Artist Quotes

A writer must find his own grain, way, bent. ...He aspires to create new and original works. His way is alone. If he succumbs to ideologies, he turns into a mouthpiece. He must hang on to his identity for dear life. In the end he must rely on his own judgment. It’s the only way to survive as a writer and an artist.

~ F. Scott Fitzgerald

Artists hide their identities in the brushstrokes of their paintings, the verses in their cantos, and the sentences in their novels. The true face of an artist is never on his face and this is what he prefers. Others misunderstand this displaced melancholy with an absence of melancholy.

~ Bruce Crown

But the artist began to have misgivings as the wall underwent its transformation. Bigger than any pavement project he had yet undertaken, it made him restless. Over the years, a precise cycle had entered the rhythm of his life, the cycle of arrival, creation, and obliteration. Like sleeping, waking and stretching, or eating, digesting and excreting, the cycle sang in harmony with the blood in his veins and the breath in his lungs. He learned to disdain the overlong sojourn and the procrastinated departure, for they were the progenitors of complacent routine, to be shunned at all costs. The journey -- chanced, unplanned, solitary -- was the thing to relish.Now, however, his old way of life was being threatened. The agreeable neighborhood and the solidity of the long, black wall were reawakening in him the usual sources of human sorrow: a yearning for permanence, for roots, for something he could call his own....

~ Rohinton Mistry

With lead he shaded love into the woman's eyes.

~ Dean Koontz

The here, the now and the individual have always been the special concern of the saint, the artist, the poet and -- from time immemorial--the woman.

~ Anne Morrow Lindbergh

The Marquesa would even have been astonished to learn that her letters were very good, for such authors live always in the noble weather of their own minds and those productions which seem remarkable to us are little better than a day's routine to them.

~ Thornton Wilder

But you're an artist. you should know there's more to a story than the part happening right now.

~ Kate Messner

You won't change anything significant in the world if you try to be like it. Change comes when you do something different.

~ Shannon L. Alder

She, however, attentively watched my looks, and her artist's pride was gratified, no doubt, to read my heartfelt admiration in my eyes.

~ Anne Brontë

Miss, I'd gladly pay you to remove your clothes.

~ David Scheier

My normal friends loved having a token author. Just like every WoW raiding party needs at least one healer, every gaggle needs at least one artist. They enjoyed introducing me to people at bars. This is Jessica. She's a writer. That's really code for She's definitely fucking someone tonight. Hang around long enough, and that someone might be you.

~ Jessica Wildfire

He traced her arched eyebrow. “Every morning when I wake up with you at my side, you’re more beautiful than yesterday.

~ Lindsay Mckenna

I see the game now. You can't write with ink, and you can't write with your own heart's blood, but you can write with the heart's blood of some one else. You have to be a cad before you can be an artist. O’Henry 'The Plutonian Fire' (1905)

~ O. Henry

Leave me to die a lonely death. An artist’s death. A writer’s playground. A painter’s background. A philosopher’s bread and butter.An endeavor that we all face. I just hope that I’m not the only one there.

~ A.p. Sweet

Artist must have an all-or-nothing attitide. Otherwise they will bite his head off and there will be no artist.

~ Kata Mlek

I am happiest sitting against a tree, with my notebook or sketchpad on my knee, capturing the moment.

~ Fennel Hudson

If it's your greatest dream, you wouldn't give up so easily.. So do yourself a favour, find it again & start focusing on anything that will help you materialise it, it's not going to be a walk in the park, but it will help you sleep at night; 10 years from now.

~ Nikki Rowe

The artistic bend is a sell-out. It's all truth, or it's no good. EIther write what's in the heart, all of it, the good, the bad, the ugly, the uglier, the privat and even more private and it's a book worth reading. Not willing to go there? Do yourself and the world a favor: Don't write it until you're ready to do so. Only then is it your truest artist being heard. And only then will the world want to hear what you have to say.-Wendy K. Williamson 9/25/14

~ Wendy K. Williamson

The art is more important than the artist. The work is more important than the person who does it. You must be prepared to sacrifice all the you could possibly have, be, or do; you must be willing to go all the way for your art. If it is a question between choosing between your life and a work of art -- any work of art -- your decision is made for you.

~ Lloyd Alexander

My writing, it’s my way of making sense of everything. My way to feel whole. May I never be complete and may I never feel content – please, let me always have the need, always have the urge to write. 

~ Charlotte Eriksson

...she (the artist, the writer) doesn't wait for inspiration, she acts in the anticipation of its apparition.

