Artists Quotes

Any local music scene at any point in time can be referred to as derivative of more well-known acts. The line separating influence from imitation is a blurry one. Very few artists are completely original; even great artists build upon what has occurred before, and add their personality and talent to create their own original expression.

~ Stephen Tow

Artists of today can be inspired by the past, but they have to apply present methods if they want a future in music.

~ Loren Weisman

It was the artists who finally gave their times and places significance. Paul felt the presence of their ghosts out in the world, just as felt them in his office and in his head. The air was full of them. They were everywhere and always would be.

~ Jonathan Galassi

There is no such thing as an “independent artist”. All artists are essentially co-dependent of the audience.

~ Natasha Tsakos

You never needed wings to fly,You only needed love.

~ Jenim Dibie

Guys don't understand great art. They don't care that sometimes the camera has power beyond the photographer to record emotion that only the heart can see. They're threatened when the camera jumps ahead of me. Todd Kovich was pissed when I brought my Nikon to the prom, but I'd missed too many transcendent shots over the years to ever take a chance of missing one again. A prom, I told him, had a boundless supply of photogenic bozos who could be counted on to do something base.

~ Joan Bauer

if you have the tools but do not have the visual concept, the tools do not work

~ Betty Poluk

An art prodigy of the 21st century has yet to be crowned. Or have they?

~ Luhraw

The visual arts will one day be king. The pop stars and celebrities soon to be forgotten.

~ Luhraw

We are all artists painting our desires on the canvas of life and time.

~ Steven Redhead

We are all artists painting our desires on the canvas of life.

~ Steven Redhead

I appreciated art, long before I could produce it.

~ Wayne Gerard Trotman

Artists are agents of chaos. It is the artistsjob to encourage entropy, to promote chaos. Idols must be killed, icons crushed, beliefsshattered. It is the artists job to encourage legitimate, unadulterated, raw thought andemotion. Art that does nothing new, that simply fills an established role, is not art.It is a product. A stale, stagnant product of a disgustingly mundane process that has beendone so much it is assumed mandatory. Little different than feces. The last thing the world needs is to get shittier.

~ Jonathan Culver

What they, in their innocence, cannot comprehend is that a properly constituted, healthy, decent man never writes, acts, or composes.

~ Thomas Mann

Pregnancy had seemed a reasonable excuse for letting her metal-smithing tools languish, but that accounted for only eighteen months of the last twenty-six years. Motherhood wasn't the real problem, though it took him a long time to figure out what was. She needed resistance, the very quality that metal most demonstrably offered up. Suddenly Glynis had no difficulty to overcome, no hard artisan's life with galleries filching half the too-small price of a mokume brooch that had taken three weeks to forge. No, her husband made a good living, and if she slept late and dawdled the afternoon away reading Lustre, American Craft Magazine and Lapidary Journal, the phone bill would still get paid. For that matter, she needed need itself. She could overcome her anguish about embarking on an object that, once completed, might not meet her exacting standards only if she had no choice. In this sense, his helping had hurt her. By providing the financial cushion that should have facilitated making all the metal whathaveyou she liked, he had ruined her life. Wrapped in a slackening bow, ease was a poisonous present.

~ Lionel Shriver

Repetita iuvant. Italy, a land of great saints, poets, sailors, artists, statesmen, businessmen, lawyers, intellectuals, professors, journalists, whores, gangsters, religious parasites and dickheads.

~ Carl William Brown

Artists are strange people. They make the world a beautiful place, and make others feel good, but they are a bunch of lonely people. Artists are people with unfulfilled, unrealistic dreams, lonely, and always searching for perfection.

~ Ama H. Vanniarachchy

Artists to my mind are the real architects of change, and not the political legislators who implement change after the fact.

~ William S. Burroughs

We artists are indestructible; even in a prison, or in a concentration camp, I would be almighty in my own world of art, even if I had to paint my pictures with my wet tongue on the dusty floor of my cell.

~ Pablo Picasso

Through the years, I have learned there is no harm in charging oneself up with delusions between moments of valid inspiration.

