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Artists
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“Writers and artists [are] to be themselves with dignity, not to be always feeling apologetic toward the normal people and trying to explain and adapt themselves.”
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“An artist usually has no friends except other artists, and usually they do not like his work.”
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“Never, never ask an author what he is going to write next, a painter what subject he is going to depict next. They most prefer talking about their past achievements.”
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“... the first prerogative of an artist in any medium is to make a fool of himself. ”
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“... it is the nature of the artist to mind excessively what is said about him. Literature is strewn with the wreckage of men who have minded beyond reason the opinions of others.”
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“To be successful in the world of art you must, of course, have talent, although very small talents have gone very far in this age. Just as the microphone gave volume to voices that had none, so does the science of press-agentry magnify limited skills into highly saleable properties.”
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“Artists never make wars. They are too busy making life out of the matter of their visions.”
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“Artists are people who are not at all interested in the facts — only in the truth.”
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“Any artist must expect to work amid the total, rational indifference of everybody else to their work, for years, perhaps for life ... ”
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“No form of art repeats or imitates successfully all that can be said by another; the writer conveys his experience of life along a channel of communication closed to painter, mathematician, musician, film-maker.”
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“If some people are right, artists are put into this world not to practice their art, but to talk about it. And judging by the flattering invitations many a humble climber will receive to pontificate from the lowest rung but one of the ladder, humanity is in a dangerously receptive frame of mind, and artists a race devoid of either modesty or sense of humor.”
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“ To be an artist includes much; one must possess many gifts — absolute gifts — which have been acquired by one's own effort. And moreover, to succeed, the artist must possess the courageous soul ... the brave soul. The soul that dares and defies.”
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“... artists are exposed to great temptations: their eyes see paradise before their souls have reached it, and that is a great danger.”
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“Her religion was that of all artists — obedience to the laws of her creative art.”
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“The artist's business is to take sorrow when it comes. The depth and capacity of his reception is the measure of his art; and when he turns his back on his own suffering, he denies the very laws of his being and closes the door on everything that can ever make him great.”
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“The most potent and sacred command which can be laid upon any artist is the command: wait.”
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“All artists dream of a silence which they must enter, as some creatures return to the sea to spawn.”
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“Real artists, it seems to me, are those who don't repeat themselves.”
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“Artists are always young.”
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“ The artist's knowledge of his own creative nature is often unconscious; he pursues his mysterious way of life in a strange innocence.”
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“Failure would only be if you had somewhere stopped growing. As far as I can see the whole duty of the artist is to keep on growing ... ”
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“Trouble is said to be good for an artist's soul but almost never is.”
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“... until you learn that an artist cannot afford to scorn any phase of life that is human, you will never do great work. ”
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“... the artist's relation to money is always queer because the production of art is not for money; one would do it even if one got paid nothing at all.”
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“It is the artists who make the true value of the world, though at times they may have to starve to do it. They are like earthworms, turning up the soil so things can grow, eating dirt so that the rest of us may eat green shoots.”
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“[On directing:] We're the storytellers. We're the children under the bed, reading our picture books, and moving our little people around and making them talk.”
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“It was at that moment that Degas persuaded me to send no more to the Salon and to exhibit with his friends in the group of Impressionists. I accepted with joy. At last I could work with complete independence without concerning myself with the eventual judgement of a jury. I already knew who were my true masters. I admired Manet, Courbet and Degas. I hated conventional art. I began to live.”
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“In reply to your form of Sept. 16th asking for my photograph, I don't possess one, and it would be very disagreeable to me to have my image in a catalogue or in any publication. It is always unpleasant to me to see the photographs of the artists accompany their work, what has the public to do with the personal appearance of the author of picture or statue? Why should such curiosity if it exists be gratified?”
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“... the communal mental picture of the artist starving in a garret seems to me to have a grain of truth in it. What may be less familiar as an idea is my own notion that the artist creates his own garret and goes on hunger strike. ... The artist starves in his garret because he must have the resistance of the garret and the starvation but these privations can take many forms. ”
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“Never interrupt an artist in the middle of his work! You are inflicting agony upon him. ”
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“My greatest fear in working is always the end. Lately I have taken to tricking myself into finishing by leaving a hole in the middle somewhere, then stitching the two pieces together — the Union Pacific approach. ”
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“Artistic growth is, more than it is anything else, a refining of the sense of truthfulness. The stupid believe that to be truthful is easy; only the artist, the great artist, knows how difficult it is.”
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“A child's attitude toward everything is an artist's attitude.”
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“An artist's saddest secrets are those that have to do with his artistry.”
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“To note an artist's limitations is but to define his genius. A reporter can write equally well about everything that is presented to his view, but a creative writer can do his best only with what lies within the range and character of his talent.”
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“Never strive, O artist, to create what you are not irresistibly impelled to create!”
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“... out of various forms of personal catastrophe comes art, if you're lucky. ”
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“Early in school, they called me 'the artist.' When teachers wanted things painted, they called upon me, they called upon 'the artist.' I am not saying that I learned my name, animals can learn their names, I am saying that they learned it.”
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“Another thing about creation is that every day it is like it gave birth, and it's always kind of an innocent and refreshing. So it's always virginal to me, and it's always a surprise. ... Each piece seems to have a life of its own. Every little piece or every big piece that I make becomes a very living thing to me, very living. I could make a million pieces; the next piece gives me a whole new thing. It is a new center. Life is total at that particular time. And that's why it's right. That reaffirms my life.”
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“Some of us come on earth seeing. Some of us come on earth seeing color.”
