Artists Quotes

Well, Daddy, I used to believe that artists went crazy in the process of creating the beautiful works of art that kept society sane. Nowadays, though, artists make intentionally ugly art that’s only supposed to reflect society rather than inspire it. So I guess we’re all loony together now, loony rats in the shithouse of commercialism.

~ Tom Robbins

Possible reality [is obtained] by slightly bending physical and chemical laws.

~ Marcel Duchamp

From recovery to rags and rags to recovery symbolizes art - a perfect compilation of human imperfections.

~ Criss Jami

What does one prefer? An art that struggles to change the social contract, but fails? Or one that seeks to please and amuse, and succeeds?

~ Robert Hughes

It's impossible for a creative artist to be either a Puritan or a Fascist, because both are a negation of the creative urge. The only things a creative artist can be opposed to are ugliness and injustice.

~ Liam O'flaherty

An artist that makes art merely to meet a demand is a slave to what his patrons wants to see, or, hear.

~ Mokokoma Mokhonoana

Art is nothing more than creating an emotion in your own form.

~ Shannon L. Alder

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

~ Paul Klee Foundation

Fantasy, abandoned by reason, produces impossible monsters; united with it, she is the mother of the arts and the origin of marvels.

~ Francisco De Goya

Then Martine said: So yuo will be poor now all your life, Babette?Poor? said Babette. She smiled as if to herself. No, I shall never be poor. I told you that I am a great artist. A great artist, Mesdames, is never poor.We have something, Mesdames, of which other people know nothing.

~ Karen Blixen

Love is an art and this love lacks artists.

~ Javaria Waseem

Magic is the stunning art of surprising your audience, so that nothing else surprises them.

~ Amit Kalantri

Look, I don't see why bad artists - I mean artists who are obviously incompetent... - why they should be presented hypocritically as good artists just because they're supposed to be advancing the frontiers of freedom of expression or... ...demonstrating that there should be no limit on subject matter.

~ Anthony Burgess

Too Clear, too clean. The problem was precision, perfection; the problem was digitization which sucked the life out of everything that got smeared through its microscopic mesh. Film, photography, music: dead. An aesthetic holocaust!

~ Jennifer Egan

Dignity is not a symbol bestowed on man, nor does the word itself possess force. Man's dignity is a force and the only modus vivendi by which man and his history survive. When mid-twentieth century Germany did not let man live and die with this right, man became an animal. No matter how technologically advanced or sophisticated, when man negates this divine right, he not only becomes self-destructive, but castrates his history and poisons our future. This is what 'The Nazi Drawings' are about.

~ Mauricio Lasansky

It's the only dish I serve my craziness for color in.

~ Josef Albers

I will admit that I wanted to shout for standing on the top of a scaffold in front of a good new wall always goes to my head. It is a sensation something between that of an angel let out of his cage into a new sky and a drunkard turned loose in a royal cellar.And after all, what nobler elevation could you find in this world than the scaffold of a wall painter? No admiral on the bridge of a new battleship designed by the old navy, could feel more pleased with himself than Gulley, on two planks, forty feet above dirt level, with his palette table beside him, his brush in his hand, and the draught blowing up his trousers; cleared for action.

~ Joyce Cary

B-but, Mr Jimson, I w-want to be an artist.''Of course you do,' I said, 'everybody does once. But they get over it, thank God, like the measles and the chickenpox. Go home and go to bed and take some hot lemonade and put on three blankets and sweat it out.''But Mr J-Jimson, there must be artists.''Yes, and lunatics and lepers, but why go and live in an asylum before you're sent for? If you find life a bit dull at home,' I said, 'and want to amuse yourself, put a stick of dynamite in the kitchen fire, or shoot a policeman. Volunteer for a test pilot, or dive off Tower Bridge with five bob's worth of roman candles in each pocket. You'd get twice the fun at about one-tenth of the risk.

~ Joyce Cary

The notion of making money by popular work, and then retiring to do good work, is the most familiar of all the devil's traps for artists.

~ Logan Pearsall Smith

Nevertheless, what was made in the hope of transforming the world need not be rejected because it failed to do so – otherwise, one would also have to throw out a good deal of the greatest painting and poetry of the nineteenth century. An objective political failure can still work as a model of intellectual affirmation or dissent.

