Artist Quotes

The machinery of the sky that confounds us on earth with endless transformations of clouds in the light of dawn does not compare to the extraordinary tenacity of human beings, the way of human life, the presentiment of approaching death, the existence of love, the brilliant coruscations of light and the dark scars of our lives, to say nothing of the incomprehensible form of the cosmos and the overwhelming mysteries of space, time, distance.

~ Yayoi Kusama

The data on the economic utility of artists is really, really strong. Artists and entrepreneurs are the same people...and of course entrepreneurs are the people who provide all of the vision for the entire capitalist system. They're absolutely necessary.But conservatives tend to be so blind to art that they can't even see that the artists are the ones who drive the economy forward!

~ Jordan Peterson

Artist communities love to bullshit each other and glad-hand one another, and there's no room for the crippling honesty of comedy.I'm a painter -- well... you don't...probably need to do that.. . . if you're painting something that doesn't exist, I understand that, I can appreciate- . . . but if your pain- 'oh, it's a barnyard scene in autumn'--well then just take a picture of a barn in autumn! It's way better than a painting! - Before Turning the Gun on Himself [2012]

~ Doug Stanhope

Art is a visual language, I'm just perfecting my alphabet.

~ Zachary A. Diaz

It's 4am again and I'm just getting started. People are boring and I want to burn with excitement or anger and bleed, bleed through my words. I want to get all fucked up and write real and raw and ugly and beautifully. I bet you're sleeping safe and calm, and you can stay there, it's safer there, and you wouldn't stand one night on this journey my mind wanders off to every night you close your eyes. I'll stay here one day and I will never come down. I promise I can fly before I hit the ground. It doesn't even hurt anymore. I swear, it doesn't hurt.

~ Charlotte Eriksson

Life is a collection of memories and feelings. Mawkish sentimentally urges us to engage in artistic overtures, we yearn to share with other people a melody of rudimentary experiences and respond to a stabilizing tune strung together with a shared ethos. We walk in parallel strides with our brethren seeking out equivalent affirmations of our being. We long to shout out to the world that we once walked this earth; we seek to leave in our wake traces of our pithy habitation. Our unfilled longing propels us into committing senseless acts of self-sabotage and then we desperately seek redemption from our slippery selves by building monuments to the human spirit. We employ a bewildering blend of conscious and unconscious materials to construct synoptic testaments to our temporal existence. We labor on the canvas of our choosing to scrawl our inimitable mark, fanatically toiling to escape a sentence of total obliteration along with our impending mortality.

~ Kilroy J. Oldster

An artist's job is to make new clichés.

~ Grayson Perry

I think, if one is a true art lover, he can't stick to a particular genre. Art knows no partitions, no boundaries.

~ Saketkr

An artist is a man who digests his own subjective impressions and knows how to find a general objective meaning in them, and how to express them in a convincing form.

~ Maxim Gorky

In every situation, at the beginning or end of the workday, you have a choice. You can look back or you can look forward. My advice: look forward. Always think about the next day. Don't go into the studio thinking, 'Hmmm, let's see what I was doing yesterday?' It takes more energy to twist yourself around and look back that it does to face forward.

~ Twyla Tharp

It is ten per cent how you draw, and ninety per cent what you draw.

~ Andrew Loomis

The very first thing I remember in my early childhood is a flame, a blue flame jumping off a gas stove somebody lit... I remember being shocked by the whoosh of the blue flame jumping off the burner, the suddenness of it... I saw that flame and felt that hotness of it close to my face. I felt fear, real fear, for the first time in my life. But I remember it also like some kind of adventure, some kind of weird joy, too. I guess that experience took me someplace in my head I hadn't been before... The fear I had was almost like an invitation, a challenge to go forward into something I knew nothing about. That's where I think my personal philosophy of life and my commitment to everything I believe in started... In my mind I have always believed and thought since then that my motion had to be forward, away from the heat of that flame.

~ Miles Davis

As a student I thought there was a formula of some kind that I would get hold of somewhere, and thereby become and artist. There is a formula, but it has not been in books. It is really plain old courage, standing on one's own feet, and forever seeking enlightenment; courage to develop your way, but learning from the other fellow; experimentation with your own ideas, observing for yourself, a rigid discipline of doing over that which you can improve.

~ Andrew Loomis

I have never found a book that stressed the importance of myself as a caretaker of my ability, of staying healthy mentally and physically, or that gave me an inkling that my courage might be strained to the utmost.

~ Andrew Loomis

He gave us music that reached into the ear like a lover's tongue and changed the color of our feelings. He presented movement so exquisite and fluid it coaxed our souls out of our bodies to dance with him, weightless in the perfume of divinity.

