Artist Quotes

Every artist preserves deep within him a single source from which throughout his lifetime he draws what he is and what he says and when the source dries up the work withers and crumbles.

~ Albert Camus

As an artist grows older he has to fight disillusionment and learn to establish the same relation to nature as an adult as he had when a child.

~ Charles Burchfield

Perpetual modernness is the measure of merit in every work of art.

~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

Nothing can come out of an artist that is not in the man.

~ H. L. Mencken

It is not in life but in art that self-fulfillment is to be found.

~ George Woodcock

An artist never really finishes his work he merely abandons it.

~ Paul Valéry

I am convinced it is a mistake to find an artist human outside his work. If you cannot find him human in and through his work you are better not to know it when you come to formulate an opinion of his public value.

~ Kenneth Winters

One must work nothing but work and one must have patience.

~ Auguste Rodin

Art does not reproduce the visible rather it makes it visible.

~ Paul Klee

The more horrifying this world becomes the more art becomes abstract.

~ Paul Klee

One of the recognizable features of the authentic masterpiece is its capacity to renew itself to endure the loss of some kinds of immediate relevance while still answering the most important questions men can ask including new ones they are just learning how to frame.

~ Arnold Stein

Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once he grows up.

~ Pablo Picasso

Art is man's nature nature is God's art.

~ P. J. Bailey

With the pride of the artist you must blow against the walls of every power that exists the small trumpet of your defiance.

~ Norman Mailer

All art is a kind of confession more or less oblique. All artists if they are to survive are forced at last to tell the whole story to vomit the anguish up.

~ James Baldwin

History repeats itself but the special call of an art which has passed away is never reproduced. It is utterly gone out of the world as the song of a destroyed wild bird.

~ Joseph Conrad

Illustrations have as much to say as the text. The trick is to say the same thing but in a different way. It's no good being an illustrator who is saying a lot that is on his or her mind if it has nothing to do with the text. . . the artist must override the story but he must also override his own ego for the sake of the story.

~ Maurice Sendak

In any evolutionary process even in the arts the search for novelty becomes corrupting.

~ Kenneth Boulding

The cheap no matter how charming how immediate does not wear so well. It has a way of telling its whole story the first time through.

~ William Littler

Art at its most significant is a Distant Early Warning System that can always be relied on to tell the old culture what is beginning to happen to it.

~ Marshall Mcluhan

It is well with me only when I have a chisel in my hand.

~ Michelangelo

Art is based on order. The world is full of 'sloppy Bohemians' and their work betrays them.

~ Eduard Weston

Living is a form of not being sure not knowing what next or how. The moment you know how you begin to die a little. The artist never entirely knows. We guess. We may be wrong but we take leap after leap in the dark.

~ Agnes De Mille

The artist like the idiot or clown sits on the edge of the world and a push may send him over it.

~ Osbert Sitwell

Art-speech is the only truth. An artist is usually a damned liar but his art if it be art will tell you the truth of his day. And that is all that matters. Away with eternal truth. The truth lives from day to day and the marvelous Plato of yesterday is chiefly bosh today.

~ D. H. Lawrence

Art isn't something you marry it's something you rape.

~ Edgar Degas

It's not what you see that is art art is the gap.

~ Marcel Duchamp

I always suspect an artist who is successful before he is dead.

~ John Murray Gibbon

An artist has to take life as he finds it. Life by itself is formless wherever it is. Art must give it form.

~ Hugh Maclennan

Art upsets science reassures.

~ Georges Braque

An artist has been defined as a neurotic who continually cures himself with his art.

~ Lee Simonson

Art is either plagiarism or revolution.

~ Paul Gauguin

The father of every good work is discontent and its mother is diligence.

~ Lajos Kassak

A work should contain its total meaning within itself and should impress it on the spectator before he even knows the subject.

~ Henri Matisse

The terror of art lies in the representation of the hidden reality with its shattering effect.

~ Martin Greenburg

Drawing is speaking to the eye talking is painting to the ear.

~ Joseph Joubert

We should comport ourselves with the masterpieces of art as with exalted personages - stand quietly before them and wait till they speak to us.

~ Arthur Schopenhauer

Be regular and orderly in your life like a bourgeois so that you may be violent and original in your work.

~ Gustave Flaubert

The painting rises from the brushstrokes as a poem rises from the words. The meaning comes later.

~ Joan Miró

Caricature is rough truth.

~ George Meredith