Artist Quotes

Every act of creation is first of all an act of destruction. ― Pablo Picasso

~ Pablo Picasso

I'm tired of feeling like I'm fucking crazy.I'm tired of driving till I see stars in my eyes.

~ Lana Del Rey

This is the time for every artist in every genre to do what he or she does loudly and consistently. It doesn't matter to me what your position is. You've got to keep asserting the complexity and the originality of life, and the multiplicity of it, and the facets of it. This is about being a complex human being in the world, not about finding a villain. This is no time for anything else than the best that you've got.

~ Toni Morrison

I have forced myself to contradict myself in order to avoid conforming to my own taste.

~ Marcel Duchamp

Whatever the source of emotion that drives me to create, I want to give it a form which has some connection with the visible world, even if it is only to wage war on that world....I want my paintings to be able to defend themselves to resist the invader, just as though there were razor blades on all surfaces so no one could touch them without cutting his hands.

~ Pablo Picasso

Curiosity is the main energy...

~ Robert Rauschenberg

The need to be a great artist makes it hard to be an artist. The need to produce a great work of art makes it hard to produce any art at all.

~ Julia Cameron

It is only in his work that an artist can find reality and satisfaction, for the actual world is less intense than the world of his invention and consequently his life, without recourse to violent disorder, does not seem very substantial. The right condition for him is that in which his work in not only convenient but unavoidable.

~ Tennessee Williams

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

The artist is always beginning. Any work of art which is not a beginning, an invention, a discovery is of little worth.

~ Ezra Pound

An artist is like a woman who can do nothing but love, and who succumbs to every stray male jackass.

~ Heinrich Böll

I'm often painted as the bad guy, and the artistic part of me wants to hand out the brush.

~ Criss Jami

I do not know anything about Art with a capital A. What I do know about is my art. Because it concerns me. I do not speak for others. So I do not speak for things which profess to speak for others. My art, however, speaks for me. It lights my way.

~ Mark Z. Danielewski

An original artist is unable to copy. So he has only to copy in order to be original.

~ Jean Cocteau

All in all, the creative act is not performed by the artist alone.. the spectator brings the work in contact with the external world by deciphering and interpreting its inner qualifications and thus adds his contribution to the creative act.

~ Marcel Duchamp

I love to draw—pencil, ink pen—I love art. When I go on tour and visit museums in Holland, Germany or England—you know those huge paintings?—I’m just amazed. You don’t think a painter could do something like that. I can look at a piece of sculpture or a painting and totally lose myself in it.

~ Michael James Jackson

When you want to make the main color pure and bright, don't just keep adding bright colors on it. Just make the colors around the spot darker and dull. It will give the scene dramatical effects.I think the life is the same.

~ Hiroko Sakai

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

The object of the artist is the creation of the beautiful. What the beautiful is is another question.

~ James Joyce

[in the true mad north] of introspection,where 'falcons of the inner eye'dive and die, glimpsing in their dying fall, all life's memory of existence.

~ Lawrence Ferlinghetti

If there’s a thing, a scene, maybe, an image that you want to see real bad, that you need to see but it doesn’t exist in the world around you, at least not in the form that you envision, then you create it so that you can look at it and have it around, or show it to other people who wouldn’t have imagined it because they perceive reality in a more narrow, predictable way. And that’s it. That’s all an artist does.

~ Tom Robbins

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

Art is nothing more than creating an emotion in your own form.

~ Shannon L. Alder

Art does not have to be dull, to be effective; the artist does not have to be a bore, to be real.

~ Burton Raffel

The artist's world is limitless. It can be found anywhere, far from where he lives or a few feet away. It is always on his doorstep.

~ Paul Strand

There is only one thing left for you to do,” John Sloan advised one artist. “Pull off your socks and try with your feet.

~ Ross Wetzsteon

Magic is the stunning art of surprising your audience, so that nothing else surprises them.

~ Amit Kalantri

Would Turner have slept through such terrific drama? Absolutely not! Anyone in my business who slept through that would be a fool. I don't keep office hours.

~ Martin Gayford

Jack was too absorbed in his work to hear the bell. He was mesmerized by the challenge of making soft, round shapes of hard rock. The stone had a will of its own, and if he tried to make it do something it did not want to do, it would fight him, and his chisel would slip, or dig in too deeply, spoiling the shapes. But once he had got to know the lump of rock in front of him he could transform it. The more difficult the task, the more fascinated he was. He was beginning to feel that the decorative carving demanded by Tom was too easy. Zigzags, lozenges, dogtooth, spirals and plain roll moldings bored him, and even these leaves were rather stiff and repetitive. He wanted to curve natural-looking foliage, pliable and irregular, and copy the different shapes of real leaves, oak and ash and birch.

~ Ken Follett

I sat there and my love to him poured out more and more, and, lo, he flew down to a stump, and then to my knee. I knew beyond a shadow of doubt that the important thing is the love that goes out from oneself.

~ Agnes Grinstead Anderson

I pastiche, I quote, I lie. Fake, forge, forage, fabricate, copy, borrow, transform, steal. I illusion. I’m a genuine deceiver, a shy sham artist.

~ Shawna Lemay

Because all the brilliant ones- they can sing it and they can paint it, but they can't do it. You can't expect them to love you.

~ Dakota Lane

You know it's ART, when the check clears.

~ Andy Warhol

Inking is meditation in liquid form...

~ J.h. Everett

Where there is a true art and genuine virtuosity the artist can paint an incomparable masterpiece without leaving even a trace of his identity.

~ Orhan Pamuk

However my mother had once said, ‘When you go to art school, you’ll find everybody sitting around practicing how to do their signature'; and sure enough, there they were, some of them doing just that.

~ Richard Williams

[I]t was [Barnett] Newman who made the famously wry remark, “Aesthetics is for the artist as ornithology is for the birds

~ Ross Wetzsteon

The scary part of being an artist is knowing that what makes you a better artist can also kill you.

~ Darnell Lamont Walker

I had come down here, not to serve God as a craftsman should, but to show my people how great a craftsman I was. They cared not.

~ Rudyard Kipling

This is what the great artists manage. They flatter us, by observing better than others and then speaking to each of us as individuals and in a language that we worry we may be the only ones left caring for.

~ Tristan Gooley