~ Steve Martin

You sensed that you should be following a different path, a more ambitious one, you felt that you were destined for other things but you had no idea how to achieve them and in your misery you began to hate everything around you.

~ Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Artists can have greater access to reality; they can see patterns and details and connections that other people, distracted by the blur of life, might miss. Just sharing that truth can be a very powerful thing.

~ Jay-Z

When critics disagree the artist is in accord with himself.

~ Oscar Wilde

But why? Why do you care about our class’s history? I just do. Besides, I need something to put on my art-school applications besides ’Locks self in room and draws all day.’ Even art schools won’t take a psychopath.

~ Natalie Standiford

It is possible, however, that the artist is both thin-skinned and prophetic and, like the canary lowered into the mine shaft to test the air, has caught a whiff of something lethal.

~ Walker Percy

Lucien, women are wondrous, mysterious, and magical creatures, who should be treated not only with respect but with reverence, perhaps even awe. Now go sweep the steps.

~ Christopher Moore

A genius doesn't adjust his treatment of a theme to a tyrant's taste

~ Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

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

~ Oscar Wilde

...As an artist, you need the naysayers and the nonbelievers to add fuel to your creative fire.

~ Ice-T

... but now men who could work preferred to beg, and the artists forgot that their calling was noble and became imitators instead of creators, charging exorbitant sums for the rubbish they churned out with one eye closed.

~ Pauline Gedge

Everyone should have a hippie painter anarchist in their lives. It's the guys in silvered aviators with guns that you've got to be wary of.

~ John Sandford

As artists, we create the beautyWe are too afraid to live outAnd search, but always fall just shyOf finding what life is about.

~ Justin Wetch

Actual artists are like mythological creatures,' she heard herself opine. 'You hear about them, but a sighting's pretty rare.

~ Garth Risk Hallberg

Bureaucracy is a huge beast; deeply rooted, it exists even among artists; it’s an almost losing battle against it.

~ Dejan Stojanovic

Artists, who are selfish people, become anxious around the self-sacrificing

~ Karan Mahajan

The particulars of life do not matter to the artist, they merely provide him with the opportunity to lay bare his genius.

~ Marcel Proust

Artists, like criminals, are dependent on a jury.

~ Glenn Haybittle

This guy! I plead the fifth. This guy is nuts.”- Eminem“Dope questions, man. Very insightful, very thoughtful.”- Guru (Gang Starr)“You like a Psychiatrist or some shit? This shit is just coming out but go ahead.”- Mary J. Blige“Definitely a real interview! Digging deep up in there, man. Not afraid to ask questions!”- K-Ci Hailey (Jodeci)“The Wizard asked me for a copy of your magazine.”- Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo (Daft Punk)“You didn’t wear your glasses and you haven’t carried your hearing aid. What else is wrong with you?”- Bushwick Bill“Peace and blessing, Brother Harris. Thank you for inspiring my words. Keep ‘yo balance.”- Erykah Badu“Can I see that pen?”- Bobby Brown“What else do you want to know? Talk to me.”- Aaliyah

~ Harris Rosen

The God who impoverished himself is also the God of abundance, and somehow, perhaps at times nonsensically, Christians are called to live out of an ethic not of scarcity but of abundance—an abundance that extends both to the homeless neighbor and to the artist neighbor. . .

~ Lauren Winner

The language of worldview tends to imply...that we can think ourselves into new ways of behaving. But that is not the way culture works. Culture helps us behave ourselves into new ways of thinking. The risk in thinking worldviewishly is that we will start to think that the best way to change culture is to analyze it. We will start worldview academies, host worldview seminars, write worldview books. These may have some real value if they help us understand the horizons that our culture shapes, but they cannot substitute for the creation of real cultural goods. And they will subtly tend to produce philosophers rather than plumbers, abstract thinkers instead of artists and artisans. They can create a cultural niche in which worldview thinkers are privileged while other kinds of culture makers are shunted aside.But culture is not changed simply by thinking.

~ Andy Crouch