Artist Quotes

Every person who is really an artist desires to create inside of himself another, deeper, more interesting life than the one that actually surrounds him.

~ Konstantin Stanislavski

The art does not always mimic the artist. You never know the real person until you slide beneath their surface

~ Lisa Renee Jones

The hardest thing is to do something which is close to nothing because it is demanding all of you.

~ Marina Abramović

An artist is a provincial who finds himself somewhere between a physical reality and a metaphysical one. It’s this in-between that I’m calling a province, this frontier country between the tangible world and the intangible one. That is the realm of the artist.

~ Federico Fellini

I've always liked the minds of criminals, they seem similar to artists.

~ Richard Linklater

Restoration is a skilled profession. You might even call it an art in its own right, except that it is frowned on to be original. First rule of restoration: follow the intention of the artist. Never try to improve on him.

~ J.m. Coetzee

[Who are the artists you admire, Surrealist or otherwise?]Remedios Varo, Max Ernst, Charlotte Salomon, Goya, Aubrey Beardsley. Beardsley is not so much about the impossible as he is about freaks and deformities, but those are interesting to me too.

~ Audrey Niffenegger

I wanna be forever young.

~ Alphaville

He stares at me—taking me in—with his lips slightly parted. I struggle to hold myself in place as we gawk at each other. I want so desperately to run, but something is holding me back, keeping me in place.

~ Ashley Earley

(Ars longa vita brevis.) Art is long life is short. A picture can become for us a highway between a particular thing and a universal feeling.

~ Lawren Harris

A work of art cannot be satisfied with being a representation it should be a presentation.

~ Jacques Reverdy

An amateur is an artist who supports himself with outside jobs which enable him to paint. A professional is someone whose wife works to enable him to paint.

~ Ben Shahn

Art distills sensation and embodies it with enhanced meaning in memorable form - or else it is not art.

~ Jacques Barzun

Artistic temperament is a disease that afflicts amateurs.

~ G. K. Chesterton

Artists are the antennae of the race but the bullet-headed many will never learn to trust the great artists.

~ Ezra Pound

Artists must be sacrificed to their art. Like bees they must put their lives into the sting they give.

~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

Artists by definition innocent don't steal. But they do borrow without giving back.

~ Ned Rorem

As a painter I shall never signify anything of importance. I feel it absolutely.

~ Vincent Van Gogh

Classic means standard as opposed to Romantic: form before meaning as opposed to meaning before form. It grows from inside out while Romantic grows from outside in.

~ Ned Rorem

Everything in nature is formed upon the sphere the cone and the cylinder. One must learn to paint these simple figures and then one can do all that he may wish.

~ Paul Cézanne

Fine art is that in which the hand the head and the heart of man go together.

~ John Ruskin

Good artists exist simply in what they make and consequently are perfectly uninteresting in what they are.

~ Oscar Wilde

I think there is no work of art which represents the spirit of a nation more surely than Die Meister Singer of Richard Wagner. Here is no plaything with local colour but the raising to its highest power all that is best in the national consciousness of his country.

~ Ralph Vaughan Williams

I wonder whether Art has a higher function than to make me feel appreciate and enjoy natural objects for their art value?

~ Bernard Berenson

I've been 40 years discovering that the Queen of all colours is black.

~ Auguste Renoir

If artists and poets are unhappy it is after all because happiness does not interest them.

~ George Santayana

Interpretation is the revenge of the intellect upon art.

~ Susan Sontag

One of the most difficult things to do is to paint darkness which nonetheless has light in it.

~ Vincent Van Gogh

Painting is a faith and it imposes the duty to disregard public opinion.

~ Vincent Van Gogh

Rembrandt painted about 700 pictures - of these 3 000 are in existence.

~ Wilhelm Bode

Still there is a calm pure harmony and music inside of me.

~ Vincent Van Gogh

Style like the human body is specially beautiful when the veins are not prominent and the bones cannot be counted.

~ Tacitus

The fingers must be educated the thumb is born knowing.

~ Marc Chagall

The genuine artist is as much a dissatisfied person as the revolutionary yet how diametrically opposed are the products each distills from his dissatisfaction.

~ Eric Hoffer

The object of art is to give life a shape.

~ Jean Anouilh

The scholar seeks the artist finds.

~ André Gide

The song of the brush.

~ Chinese Saying

Theatre takes place all the time wherever one is and art simply facilitates persuading one this is the case.

~ John Cage

Two boys arrived yesterday with a pebble they said was the head of a dog until I pointed out that it was really a typewriter.

~ Pablo Picasso

We live in a rainbow of chaos.

~ Paul Cézanne