe as musicians and artists we have an obligation to our souls. What that is? Only each one of us knows. I can speak for myself and say my obligation is to be happy. When I'm happy, I make great music. When I'm unhappy and my heart is broken, I may make brokenhearted music, but it still sounds good.

An artist should remain true. Otherwise his talent, like his stomach, grows fat and stuffy.

The film of tomorrow will not be directed by civil servants of the camera, but by artists for whom shooting a film constitutes a wonderful and thrilling adventure.

Back in the day, fans wrote letters to groups - you'd get them, although it could take a while. Now, artists can go online and there's discussions about what you should and shouldn't be doing. The minute you announce that you're recording an album, thousands of people are telling you what that album should be.

That is why the analogy of stealing does not work. With a thief, we want to know how much money he stole, and from whom. With the artist it is not how much he took and from whom, but what he did with it.

I'm a con artist in that I'm an actor. I make people believe something is real when they know perfectly well it isn't.

Human life itself may be almost pure chaos, but the work of the artist is to take these handfuls of confusion and disparate things, things that seem to be irreconcilable, and put them together in a frame to give them some kind of shape and meaning.

All artists are egotistical maniacs with inferiority complexes.

What marks the artist is his power to shape the material of pain we all have.

Sometimes I read a biography of some tempestuous artist and find myself longing for fireworks! booze! bloody fights!; I do think that life must be so much more thrilling when you're actively miserable.

I think there is an element of nihilism about, but I don't think most artists feel their work is meaningless.

An artist, under pain of oblivion, must have confidence in himself, and listen only to his real master: Nature.

One thing that really appeals to me is this idea of music being a living thing that has an evolution that, in a way, enables the artist to sell a process rather than a piece of product.

So ultimately, it's idealistic to think that artists are able to step away from the power of the media and the way it controls things, and go on doing their own things.

Magical realism allows an artist like myself to inject layers of meaning without being obvious. In American culture, where there is freedom of expression, this approach may seem forced, unnecessary and misunderstood. But this system of communication has become very Iranian.

My name is Kurt Schwitters... I am an artist and I nail my pictures together.

It is the artist's business to create sunshine when the sun fails.

Artists speak the truth to the public without fear of retribution or damage to their careers.

My tastes and inspirational artists were always rather eclectic and diverse.

I love Darius Rucker. He's a true artist, a great songwriter who can play his instrument, sing and write about his life.

Experiments were not attempted at that time, we did not believe in the usefulness of the concept anyway, and I finished my thesis in 1962 with a feeling like an artist balancing on a high rope without any interested spectators.

I was the least Pop of all the Pop artists.

A garden is a complex of aesthetic and plastic intentions; and the plant is, to a landscape artist, not only a plant - rare, unusual, ordinary or doomed to disappearance - but it is also a color, a shape, a volume or an arabesque in itself.

A great chef is an artist that I truly respect.

I am a poor student sitting at the feet of giants, yearning for their wisdom and begging for lessons that might one day make me a complete artist, so that if all goes well, I may one day sit beside them.

The work of the artist is to express what is repressed or even to speak the unspoken grief of society.

Whatever obstacle comes your way, you gotta be prepared to jump over it! And I think that's what separates the legends from the regular artists. It's all in how you manage that success, and how you deal with the controversy when it actually comes.

It's very difficult for me to dislike an artist. No matter what he's creating, the fact that he's experiencing the joy of creation makes me feel like we're in a brotherhood of some kind we're in it together.

Every photo shoot, I'm always asking the makeup artist what they're using on me, and I'll go out and get it.

The Renaissance is studded by the names of the artists and architects, with their creations recorded as great historical events.

If it's stage, the two most important artists are the actor and the playwright. If it's film, THE most important person is the director. The director says where the camera goes.

There have been many different artists that have been inspirational. I suppose the question is directed to what was the reason why I went into fantasy illustration.

I try to deal with the complexities of power and social life, but as far as the visual presentation goes I purposely avoid a high degree of difficulty.

Painting picture by picture, I followed the impressions my eye took in at heightened moments. I painted only memories, adding nothing, no details that I did not see. Hence the simplicity of the paintings, their emptiness.

There has never been any proper commitment to marketing these artists and their music. We are not Sony.

I believe that an artist working for and representing the Kingdom of God should do the best of their ability to show and prove the depth, life, newness, creativity, truth and excitement of their Heavenly Father through the work that is set before them.

With Martha Stewart, the power of the brand, the power of television, taught me that if you can marry all those ingredients - like you marry a great song with a great artist - and get the right television exposure, then you've got something that really is going to be sustainable. You can expand and blow up.

The conceptual artist Ai WeiWei illustrates the schizoid society that rapid change has produced - sometimes by reassembling Ming-style furniture into absurd and useless arrangements, or by carefully painting and antiquing a Coca-Cola logo on an ancient Chinese pot.

For us Africans, literature must serve a purpose: to expose, embarrass, and fight corruption and authoritarianism. It is understandable why the African artist is utilitarian.

I don't mind doing two or three Eagles songs and playing the drums. I'm not one of those artists who's going to sit here and deny the past.

I think it's part of the responsibility of an artist to shock, to upset, to make people think differently, and to surprise people. And that's where the good humor is, if there's a surprise and there's something unexpected. Something that's not normal, not in the realm of general living expectations.

I can remember the first time I ever recorded my vocals on to a beat. Cat Coore from Third World - a legendary Jamaican band - had a little demo set up at his house. I'm very good friends with his eldest son, Shiah, who plays with me now. So we were rhyming over a track by the dancehall artist Peter Metro. I've still got it somewhere.

I love games. I honestly can't imagine working with any other medium. I guess it would be akin to an artist who's doing commercial art and then goes into education, but it really frees you up to do all other kinds of creative stuff.

I enjoy doing my work, and I don't want to deal with the other things. When you enjoy doing your work so much, why deal with where to show, how to show, what to do? If the artist finds the right gallery which respects their work and gives them that freedom to do whatever they want to do, the artist can focus on his work.

Experience is the best teacher of all. And for that, there are no guarantees that one will become an artist. Only the journey matters.

Artists and celebrities are citizens, and as such you have a responsibility to keep fighting for justice because there are monolithic power structures and systemic oppression out there.

The artist who aims at perfection in everything achieves it in nothing.

I'm an artist. So if acting doesn't work out, which I hope it does, I'm probably going to go into graphic design or something like that.

Sometimes you have to be a diva. All the artists I admire from Madonna to Whitney to Mariah have all been called divas. If you are strong, if you have vision, if you are an artist, you have to do what you believe in. And if you get called a diva for it, then so what.

We've been surrounded by images of space our whole lives, from the speculative images of science fiction to the inspirational visions of artists to the increasingly beautiful pictures made possible by complex technologies. But whilst we have an overwhelmingly vivid visual understanding of space, we have no sense of what space sounds like.

I'm never happier than when I'm being creative, whether that's with Coldplay or other artists. I just love being in the studio.

There are people who help you in life. I've been given a helping hand, and that's why I feel it's my duty to help younger artists.

Many artists in Mexico fight to be the Latina Madonna. I don't want that! Never! Maybe she's the American Gloria Trevi!

A half dozen pictures would just about be enough for the life of an artist, for my life.

I always work out of uncertainty but when a painting's finished it becomes a fixed idea, apparently a final statement. In time though, uncertainty returns.. your thought process goes on.