Artist Quotes

I have always been aware that you have to get people listening before you can change their minds. Any artist's big fear is being ignored, so if you get debate, that's great.

~ Damien Hirst

There's a certain fear of simplicity. I think that's the thing, when you're younger as an artist, you get this idea in your head that complexity equals quality. The more notes you're playing, the better.

~ Patrick Stump

If an artist is driven primarily by social responsibility, I think the art probably suffers because, again, just as leadership has a rather defined end point or purpose, social responsibility would seem to have a very clear moral context.

~ Billy Collins

I really love New York, and I've lived here for a long time. I know not just the different neighborhoods but the different kind of class cultures in New York from the up-and-coming, down-and-out kind of artist to the powerful worlds of finance.

~ Neil Burger

The stupid believe that to be truthful is easy; only the artist, the great artist, knows how difficult it is.

~ Willa Cather

I try to be a truthful artist and I try to show a level of courage. I enjoy that. I'm a messenger.

~ Jeff Koons

You have to do what you need to do as an artist. You have to have that courage.

~ Liz Phair

No great artist ever sees things as they really are. If he did, he would cease to be an artist.

~ Oscar Wilde

The key to the mystery of a great artist is that for reasons unknown, he will give away his energies and his life just to make sure that one note follows another... and leaves us with the feeling that something is right in the world.

~ Leonard Bernstein

Any great warrior is also a scholar, and a poet, and an artist.

~ Steven Seagal

You need pencil miles to be a great artist, animator, or filmmaker, and the sooner you start making mistakes, the quicker you learn.

~ Phil Lord

A great artist is always before his time or behind it.

~ George Edward Moore

Think of an economy where people could be an artist or a photographer or a writer without worrying about keeping their day job in order to have health insurance.

~ Nancy Pelosi

You learn so much about yourself as an artist. I never would have thought that I could sing every night, you know? Travel and perform every single night, and travel to another city the next day and do it all over again? You learn a lot of new things about yourself, and you make a lot of connections with people.

~ Yuna

Of all possible subjects, travel is the most difficult for an artist, as it is the easiest for a journalist.

~ W. H. Auden

There are so many things I want to do. Like, I want to get an artist, a musician, a photographer, and a bunch of dancers that I know and just travel across Africa and just film it and just see what happens. Do and learn as much as I possibly can. Luckily, I have a lot more time.

~ Channing Tatum

Barton Fink is just too self-important as an artist to get much sympathy.

~ Ethan Coen

To be in any way a positive contribution, that's all anybody wants to be. It's all I've ever wanted to be. I wanted to be an artist, be a mother. You want to feel that in your life you've been of use, in whatever way that comes out.

~ Angelina Jolie

When we talk about Oscars, it's almost as a symbol of excellence, and the American public and the worldwide public accept that symbol. So, a movie like 'The Artist' that costs $14 million, has to go out and compete with movies that cost $140 million. How does David deal with Goliath?

~ Harvey Weinstein

The only thing an artist has to remember is to never lose faith in his vision.

~ James Lee Burke

It is only after years of preparation that the young artist should touch color - not color used descriptively, that is, but as a means of personal expression.

~ Henri Matisse

As an artist, as I design and lay out a page, the less-important things, things I want you to spend less time looking at, I draw them very small, maybe even silhouette them. The more-important pivotal scenes, I draw them larger, maybe even a double-page spread.

~ Jim Lee

The artist in me cries out for design.

~ Robert Frost

I'm an artist, so I love the graphic design of Instagram.

~ Pierce Brosnan

I grew up as an artist. Science fiction allows for design and creatures and guns and all the stuff that I like as well. So I think most of the films I make, I'm sure, will be in that category. But I can also see myself making a film like 'Black Hawk Down,' and I could also totally do horror.

~ Neill Blomkamp

I was in the National Academy of Fine Arts and Design, on a scholarship. I was - still am - an artist. They were looking for an actor for 'Take a Giant Step,' and a producer liked my look and asked if I could act. I said, 'Yep!' Then I got into acting more or less just to make money for paints and canvases.

~ Billy Dee Williams

If I go into a relationship with an artist, which at most is going to last five years, we have a 100-page contract covering every eventuality. Whereas with marriage you go into it with no contract, with laws that date back hundreds of years, and I don't think that's right.

~ Simon Cowell

Never trust the artist. Trust the tale. The proper function of the critic is to save the tale from the artist who created it.

~ D. H. Lawrence

To some extent I happily don't know what I'm doing. I feel that it's an artist's responsibility to trust that.

~ David Byrne

I can look at you and say, 'I'm gonna be the biggest artist in the world' because, at the end of the day, it's about the trust I have in God. He's already shown me that I'm gonna fulfil my destiny.

~ Tory Lanez

If you're an original thinker, you are going get told 'no' a lot, and you have to be able to hear 'no' many times from the bankers and trust that at some point, someone is going to recognize that you are an artist and not a can of soda.

~ Nick Offerman

You can't trust an artist that just makes good records.

~ Nick Cave

When you find fame, or you get signed to a record label, it's not what you imagined - because you imagined they would have 100 percent trust or faith in you as an artist. Unfortunately, that's not really the case - it's what sells.

~ James Arthur

A garden is a complex of aesthetic and plastic intentions; and the plant is, to a landscape artist, not only a plant - rare, unusual, ordinary or doomed to disappearance - but it is also a color, a shape, a volume or an arabesque in itself.

~ Roberto Burle Marx

I don't see my artist friends as any more neurotic or addiction-prone than the others. The roommates I have had who were into triathlons or environmentalism were just as crazy as the poets, just as prone to tears over gardening or air conditioners, just as ready to kite a cheque or binge on cookie dough.

~ Russell Smith

Perhaps the mission of an artist is to interpret beauty to people - the beauty within themselves.

~ Langston Hughes

The study of beauty is a duel in which the artist cries with terror before being defeated.

~ Charles Baudelaire

An artist is an artist only because of his exquisite sense of beauty, a sense which shows him intoxicating pleasures, but which at the same time implies and contains an equally exquisite sense of all deformities and all disproportion.

~ Charles Baudelaire

The artist forges himself to the others, midway between the beauty he cannot do without and the community he cannot tear himself away from. That is why true artists scorn nothing: they are obliged to understand rather than to judge.

~ Albert Camus

The moment you cheat for the sake of beauty, you know you're an artist.

~ David Hockney