Artists Quotes

The greatest artists express their inner self, an artist paints her rage, a writer pens his fear, a dancer expresses her sadness through movement, and a musician's loneliness echoes in his performance.

~ Gerard De Marigny

To paint one must forget everything else. Where you live, who you know, what you eat, when to sleep. The landscape of the canvas becomes your only reality. The planet you inhabit is a single plane of infinite dimensions, stretched like a guitar string, and standing before you like a concubine waiting for your command.

~ Thomas Lloyd Qualls

The painter folded back the heavy curtain, standing in the stream of light breaking through the damp thickness of the room. He paused, still holding the drape in his hand as he considered with suspicion that a world could exist outside the window.

~ Thomas Lloyd Qualls

They do not discover anything new after that, they only learn how to understand better and better the secret entrusted to them at the outset; their creative effort goes into an unending exegesis, a commentary on that one couplet of poetry assigned to them.

~ Bruno Schulz

Never underestimate the power of the spiritual world.

~ Eileen Keledjian

Be an artist, in whatever little faculty possible.For the Earth, without ‘Art’ is just ‘Eh

~ Jasleen Kaur Gumber

You forget, my good man, that what the artist perceives is, primarily, the difference between things. It is the vulgar who note their resemblance.

~ Vladimir Nabokov

As an artist I have always tried to be faithful to my vision of life, and I have frequently been in conflict with those who wanted me to paint not what I saw but what they wished me to see.

~ Diego Rivera

I think that most artists scorned would prefer to be known as the one with the genius brain risking no career over the one with the good brain and great career.

~ Criss Jami

The supreme artist lives as closely as possible to replicating the perfect dream, with life unfolding in a manner that a person could never conceive or direct.

~ Kilroy J. Oldster

I think that cars today are almost the exact equivalent of the great Gothic cathedrals; I mean the supreme creation of an era, conceived with passion by unknown artists, and consumed in image if not in usage by a whole population which appropriates them as a purely magical object.

~ Roland Barthes

A 'black' man who draws a 'black' person with big lips is called observant. A 'white' man who does the same is called a racist.

~ Mokokoma Mokhonoana

Nothing would keep him from loving her. She was everything he wanted. She was his.

~ Lisa Carlisle

Royal Young has accomplished a rare feat in his fresh and riveting debut: he manages to recount his fascinating youth and unconventional family with a mixture of humor, scathing honesty and tenderness. Much more than simply a book about a kid who dreams of stardom, Fame Shark is a thoughtful, hilarious and moving love letter to his family and the Lower East Side of New York City.

~ Kristen Johnston

Why not fall in love with an artist? Otherwise there are no letters, pictures, paintings and songs for you when you wake up.

~ Darnell Lamont Walker

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

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

~ Lemony Snicket

True artists unburden their envies and work toward encouraging amateurs.

~ Aniruddha Sastikar

Artists are never poor, they just don't get enough time to make money !

~ Brahmananda Patra

It is the poet and philosopher who provide the community of objectives in which the artist participates. Their chief preoccupation, like the artist, is the expression in concrete form of their notions of reality. Like him, they deal with the verities of time and space, life and death, and the heights of exaltation as well as the depths of despair. The preoccupation with these eternal problems creates a common ground which transcends the disparity in the means used to achieve them.

~ Mark Rothko

The universe constantly and obediently answers to our conceptions; whether we travel fast or slow, the track is laid for us. Let us spend our lives in conceiving then. The poet or the artist never yet had so fair and noble a design but some of his posterity at least could accomplish it.

~ Henry David Thoreau

In this image (watching sensual murder through a peephole) Lorrain embodies the criminal delight of decadent art. The watcher who records the crimes (both the artist and consumer of art) is constructed as marginal, powerless to act, and so exculpated from action, passive subject of a complex pleasure, condemning and yet enjoying suffering imposed on others, and condemning himself for his own enjoyment. In this masochistic celebration of disempowerment, the sharpest pleasure recorded is that of the death of some important part of humanity. The dignity of human life is the ultimate victim of Lorrain's art, thrown away on a welter of delighted self-disgust.