~ Robert Hughes

An artist is above all a human being, profoundly human to the core. If the artist can’t feel everything that humanity feels, if the artist isn’tcapable of loving until he forgets himself and sacrifices himself if necessary, if he won’t put down his magic brush and head the fightagainst the oppressor, then he isn’t a great artist.

~ Diego Rivera

The data on the economic utility of artists is really, really strong. Artists and entrepreneurs are the same people...and of course entrepreneurs are the people who provide all of the vision for the entire capitalist system. They're absolutely necessary.But conservatives tend to be so blind to art that they can't even see that the artists are the ones who drive the economy forward!

~ Jordan Peterson

Artist communities love to bullshit each other and glad-hand one another, and there's no room for the crippling honesty of comedy.I'm a painter -- well... you don't...probably need to do that.. . . if you're painting something that doesn't exist, I understand that, I can appreciate- . . . but if your pain- 'oh, it's a barnyard scene in autumn'--well then just take a picture of a barn in autumn! It's way better than a painting! - Before Turning the Gun on Himself [2012]

~ Doug Stanhope

It's 4am again and I'm just getting started. People are boring and I want to burn with excitement or anger and bleed, bleed through my words. I want to get all fucked up and write real and raw and ugly and beautifully. I bet you're sleeping safe and calm, and you can stay there, it's safer there, and you wouldn't stand one night on this journey my mind wanders off to every night you close your eyes. I'll stay here one day and I will never come down. I promise I can fly before I hit the ground. It doesn't even hurt anymore. I swear, it doesn't hurt.

~ Charlotte Eriksson

The sound a box of Lego makes is the noise of a child's mind working, looking for the right piece. Shake it, and it's almost creativity in aural form.

~ Grayson Perry

In Europe, being an artist is a form of behavior; in America, it's an excuse for a form of behavior.

~ William Faulkner

We form a mental map, and then that shape, shapes us

~ Lois Farfel Stark

I thought of the cool, fresh air of the city I'd always dreamed of living in. The art museums and trolleys and the mysterious fog that blanketed it. I could almost smell the cappuccinos I'd planned to drink in bohemian cafes or hear the indie music in the bookstores I would spend my free time in. I pictured the friends I'd make, my kindred art people, and the dorm room I was supposed to move into.

~ Heather Demetrios

The value is not in the art, whether there are more artists or less artists, the value depends on it.

~ Dada Bhagwan

I've never been somewhere I belonged, but there are places where I think I could be happy. Like San Francisco. Well, do art museums count? Because I feel like I belong in them.

~ Heather Demetrios

My eyes roved over the walls covered with my collages and prints of famous paintings. Magritte, Kandinsky, Kahlo. My origami shapes hung from fishing wire, dangling over my bed. They shivered in the slight breeze blowing through my open window. It was my own little escape pod, but none of it was enough tonight.

~ Heather Demetrios

The crucial job of artists is to find a way to release materials into the animated middle ground between subjects, and so to initiate the difficult but joyful process of human connection.

~ Ann Lauterbach

Art doesn’t bare itself to just anyone, but to believers called artists.

~ Richelle E. Goodrich

Masochists hold on to broken people. Artists hold on to broken memories.

~ Dominic Riccitello

Words do not always need a destination.We can leave them behind us at the borders of feelings.Running around headless in the vague zone.And that is the privilege of artists: to live in confusion.

~ David Foenkinos

Art is the medium through which you express the inexpressible, convey the unconveyable, transporting the audience in different realms of existence erasing their mental identities. Any effort by the artist to make an personal identity is detrimental in an artistic sense. Be Wiser, leave no residue, dissolve in ART!

~ Ramana Pemmaraju

Art should be for sale. The artist should not.

~ A.e. Samaan

Note to myself - It is time for me to start taking my guitar lessons. One of my neighbor's singing and guitar strumming skills are so cool that I can't stop marveling at the music wafting around here.

~ Avijeet Das

The human spirit’s unquenchable drive for originality and compulsion for creating art is the compelling force of our humanity.

~ Kilroy J. Oldster

Art is a distinct form of human communication. Art interprets experience, sensation, and feelings. An artistic work translates our mental images and allows other people to understand what we feel; art conveys our happiness, sadness, hopes, doubts, anxieties, fears, desires, and ineffable longings.

~ Kilroy J. Oldster