Artists Quotes

Ocular infidelity is unfortunately rampant in this so called artist's world.

~ Muse

There is a LOT of bad news every day. The world seems to be getting more and more crazy. So every time you see some bad news, go do something nice for someone or go create something. Write a poem or a song, draw or paint a picture, do something nice for a stranger, even something as simple as complimenting a stranger's outfit or doling out extra smiles during your day. We have to balance out the evil of the world somehow. As artists we are most well equipped to do so!

~ Marcy Ferro

He showed videotape of himself committing acts of self-violence and informing news crews that he had been assaulted by a marauding mob of irate art historians.

~ Johnny Rich

Artist colonies are notorious for breaking up marriages and housing affairs.

~ Kerry Cohen

The reason people are so moved by art and why artists tend to take it all so seriously is that if they are real and true they come to the painting with everything they know and feel and live, and all the things they don't know, and some of the things they hope, and they are honest about them all and put them on the canvas. What can be more serious?

~ Peter Heller

The terrible things that happen to us,” Tessa said slowly. “What wedo with them...I think that’s what makes us artists.

~ Helen Maryles Shankman

I found that those friends of mine who welcomed the unseen into the realm of their seen offered immediate understanding. Some are Christians, some are not. Most are artists of some kind or other; artistry can extend to a way of being, of living lovingly in this world. Many seem to have almost a spiritual affinity for the unmarked trail, armed only with True North. [Leap With Faith Blogpost By Carolyn Weber — July 27, 2011]

~ Carolyn Weber

So you have to be humble in dealing with the spaces and make sure they are used according to their unique purpose for which there is no alternative...art, if you like, is really a lack of alternatives.-Jonathan Meese

~ Prestel Publishing

I suppose that was an example of close attention to detail that is common to writers and artists. It is imperative, whether consciously or not, that one observe the vast as well as the infinitesimal in order to create the image or choose accurate words that ring true.

~ Elizabeth Winder

There was nothing particularly striking about them except that they were artists of the kind that talk. Everyone knows of the talking artists. Throughout all of the known history of the world they have gathered in rooms and talked. They talk of art and are passionately, almost feverishly, in earnest about it. They think it matters much more than it does.

~ Sherwood Anderson

Now there are no priests or philosophers left, artists are the most important people in the world.

~ Roma Tearne

I am not an adventurer by choice but by fate.

~ Vincent Van Gogh

Cherish your own emotions and never under-value them. We are not here to do what has already been done.

~ Robert Henri

When I compare myself to the other fellows there is something stiff and awkward about me, I look as if I had been in prison for ten years.

~ Irving Stone

Artist Matthew Barney has made a film about “shit”. It is hardly original. Hollywood has made shit films for decades.

~ Dean Cavanagh

Don't listen to the politicians, always look at the artists, they're the first to tell us where we're going.

~ Mark Mills

Girls do go for the finely-chiselled. And apart from his looks, he's and artist, and there's something about artists that seems to act on the other sex like catnip on cats.

~ P.g. Wodehouse

Artists shows us what we blind to.

~ Baris Gencel

It's hard to explain your passions, but sometimes it is harder to live them.

~ Michael Lee West

I wonder if only artists can feel peace like this—such a gentle, inconspicuous peace that an ordinary person might not even notice.

~ Tessa Emily Hall

Some one has defined a work of art as a “thing beautifully done.” I like it better if we cut away the adverb and preserve the word “done,” and let it stand alone in its fullest meaning. Things are not done beautifully. The beauty is an integral part of their being done.

~ Robert Henri

Art does what reality cannot.

~ Jayme K.

And in uttering thatExcellently executed truthYou become an artist too

~ Maddy Kobar

Being an artist means forever healing your own wounds and at the same time endlessly exposing them.

~ Annette Messager

We do it because we care. We care that Vincent Van Gogh mutilated his ear. We care that behind a pile of manure in the yard he destroyed his life. We care that Scott Joplin's music lives! We care because we know this: the life we save is our own.

~ Alice Walker

We [artists] aren't people, not the way most people are. We're just...carriers. Little boats bringing goods from foreign lands.

~ Sam Starbuck

That’s what writers and artists and creators do, boy. Listen to the Void and try to hear dead folks’ thoughts. Feel their pain. The pain of living folks too. Finding a muse is just an artist or holy man’s way of getting a foot in the Void Which Binds’ front door. Aenea knew that. You should have too.

~ Dan Simmons

I believe art prefers rules. For some artists, the worst thing you can do is say 'Do whatever you want.' Such permission can be terrifying. I know it is for me. Often it's better if you impose rules or restrictions on a project. Requirements can force you to be creative in unusual ways.

~ Lisa Mangum

The first thousand are the hardest.

~ Herbert Gute

Don't separate 'real' life from 'creative' life.

~ Patti Digh

Good artists copy, great artists steal.

~ Pablo Picasso

Innocence was gone from all our acts. Our habitual state of rebellion became a serious political crime.

~ Anaïs Nin

Here's one from me: 'You have to be aware that everyone else is thinking far too hard about themselves to be thinking about you, whoever you are.' If you want it, you can have it. Once you know that, you can be free.

~ Damien Hirst

That's what dreams are really like, you know? They're not full of melting clocks or floating roses or people made out of rocks. Most of the time, dreams look just like the normal world. It's your feelings that tell you something's off. Not your mind, not your intellect, not something as obvious as that. The only part of you that really knows what's going on is the part of you that's most a mystery. If that's not Surrealism, I don't know what is.

~ Amy Reed

With the manipulation of abstract symbols, an artist can send you information without sound, change your feelings and,sometimes, even beliefs. Artists convey the unspeakable. Artists inspire.

~ Jonathan Culver

I have always been jealous of artists. The smell of the studio, the names of the various tools, the look of a half-finished canvas all shout of creation. What do writers have in comparison? Only the flat paper, the clacketing of the typewriter or the scrape of a pen across a yellow page. And then, when the finished piece is presented, there is a small wonder on one hand, a manuscript smudged with erasures or crossed out lines on the other. The impact of the painting is immediate, the manuscript must unfold slowly through time.

~ Jane Yolen

I think we should throw money at artists, not at girls who take their clothes off because they made a bad choice in life.

~ Darnell Lamont Walker

After the great Impressionists, and again after Van Gogh and Gaugin, people said, 'Painting is now played out.' But Bonnard, Maurice Denis, Roussel and Vuillard appeared and gave them the lie. 'We were wrong,' said the croakers, 'but this at any rate is the end.' Yet to refute them, and to prove that there is no end to art, still another generation of painters sprang up.

~ Ambroise Vollard

Artists are dishonest creatures really. They foist their version of reality upon us while making it all up. Writers, painters, musicians, auteurs—they’re all the same.

~ Tom Gething From Sabotage

Real artist cannot be blackmailed. I suspect they've been confessing shit all their life.

~ Darnell Lamont Walker