~ Steven Pressfield

The artist must be like that Marine. He has to know how to be miserable. He has to love being miserable.

~ Steven Pressfield

The greatest artists express their inner self, an artist paints her rage, a writer pens his fear, a dancer expresses her sadness through movement, and a musician's loneliness echoes in his performance.

~ Gerard De Marigny

Only the mediocre artist is always at his best.

~ Victor J. Banis

During the act of making something, I experience a kind of blissful absence of the self and a loss of time. When I am done, I return to both feeling as restored as if I had been on a trip. I almost never get this feeling any other way. I once spent sixteen hours making 150 wedding invitations by hand and was not for one instance of that time tempted to eat or look at my watch. By contrast, if seated at the computer, I check my email conservatively 30,000 times a day. When I am writing, I must have a snack, call a friend, or abuse myself every ten minutes. I used to think that this was nothing more than the difference between those things we do for love and those we do for money. But that can't be the whole story. I didn't always write for a living, and even back when it was my most fondly held dream to one day be able to do so, writing was always difficult. Writing is like pulling teeth. From my dick.

~ David Rakoff

Writing is the only way to run away from home, without ever leaving.

~ Shannon L. Alder

In my younger days dodging the draft, I somehow wound up in the Marine Corps. There's a myth that Marine training turns baby-faced recruits into bloodthirsty killers. Trust me, the Marine Corps is not that efficient. What it does teach, however, is a lot more useful.The Marine Corps teaches you how to be miserable.This is invaluable for an artist.Marines love to be miserable. Marines derive a perverse satisfaction in having colder chow, crappier equipment, and higher casualty rates than any outfit of dogfaces, swab jockeys, or flyboys, all of whom they despise. Why? Because these candy-asses don't know how to be miserable.The artist committing himself to his calling has volunteered for hell, whether he knows it or not. He will be dining for the duration on a diet of isolation, rejection, self-doubt, despair, ridicule, contempt, and humiliation.The artist must be like that Marine. He has to know how to be miserable. He has to love being miserable. He has to take pride in being more miserable than any soldier or swabbie or jet jockey. Because this is war, baby. And war is hell.Page 68

~ Steven Pressfield

The words of the Quran all seemed strangely familiar yet so unlike anything I had ever read before,’ he told us. He embraced Islam in 1977, and changed his name to Yusuf, the Arabic for Joseph. ‘I identified with the story of Joseph in the Quran,’ he said. ‘His brothers sold him like goods in the market place.’ Yusuf felt the music business had treated him not like an artist but as a commodity.

~ Kristiane Backer

Where Norman Rockwell is the Artist for the man on the street, O'Henry is his author.

~ Sonia Rumzi

The thing about being a screenwriter, scriptwriter, or scenarist, You get to have multiple personalities and not be charged!

~ Funny

I never understood, what a starving artist was until I became one.

~ Mary Sage Nguyen

My main task as an artist is to show you either what you have never seen before -- or to show you what you have seen countless times, in a way you've never seen it.

~ Mike Duron

I've played Romeo for Juliet(But in depth)It's vignettes of silhouettes(And then read)And watched Russian roulette, yeah red SovietYet doing it simultaneouslyWhile dropping down shed oubliettesTurned around and took truth to the head thatLove is the ugliest thing too beautiful for death

~ Criss Jami

For a second, I stared at the map of her veins just under the surface of her thin skin. It was like her body was trying to become diaphanous. Instead of getting harder and stronger and full of life as we age, we disappear slowly. Our skin thins and evaporates. Our nails barely coat our fingertips. Our hair falls out. We are never more see-through.

~ Laura Anderson Kurk

He smiled and squinted at me again, tilting his head up and to the right as he stared. “Maybe what I’m attracted to in you is more than your looks and your brain and your humor.” He leaned closer like he had a secret. “It could be your soul,” he whispered.I pushed his cheek until he was squinting at the door to the kitchen instead. “Is this when you tell me I’m your soul mate, O’Neill?

~ Laura Anderson Kurk

What I see is sacred.

~ Lailah Gifty Akita

Ok! So that's the spice. Typical gossips for or against a qualified newcomer!

~ Koral Dasgupta

Be an artist, in whatever little faculty possible.For the Earth, without ‘Art’ is just ‘Eh

~ Jasleen Kaur Gumber

Added to the moral solitude of the murderer comes the solitude of the artist, which can acknowledge no authority, save that of another artist.

~ Jean Genet

Opposites though they are, both solitude and solidarity are essential if the artist is to produce works that are not only significant to his or her age, but that will also speak to future generations.

~ Rollo May