~ Katie Waitman

William, an artist is someone who combines a desperate need to be understood with the fiercest love of privacy-

~ Garth Risk Hallberg

I thought of the cool, fresh air of the city I'd always dreamed of living in. The art museums and trolleys and the mysterious fog that blanketed it. I could almost smell the cappuccinos I'd planned to drink in bohemian cafes or hear the indie music in the bookstores I would spend my free time in. I pictured the friends I'd make, my kindred art people, and the dorm room I was supposed to move into.

~ Heather Demetrios

I've never been somewhere I belonged, but there are places where I think I could be happy. Like San Francisco. Well, do art museums count? Because I feel like I belong in them.

~ Heather Demetrios

My eyes roved over the walls covered with my collages and prints of famous paintings. Magritte, Kandinsky, Kahlo. My origami shapes hung from fishing wire, dangling over my bed. They shivered in the slight breeze blowing through my open window. It was my own little escape pod, but none of it was enough tonight.

~ Heather Demetrios

To fall in love with pain is to fall in love with art.

~ Dominic Riccitello

Art doesn’t give rise to anything in us that isn’t already there. It simply stirs our curious consciousness and sparks a fire that illuminates who we have always wanted to be.

~ Kamand Kojouri

An artistic person taps into the destructive emotional energy of guilt and shame and the longing to love and be loveable and transforms these powerful emotions into a creative force.

~ Kilroy J. Oldster

Art fuels the fire inside me.

~ Efrat Cybulkiewicz

Art and the artist meet in stages, slowly revealing themselves until both are satisfied with what the other has become.

~ Richelle E. Goodrich

An artist is merely a tool with which art molds itself.

~ Richelle E. Goodrich

Critics are only concerned with what affects them. And feeling empathy is a gift not many possess.

~ Efrat Cybulkiewicz

Self-destruction is an art, cursed are the exponents.

~ Anurag Shourie

She must disappear for a time from the human surface,And sacrifice everything for this, To recreate herself from the depths of her world.

~ David Foenkinos

Artists are cannibals. We consume other artists, and they become part of us—flesh and bone—only to be spewed out again in our own works.

~ Siri Hustvedt

Art should be for sale. The artist should not.

~ A.e. Samaan

I write things down because my thoughts get too heavy in my head and it hurts my neck.

~ Joyce Rachelle

Art is not religion, 'it doesn't even lead to religion.' But in the time of distress which is ours, the time when the gods are missing, the time of absence and exile, art is justified, for it is the intimacy of this distress: the effort to make manifest, through the image, the error of the imaginary, and eventually the ungraspable, forgotten truth which hides behind the error.

~ Maurice Blanchot

One of the most beautiful things to do is to paint darkness, which nevertheless has light in it.

~ Vincent Van Gogh

The hours tick by as I lie in bed.Memories keep surfacing, tormenting me into unbelievable sadness. I can't bring myself to move. I can't fight the memories that keep filling my thoughts. I stay curled in the fetal position as each memory plays out. I can't stop them from coming. I can't make them go away. Nothing can distract me. I can't block the memories, so they continue to come.

~ Ashley Earley

I'm being pulled under - father and farther from the surface. My lungs continue to scream for air. Panic is building inside me, threatening to combust. I can't break free.Help! I can't break free!I open my mouth to scream.

~ Ashley Earley

I owe it all to words and art, the peace that came with a flicker of a pen silenced the suffering; eased the pain and life that was once filled with burden became sane again. It Became meaningful. Art does matter, it made me, when the world changed me.

~ Nikki Rowe

One of his hands move away from my face to flatten against my back, pulling me closer to him as he deepens the kiss. He parts my lips under his as my mind seems to sign quietly in content. I kiss him back as fiercely as he kisses me, unable to control the infatuation that rushes through me - feeling almost like fireworks. Not so careful anymore.Little shivers of urgency shoot through me. I push off the window, pressing closer to him. The rush of sensation that is coursing through me feels like I've drunk a gallon of coffee. It feels like an electric buzz is flooding between us.

~ Ashley Earley

LABOUR is effort, while ART is effortless! What are you?

~ Ramana Pemmaraju

Night has settled over Paris.The streets have cleared of the crowds, and the city has been lit up. I set my book down, deciding to go for a walk. The Eiffel Tower is only a few blocks away. Now that there aren't many people out, I can walk there without having to fight my way through mobs of gawking tourists.

~ Ashley Earley

He drinks his coffee tentatively, glancing at me every few seconds, watching me. Every time he glances in my direction, I quickly turn away though he obviously knows I'm watching him. I know he's wondering why I'm staring at him, but he doesn't ask.I finally take a sip of coffee, set the mug back on the table, and voice what's on my mind, I want to draw you.

~ Ashley Earley