Artist Quotes

Normal, average and ordinary are not a part of my vocabulary. I am an artist after all!

~ Paul S. Lynch

This is the world of pretend. We are artists and we are servants of the stage, and I take both jobs very seriously. As artists, we work as a collective—all for one and one for all. As servants, we work for thos who venture out alone, otherwise known as performers.

~ Rebecca Stead

[Epilepsy] gave her an adversity to fight against. It had shaped her personality, the need to be careful and secretive, and the ability to see things a bit differently from the neurotypical. She granted that this feeling of having a broken brain that required her to be sensitive, to look always inward to survive, might be why she turned artist.

~ Thomm Quackenbush

When I use the word rebel for the artist, I do not refer to revolutionary or to such things as taking over the dean’s office; that is a different matter. Artists are generally soft-spoken persons who are concerned with their inner visions and images. But that is precisely what makes them feared by any coercive society. For they are the bearers of the human being’s age-old capacity to be insurgent.

~ Rollo May

Oh say can you see Alma. The darlingof Them. All her friends were artists.They alone have memories. They alonelove flowers. They alone give partiesand die. Poor Alma. They alone.She died,and it was as if all the jewels in the worldhad heaved a sigh. The seismographat Fordham university registered, for once,a spiritual note. How like a sliverin her own short fat muscular foot.She loved the Western World, thoughthere are some who say she isn't really dead.

~ Frank O'hara

Vermeer's skill was in combining few colors, mixing little and using layers of lakes and varnishes to build up the illusion of life

~ Frank Wynne

An artist must paint not simply surface light but what is inside, what he sees within his subject

~ Frank Wynne

An artist must paint not simply surface light, but what is inside, what he sees within his subject

~ Frank Wynne

Normal is not a part of my vocabulary. I am an artist after all.

~ Paul S. Lynch

You are the artist, and your days the canvas. Will you create an original masterpiece, or live a paint-by-numbers kind of life?

~ John Mark Green

It's not what you look at that matters, It's what you see

~ Alphonso Dunn

I was surfing the Internet for a different sort of education. I surfed for photos of circus freaks and synonyms for the word intercourse and for answers to why staring at the stars in the evening tore my heart with longing.

~ Maggie Stiefvater

There’s nothing that makes an artist more beloved than the audience pitying him because his work comes at a price they would never pay.

~ Rafael Yglesias

Every time it’s the same. It’s easy to prove to myself that good pictures are elusive, but I can never quite believe they’re also inevitable. It would be a lot easier for me to believe they were if I also believed that they came as a result of my obvious talent, that I was extraordinary in some way. Artists go out of their way to reinforce the perception that good art is made by singular people, people with an exceptional gift. But I don’t believe I am that exceptional, so what is this that I’m making?

~ Sally Mann

We are all born artists. The nature generally doesn’t discriminate among newborns with respect to art. Yet most of us try very hard as we grow, without knowing, to stop being artists.

~ Pawan Mishra

... but as he no longer stands on his native soil, his art can't possibly have roots. An artist creates true art for his people only as long as he lives, and suffers, among them.

~ Olga Grushin

To be an artist includes much, one must possess many gifts--absolute gifts--which have not been acquired by one's own effort.

~ Kate Chopin

I get the sense that some people think that influence dilutes – that the more you are someone else, the less you are yourself, as if you were born with some innate distinct youness that is gradually sanded away by the corroding forces of conformity. That if you could somehow tune everything else out and really dig deep within yourself, you’d find your voice there, pure and independent.That’s bullshit. Your voice isn’t there, already made. You need to make your own voice. You need to make your own voice.

~ Raphael Bob-Waksberg

Fast food, fast money, shallow thinking, shallow interpretations. This is now what I deal with everyday. Art was meant to be about freedom, about having the courage to explore what it means to be human.

~ Emma Raveling

And the eye became a body, the murky heart of a rose. The sinister shadow of an orchid. Or the indolent poppy balanced behind the ear of Baudelaire.

~ Patti Smith

A piece of art is part of its creator, you cannot split them apart. You cannot like one and dislike another.

~ Sameh Elsayed

If what makes a person an artist is their work, they should be admired; if what makes a person an artist is themselves, they should be adored.

~ Gregor Collins

Its not the type of pencil but the artist's skill that matters.

~ Srinivas Shenoy

I think Livingston was going to steal a kiss in the moonlight. Lily wrinkled her nose. Well, I certainly wouldn't have given him one. He made me too uncomfortable, and I just met him! Tyler cupped her face with his hands, leaning closer. What about me? he said, his voice low. Will you give one to me? I shouldn't. The lonely years stretched ahead of her. Her earlier vow to make memories rose and suddenly she was desperate for some kisses of Tyler's to remember. In answer to his question, she tilted her mouth to his.

~ Debra Holland

I've been thanking God for you being there. For you risking your life for Dove. I'll never forget it, Tyler. I'll never forget you.... Truth is, Lily, I'll never forget you either.

~ Debra Holland

Her thoughts drifted to Tyler Dunn... to the feeling of being held in his arms. Wistfulness curled through her heart and she wished for the freedom to enjoy the attention of a man... to indulge in a lady-like flirtation... to fall in love. Although the wishes weren't new, for the first time, she had someone to weave the fantasy around. She could easily paint a romantic dream of living here with Tyler. But, Lily knew that dreaming about such a life would only make it harder to live with her reality. Yet, she couldn't help imagining him in the pool like this, naked as a newborn babe, yet all man.

~ Debra Holland

To become an artist you have to be curious.

~ Leonardo Da Vinci

There are no lines in nature, only areas of colour, one against another.

~ Edouard Manet

They say everything looks better with odd numbers of things. But sometimes I put even numbers—just to upset the critics.

~ Bob Ross

Everyone loves a dead artist. It’s the living ones that people can’t tolerate.

~ Christopher Bollen

For the artisan, craft is an end in itself. For you, the artist, craft is the vehicle for expressing your vision. Craft is the visible edge of art.

~ David Bayles

Certainly a painting can be reductionistically described by its physical properties only: its shape, the paint, the design, and so forth. But every artwork that exists is both an individual thing, a whole unto itself, and simultaneously a part of the matrix of forces that brought it into being.

~ Alex Grey

If her artist's eye had given her nothing else, it taught her to see beauty where few others noticed it.

~ Elizabeth Camden

You must make love to him like his touch is your salvation.

~ Charlotte Eriksson

If you have one person you’re influenced by, everyone will say you’re the next whoever. But if you rip off a hundred people, everyone will say you're so original.

~ Austin Kleon

Like many people who dress in black, the lump of coal was interested in becoming an artist.

~ Lemony Snicket

Be an artist in everything you do.

~ Debasish Mridha

You sought to preserve your creative instincts and what would nourish them. But neurosis itself does not nourish the artist, you know; he creates in spite of it, out of anything, any material given to him. The torments and hells of [crazy men], are not for you.

~ Anaïs Nin

The present is only faced in any generation by the artist.

~ Marshall Mcluhan

It takes an athlete to dance, but an artist to be a dancer

~ Shanna Lafleur