Artist Quotes

My reality isn't as gracious as it use to be, so I create things that are.

~ Nikki Rowe

In these electric times the criminal receives a cosmopolitan reputation. It is a privilege he shares with few other artists.

~ Israel Zangwill

I am the eye that beholds... And I am the dreamer that paints the stars in the night sky... For I am the one they call artist, and you call Love.

~ Solange Nicole

Before civilization, artists painted for the living. Today, most paint for a living.

~ Mokokoma Mokhonoana

You forget, my good man, that what the artist perceives is, primarily, the difference between things. It is the vulgar who note their resemblance.

~ Vladimir Nabokov

I’m an artist; I do not destroy, but create scars. And above that, I am an inventor of new ways to create them.

~ Hillary Wen

The supreme artist lives as closely as possible to replicating the perfect dream, with life unfolding in a manner that a person could never conceive or direct.

~ Kilroy J. Oldster

Your creation was the god's way of showing humans that, the artist in him is still alive.

~ Akshay Vasu

For the artist himself art is not necessarily therapeutic; he is not automatically relieved of his fantasies by expressing them. Instead, by some perverse logic of creation, the act of formal expressions may simply make the dredged-up material more readily available to him.

~ Al Álvarez

For an artist is not a consumer, as our commercials urge us to be. An artist is a nourisher and a creator who knows that during the act of creation there is collaboration. We do not create alone.

~ Madeleine L'engle

On the stand, I asked the witness, “What's your occupation?”“Make-up artist.”“Objection!” I replied, “Lack of foundation.

~ Natalya Vorobyova

Giving him a wry look, Shiloh said, “I think you’re forcing me to look at myself, what I want, who I am.” “Good relationships always do that for both people, Darlin’. It’s just a natural progression between them. It can bring out our self-awareness. It’s not easy. But it’s rewarding.

~ Lindsay Mckenna

Growing up, I'd already decided I wanted to be a beatnik. A Bohemian poet, I thought. Or a musician. Maybe an artist. I'd dress in black turtlenecks and smoke Gitanes. I'd listen to cool jazz in clubs, getting up to read devastating truths from my notebook, leaning against the microphone, cigarette dangling from my hand.

~ Charles De Lint

For me, the camera is a sketch book, an instrument of intuition and spontaneity.

~ Henri Cartier-Bresson

As artists, we are eternally heartbroken.

~ Lady Gaga

I see myself forever and ever as the ridiculous [person], the lonely soul, the wanderer, the restless frustrated artist, the [person] in love with love, always in search of the absolute, always seeking the unattainable.

~ Henry Miller

To photograph is to hold one's breath, when all faculties converge to capture fleeting reality. It's at that precise moment that mastering an image becomes a great physical and intellectual joy.

~ Henri Cartier-Bresson

I have Social Disease. I have to go out every night. If I stay home one night I start spreading rumours to my dogs.

~ Andy Warhol

Did you just use juxtaposition in a sentence? Yes, Sage he said patiently. We use it all the time with art, ... That, and I know how to use a dictionary

~ Richelle Mead

Myth must be kept alive. The people who can keep it alive are the artists of one kind or another.

~ Joseph Campbell

Everyone should eat hashish, but only once.

~ Salvador Dalí

The artist is not a different kind of person, but every person is a different kind of artist.

~ Eric Gill

—except for the fact that your scars mean you’ve been hurting, I am one-hundred-percent cool with having them in the painting. Some models, especially the professional ones, it’s like painting air-brushed people. Give me something raw any day.

~ J. Kenner

Ordinary persons, he said, smiling, found no differences between men. The artist found them all.

~ Alexander Theroux

It's the movies that have really been running things in America ever since they were invented. They show you what to do, how to do it, when to do it, how to feel about it, and how to look how you feel about it.Andy Warhol

~ Andy Warhol

There's nothing an artist needs more - even more than excellent tools and stamina - than a deadline.

~ Adriana Trigiani

Genius - the pursuit of madness.

~ Criss Jami

The great artists are those who impose their personal vision upon humanity.

~ Guy De Maupassant

For an artist, there's nothing better than having the opportunity to create a world that doesn't- but could- exist.

~ Christophe Lautrette

The importance of an artist is to be measured by the quantity of new signs which he has introduced to the language of art.

~ Henri Matisse

Dogmatism of all kinds--scientific, economic, moral, as well as political--are threatened by the creative freedom of the artist. This is necessarily and inevitably so. We cannot escape our anxiety over the fact that the artists together with creative persons of all sorts, are the possible destroyer of our nicely ordered systems. (p. 76)

~ Rollo May

The artist (I suppose) usually pays for the privilege by some sort of partial insomnia, by the possession of one faculty that will not be controlled nor put to sleep. In a poet this must often be the visual imagination, bringing before his eyes a succession of images which he never summoned, and of which some (it is only too likely) will be ugly or pitiful.

~ Mary Lascelles

[Kandinsky] arrived, as they say, 'with snow on his boots', and it never really melted.

~ Neville Weston

It's always been most important for me to figure out my space rather than trying to check out what everyone else is up to, minute by minute. Technology is making it easier to connect to other people, but maybe harder to keep connected to yourself-- and that's essential for any artist, I think.

~ Jay-Z

The intention (of an artist) is (the same as a scientist)...to discover and reveal what is unsuspected but significant in life.

~ H W Leggett

No man is equal to his book. All the best products of his mental activity go into his book, where they come separated from the mass of inferior products with which they are mingled in his daily talk.

~ Herbert Spencer

There were no sparks, just a gasoline fire burning through the dark

~ Sukh Dev

This assumption of the intrinsically repressive nature of collective experience and redemptive power of individuation is a staple of contemporary art theory and criticism. I would argue that a closer analysis of collaborative and collective art practices can reveal a more complex model of social change and identity, one in which the binary oppositions of divided vs. coherent subjectivity, desiring singularity vs. totalizing collective, liberating distanciation vs. stultifying interdependence, are challenged and complicated.

~ Grant H. Kester

The mystery of esthetic like that of material creation is accomplished. The artist, like the god of the creation, remains within or behind or beyond or above his handiwork, invisible, refined out of existence, indifferent, paring his fingernails.

~ James Joyce

He was an awkward mixture of strong moral impulse and restless aesthetic curiosity, and yet he would have made a most ineffective reformer and a very indifferent artist. It seemed to him that the glow of happiness must be found either in action, of some immensely solid kind, on behalf of an idea, or in producing a masterpiece in one of the arts.

~ Henry James