~ Jennifer Birkett

Success or Failure, there should always be a Drive to Keep on Creating.

~ Henry Johnson Jr

Now, as I understand it, the bards were feared. They were respected, but more than that they were feared. If you were just some magician, if you'd pissed off some witch, then what's she gonna do, she's gonna put a curse on you, and what's gonna happen? Your hens are gonna lay funny, your milk's gonna go sour, maybe one of your kids is gonna get a hare-lip or something like that — no big deal. You piss off a bard, and forget about putting a curse on you, he might put a satire on you. And if he was a skilful bard, he puts a satire on you, it destroys you in the eyes of your community, it shows you up as ridiculous, lame, pathetic, worthless, in the eyes of your community, in the eyes of your family, in the eyes of your children, in the eyes of yourself, and if it's a particularly good bard, and he's written a particularly good satire, then three hundred years after you're dead, people are still gonna be laughing, at what a twat you were.

~ Alan Moore

Yes, but the artist? said Nigel almost fiercely. He's different, you know he is. He's driven by some compulsion: if he can't do what he knows he has to do with his life he might as well be dead. He's got to break through the world's indifference, or else break himself against it. He can't help it.

~ Mary Stewart

But sometimes, talent isn't worth shit. There are tons of talentless people out there making zillions of dollars. And unfortunately, an equal number of brilliant artists whose name and voices you'll never hear. - Paul Hudson

~ Tiffanie Debartolo

Writing is like gardening. Planting, watering, and weeding are not enough. You have to prune if you want growth.

~ Ron Brackin

Artists must remain in a state of awe to remain artists.

~ Marty Rubin

I am an artist. And An artist is simply a man who is pulled along by a river: on one side sanity lies, and the other madness, yet he will find no peace on either, as the current of his art drags him away from the everyday life on it's banks, where others watch, unable to help him until he reaches the immensity of the ocean.

~ Félix J. Palma

You'll find that great artists don't love, live, fuck or even die like ordinary people. Because they always have their art. It nourishes them more than any connection to people. Whatever human tragedy befalls them, they're never too gutted, because they need only to pour the tragedy into their vat, stir in the other lurid ingredients, blast it over a fire. What emerges will be even more magnificent than if the tragedy had never occurred.

~ Marisha Pessl

Most artists weren't famous until they died (mostly because once they'd died they couldn't create any more art, so it would make it more valuable).

~ Sariah Wilson

Thanks to our artists, we pretend well, living under canopies of painted clouds and painted gods, in halls of marble floors across which the sung Masses paint hope in deep impatsi of echo. We make of the hollow world a fuller, messier, prettier place, but all our inventions can't create the one thing we require: to deserve any fond attention we might accidentally receive, to receive any fond attention we don't in the course of things deserve. We are never enough to ourselves because we can never be enough to another. Any one of us walks into any room and reminds its occupant that we are not the one they most want to see. We are never the one. We are never enough.

~ Gregory Maguire

I had already established, as you know, that it was logically impossible for Kenneth to be distressed by anything that might occur between Ned and myself; but Kenneth, being an artist, has perhaps not studied logic and is unaware of the impossibility.

~ Sarah Caudwell

The idea that any art is achieved 'intuitively' is a dehumanization of the brains, effort, and the traditions of the artist, and a classification of said artist as subhuman. It is those supposed incapable of intelligence, training, or connection with a tradition who are described as working by instinct or intuition.

~ Joanna Russ

Being rich is an untalented artist’s consolation prize.

~ Mokokoma Mokhonoana

Artists are people with a genius for finding a new answer, a new connection, or a new way of getting things done.That would be you.

~ Seth Godin

You can never kill the spirit of an artist. They will always rewrite their resurrection and paint an eternal sunset with a blaze of orange that no one has seen before.

~ Shannon L. Alder

i want to never settle for anything less than my soul on paper.

~ Jonathan Culver

It is exhausting living in a population where people don't speak up if what they witness doesn't directly threaten them.

~ David Wojnarowicz

Purses are dreamt up by artists, not architects.

~ Lauren Conrad