Artist Quotes

Who am I? I am who I say I am and tomorrow someone else entirely. You are too nostalgic, you want memory to secure you, console you. The past is a bore. What matters is only oneself and what one creates from what one has learned. Imagination uses what it needs and discards the rest— where you want to erect a museum. Don't hoard the past, Astrid. Don't cherish anything. Burn it. The artist is the phoenix who burns to emerge.

~ Janet Fitch

Art becomes an honest expression once done for oneself. Failure of that results to empty and transparent art.

~ Unarine Ramaru

It is sometimes said that the tragedy of an artist's life is that he cannot realize his ideal. But the true tragedy that dogs the steps of most artists is that they realize their ideal too absolutely. For, when the ideal is realized, it is robbed of its wonder and its mystery, and becomes simply a new starting point for an ideal that is other than itself. This is why music is the perfect type of art. Music can never reveal its ultimate secret.

~ Oscar Wilde

I am shedding.I am not a new me.I am my old me in my new me.I remain, carved with the soul of my knife.My mess scattered all over my countenance. I am me. Take me as I am.

~ Malebo Sephodi

When you paint late at night, drinking beer or wine or both, you gotta be very careful to watch what you are doing...

~ Hiroko Sakai

Trapnel wanted, among other things, to be a writer, a dandy, a lover, a comrade, an eccentric, a sage, a virtuoso, a good chap, a man of honour, a hard case, a spendthrift, an opportunist, a raisonneur; to be very rich, to be very poor, to possess a thousand mistresses, to win the heart of one love to whom he was ever faithful, to be on the best of terms with all men, to avenge savagely the lightest affront, to live to a hundred full of years and honour, to die young and unknown but recognized the following day as the most neglected genius of the age. Each of these ambitions had something to recommend it from one angle or another, with the possible exception of being poor - the only aim Trapnel achieved with unqualified mastery - and even being poor, as Trapnel himself asserted, gave the right to speak categorically when poverty was discussed by people like Evadne Clapham.

~ Anthony Powell

Color me....BRILLIANT.

~ Coco J. Ginger

But the conquest of the physical world is not man’s only duty. He is also enjoined to conquer the great wilderness of himself. The precise role of the artist, then, is to illuminate that darkness, blaze roads through that vast forest, so that we will not, in all our doing, lose sight of its purpose, which is, after all, to make the world a more human dwelling place.

~ James Baldwin

Be an artist, you can get away with anything.

~ A.d. Posey

If you are an artist, may no love of wealth or fame or admiration and no fear of blame or misunderstanding make you ever paint, with pen or brush, an ideal of external life otherwise than as you see it.

~ Olive Schreiner

The highest duty of the writer is to remain true to himself and let the chips fall where they may. In serving his vision of the truth the artist best serves his nation.

~ John F. Kennedy

All writers are different, each have their own artist way they go about telling a story. The only thing they have in common, is they write.

~ Lori Lesko

Think of a ballet dancer at the barre. Plie, eleve, battement tendu. She is practicing, because she knows that there is no difference between practice and art. The practice is the art.

~ Dani Shapiro

When people have told me that because I am a Catholic, I cannot be an artist, I have had to reply, ruefully, that because I am a Catholic I cannot afford to be less than an artist.

~ Flannery O'connor

I have always noticed that these artists and writers are very unbalanced

~ Agatha Christie

Surely there is a knowing behind it all. There is a teacher, an expresser, a creator, an artist perhaps, a poet certainly that has designed and presented all of the clues that we need to navigate life with some degree of grace, and perhaps with a greater degree of happiness than we now have.

~ Jeffrey R. Anderson

I can’t make a first impression like the one I made on you. That would be horrible.” “Slow down there, princess. How do you know what kind of first impression you gave me?” Rowan made her ‘are you for real?’ face. “I think it’s safe to say getting tangled in dog leashes and then having one of the dogs urinate on you ranks up there with worst first impressions ever.” “I’d classify it as most memorable…. I knew right then my life would never be the same.

~ Robin Bielman

What if pretending is interfering with the person you’re meant to be?” he said.

~ Robin Bielman

I’m in awe of you, Rowan Palotay,” he said softly. “And plan to make love to you for the rest of the night, but right now, I want you to be a good cowgirl and ride me.” His finger hooked around the string of her panties, and he tugged them down and off. “The boots stay on.

~ Robin Bielman

He tasted like chocolate and hazelnut liqueur and she wanted to feast on him for the rest of the night. His kiss… his kiss took her to another place where fireworks blazed.

~ Robin Bielman

A distaste for the new is not always fear of the unknown, but sometimes ambition. Some people don't like the new way simply because they never got a chance to master the old way.

~ Criss Jami

The artist is often misunderstood because, stepping outside himself and holding most details in great tension, he's about as complex as a shape-shifter; or a head with faces on all sides, but not necessarily in the negative connotation as one being two-faced usually implies. For instance, to be misunderstood can mean to be improperly deemed a troublemaker when that is not one's true intent: you see, to troublemakers, the artist knows that the peacemaker may seem like a troublemaker; therefore he may, whether in honesty or in jest, at times, present himself as a troublemaker for perceptual, artistic flair. But then to the artless peacemakers, because of this they will interpret him as a troublemaker. This is why the artist has so few allies. To the troublemakers he's a troublemaker, yet still the peacemakers a troublemaker.

~ Criss Jami

We didn't come to the world just to entertain, we came to play remarkable roles, and our reward is to see you doing more than us.

~ Michael Bassey Johnson

I believed that I wanted to be a poet, but deep down I just wanted to be a poem.

~ Jaime Gil De Beidma

Music is exciting and easy to enjoy, the rhythm and voice.It does not need interpretation. That is why it is called the Universal Language.

~ Ellen J. Barrier

The artist has the master picture in his mind, before he begins to paint.

~ Lailah Gifty Akita

Love is like a magic trickYou know you are getting fooled, but still, you stand in lineAnd pay to see it again and again.

~ Yarro Rai

Nothing I do is natural, realistic, organic or accidental. I'm never spontaneous, I'm completely premeditated.

~ Nuno Roque

The depth of your art is subject to originality, Your own authentic style.

~ Unarine Ramaru

In a timepiece, a sweep of a second hand is so slim in a way that it doesn't wait for no man, and that's why we choose to conceive things from the heart.

~ Shawn Lukas

Was it really right to look the way he did? His prominent nose was altogether too immodest for his humble position in life, and he let his hair grow right through the winter so that he appeared more and more artistic. His fiancée reacted by saying that he looked like a painter who had ended up as a photographer.

~ Knut Hamsun

Just about the worst thing an artist can do is to try and be a nice person.

~ Amanda Craig

A human being is a real artist and a creative in any field, not a programmed robot in some factory.

~ Shawn Lukas

She simply converted an average face into beautiful face and a beautiful face into an angelic face.

~ Amit Kalantri

You can survive without artistry, but you cannot live without artistry.

~ Amit Kalantri

The most mesmerizing of artists is always like one who was merely drawing in the sand and people came to watch.

~ Criss Jami

At moments of great enthusiasm it seems to me that no one in the world has ever made something this beautiful and important.

~ M.c. Escher

Every parent is an artist, but not every artist is apparent.

~ Eric Micha'el Leventhal

The prevarication and white lies which a mind that keeps itself ambitiously pure is as uneasy under as a great artist under the false touches that no eye detects but his own, are worn as lightly as mere trimming when once the actions have become a lie.

~ George Eliot

To be an artist, you need to exist in a world of silence.

~ Louise Bourgeois