Artists Quotes

The space that I can call mine, that isn't full of Henry, is so small that my ideas have become small.

~ Audrey Niffenegger

... consider the meaning of these images. Every time you're working with them, ask yourself: what do they mean? And, even more important, what do they mean to me? The more specific and personal something is, the more its universality emerges.

~ Fiona Wood

If an artist wants to be original, he should not look to art for inspiration, for art seeks its model in life, not art—and only life is rich enough to simulate originality.

~ Anthony Marais

Morning birdsong filled the room. For all his high opinion of birds, privileged among God's creatures, still, deep in his heart, the Emperor did not trust them, just as he did not trust artists.

~ Joseph Roth

The artist and the politician stand at opposite poles. The artist enhances life by his prolonged concentration upon it, while the politician emphasizes the impersonal aspect of life by his attempts to fit men into groups.

~ Richard Wright

A Photographer is limited to some types of Photography. An Artist is able to do any types of photography. It's just a matter of choice and feelings.

~ Steeven Shaw

Flying is not only the art of the birds, but it is also the art of the artists!

~ Mehmet Murat Ildan

Good artists are always crazy, one way or another.

~ Garth Risk Hallberg

There are a good many people of the same kind as Harry. Many artists are of his kind. These persons all have two souls, two beings within them. Thee is God and the devil in them; the mother's blood and the father's; the capacity for happiness and the capacity for suffering; and in just such a state of enmity and entanglement towards and within each other as were the wolf and man in Harry. And these men, for whom life has no repose, live at times in their rare moments of happiness with such strength and indescribable beauty, the spray of their moment's happiness is flung so high and so dazzlingly over the wide sea of suffering, that the light of it, spreading its radiance, touches others too with its enchantment. Thus, like a precious, fleeting foam over the sea of suffering arise all those works of art, in which a single individual lifts himself for an hour so high above his personal destiny that his happiness shines like a star and appears to all who see it as something eternal and as a happiness of their own.

~ Hermann Hesse

Philosophers tell you what they think. Artists show you.

~ Marty Rubin

How many artists have created while drunk, high on laudanum, opium, chloral or amphetamines? What have antidepressants ever done for culture?

~ Hanif Kureishi

There really is no such thing as Art. There are only artists.

~ E.h. Gombrich

I must not undervalue my work simply because I enjoy it. A working artist understands his worth and lives by it.

~ Mary Robinette Kowal

Artists and intellectuals are not he same animal. This causes a great deal of confusion. Our schools teach educate us intellectually but not artistically. We learn to deconstruct art, not construct it.

~ Julia Cameron

When I looked upon the surface of the gently flowing water, each painting that I had burned upon joining the church rose from the waves. I tried to grab them, but they dissolved upon touch.

~ William Poe

There is no difference between being an artist and being in love.

~ Marty Rubin

How does an artist learn enough about life to fill a thimble?Soli, I'm going to tell you. He needs to go rub his soul against life. ...

~ Barbara Kingsolver

Every artist gets asked the question, “Where do you get your ideas?” The honest artist answers, “I steal them.

~ Austin Kleon

The painter knew the mirror lied. And the canvas told the truth.

~ Thomas Lloyd Qualls

There are no greater or lesser arts, only greater or lesser artists.

~ Jim Malone

When Verlaine and Rimbaud were young,” [Snyder] said, they were protesting the iron-grip bourgeois rationality had on all aspects of nineteenth-century French culture— the manners, the view of reality, and the exclusion of ‘the wild’ from public life. Rationality in business and society were dominant values. ‘Deranging the senses’ was one strategy artists like Verlaine and Rimbaud employed to break free of that.“Today,” he continued, “the bourgeoisie is sociopathic, overindulged, distracted, spoiled beyond measure, and unable to restrain its gluttony, even in the face of pending planetary destruction. In the face of such a threat, it has, by necessity, become the responsibility of the artist to model health and sanity.

~ Peter Coyote

If you wish to make good art, then you must believe you already do. Otherwise, you will never be good enough.

~ Luhraw

Before, I could only guess of who I was. Now, thanks to my art, I know who I am

~ Luhraw

Know everything. Say nothing.

~ Luhraw

. . . there were masses of pictures she had not seen; however, Lily Briscoe reflected, perhaps it was better not to see pictures: they only made one hopelessly discontented with one’s own work.

~ Virginia Woolf

He never looks you straight in the eye; or if he does, it is somehow vaguely, indefinitely; he does not pierce you with the hawk's eye or the falcon's gaze of a cavalry officer. The reason for that is that he sees, at one and the same time, both your features and those of some plaster Hercules standing in his room, or else he imagines a painting of his own that he still means to produce. That is why his responses are often incoherent, not to the point, and the muddle of things in his head increases his timidity all the more.

~ Nikolai Gogol

Edsel is the artist in our family. Art is something I know nothing about.

~ Henry Ford

He was already beginning, as always happens at a respectable age, to take a firm stand for Raphael and the old masters––not because he was fully convinced of their lofty merit, but so as to shove them in the faces of young artists.

~ Nikolai Gogol

Before, I could only guess oh who I was. Now, thanks to my art, I know who I am.

~ Luhraw

Daniel's desk by the window is piled high with his drawings. The artwork is everything. He thinks of himself as the act of drawing. His body of work is his life, it is his continuity. The drawings show outwardly that inner place where he is still alive, a thread to connect him with the world.

~ J.j. Brown

They'd lived their lives on tightropes, never knowing where the next paycheck was coming from or if one was coming at all, their personal lives a mishmash of backstage affairs and dressing room brawls endured for the brief heady adrenaline rush brought by the orchestra's overture and glare of white lights.

~ Michael Callahan

We are the next we.

~ Shawn Lukas

Thanks to my art, I now know who I am.

~ Luhraw

Abstract is a journey through both my mind and my past.

~ Luhraw

We are the next us.

~ Shawn Lukas

The suprematist must have a superior knowledge of understanding. With out that, their art is powerless

~ Luhraw

There’s this misconception that artists should create their own mythologies, through how they live. Not true. They should create their own mythologies through their work. In whatever styles, textures and approaches they choose to use.

~ Guy Mankowski

I think that what most artists are trying to do is trying to understand. I think what distinguishes creative people and/or artists from another type of person is perhaps a willingness to go headlong into that uncertainty.

~ Brandon Boyd

I came there again another time. And I looked many times again. I was filled with consolation, with my consolation.The thirty-three abominations were truthful. They were the truth. They were life. The sharp fragments of life, sharp, complete moments. Such are women. They have lovers.Each of these thirty-three (or how many of them were there?) had painted his mistress. Excellent! I grew used to myself being in their presence.Thirty-three mistresses! Thirty-three mistresses!And I was all of them and yet all were not me.I studied the abomination for a long while: before I modeled for them, as well as afterwards.I modelled in order to study. This I felt so keenly. It seemed to me that I was learning about life by pieces, by separate pieces, fragments, but every fragment possessed all its own complexity and power.The abominations began to divide in half. With every day this became clearer. One half became mistresses and the other half queens.Each of the thirty-three created his mistress or his queen.(Thirty Three Abominations)

~ Lydia Zinovieva-Annibal

Contrary to general belief, an artist is never ahead of his [sic!] time but most people are far behind theirs.

~ Edgard Varèse