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“[John Craske] painted like a man giving witness under oath to a wild story.”
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“The wretched Artist himself is alternatively the lowest worm that ever crawled when no fire is in him: or the loftiest God that ever sang when the fire is going.”
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“There is nothing harder for an Artist than to retain his Artistic integrity in the tomb of success. A tomb, nevertheless, which nearly every Artist: whether he admits it or not; naturally wants to get into.”
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“... a great artist ... takes what he did not make and makes of it something that only he can make ...”
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“In the arts, you simply cannot secure your bread and your freedom of action too. You cannot be a hostile critic of society and expect society to feed you regularly.”
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“Human life itself may be almost pure chaos, but the work of the artist — the only thing he's good for — is to take these handfuls of confusion and disparate things, things that seem to be irreconcilable, and put them together in a frame to give them some kind of shape and meaning. Even if it's only his view of a meaning. That's what he's for — to give his view of life.”
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“Art is a vocation, as much as anything in this world. For the real artist, it is the most natural thing in the world, not as necessary as air and water, perhaps, but as food and water. ... to follow it you very often have to give up something.”
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“... nobody respects the work of an artist; people resent very much his needing any time to do his work. There is not much money in it, at first any way, and the idea that it should be treated as a profession at least, with a place to work and hours during which one shouldn't be disturbed, is very upsetting to the kind of people who would never dream of disturbing a life insurance salesman while he was getting up his accounts ... Again, I think there is a great deal of resentment based on the fact that a man working in the arts, is supposed to be enjoying himself — he is one of the few persons in the world doing something he really likes and wants to do, so the notion that he should be paid for this use of his time is outrageous, to say the least. It is almost plain thievery for a man to take money for enjoying himself ...”
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“... an artist is always seeking revelation.”
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“America hates the artist. It will not admit: the artist is my soul and I want to kill off my soul.”
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“... perhaps the only magician we have is the artist.”
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“Life, religion and art all converge in Bali. They have no word in their language for 'artist' or 'art.' Everyone is an artist.”
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“It is in general true that in order to create works of art one has to have leisure. On the other hand I think that one needs to experience resistance in a practical sense, and even that which is poignant to bring out what makes easy reading for others. Too much deprivation of course, means death.”
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“After a little while I murmured to Picasso that I liked his portrait of Gertrude Stein. Yes, he said, everybody said that she does not look like it but that does not make any difference, she will, he said.”
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“One of the pleasantest things those of us who write or paint do is to have the daily miracle. It does come.”
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“The artist is the voice of the people, but she is also The People.”
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“A great artist is never poor.”
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“We are often like rivers: careless and forceful, timid and dangerous, lucid and muddied, eddying, gleaming, still. Lovers, farmers, and artists have one thing in common, at least — a fear of 'dry spells,' dormant periods in which we do no blooming, internal droughts only the waters of imagination and psychic release can civilize.”
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“Temperament is something that is an integral part of the artist. Not temper, temperament. There is a vast difference.”
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“... nobody becomes an artist unless they have to.”
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“I hate flowers — I paint them because they're cheaper than models and they don't move.”
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“I don't very much enjoy looking at paintings in general. I know too much about them. I take them apart.”
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“Where I was born and where and how I have lived is unimportant. It is what I have done with where I have been that should be of interest.”
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“...even if I could put down accurately the thing that I saw and enjoyed, it would not give the observer the kind of feeling it gave me. I had to create an equivalent for what I felt about what I was looking at — not copy it.”
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“... I said to myself — I'll paint what I see — what the flower is to me but I'll paint it big and they will be surprised into taking time to look at it — I will make even busy New Yorkers take time to see what I see of flowers.”
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“God told me if I painted that mountain enough, I could have it.”
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“...I believe an artist is the last person in the world who can afford to be affected.”
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“I found things I could say with color and shapes that I couldn't say in any other way ... things I had no words for.”
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“I realized that were I to paint flowers small, no one would look at them because I was unknown. So I thought I'll make them big, like the huge buildings going up. People will be startled; they'll have to look at them — and they did.”
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“Since I cannot sing, I paint.”
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“If there is any reason to single out artists as being more necessary to our lives than any others, it is because they provide us with light that cannot be extinguished. They go into dark rooms and poke at their souls until the contours of our own are familiar to us.”
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“No other creative field is as closed to those who are not white and male as is the visual arts. After I decided to be an artist, the first thing that I had to believe was that I, a black woman, could penetrate the art scene, and that, further, I could do so without sacrificing one iota of my blackness or my femaleness or my humanity.”
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“I know now that everybody in the arts is forever a beginner. Experience counts for a great deal and very little. Every night onstage I feel I am starting from scratch, still not quite sure what I am doing and where I am going, thrown by the simplest thing that goes wrong.”
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“Children, like animals, use all their senses to discover the world. Then artists come along and discover it the same way ... Or now and then we'll hear from an artist who's never lost it.”
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“... the artist must / create himself or be born again.”
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“I have a strange need to paint; if I don't paint I cry and get bad headaches.”
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“An artist is a person who has succeeded in getting time and space to do what it wants.”
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“... you've got to go into the open market and take punishment — the way, since the beginning of art, every great artist has.”
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“A writer's heart, a poet's heart, an artist's heart, a musician's heart is always breaking. It is through that broken window that we see the world; more mysterious, beloved, insane, and precious for the sparkling and jagged edges of the smaller enclosure we have escaped.”
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“Another real thing! I am not dead yet! I can still call forth a piece of soul and set it down in colour, fixed forever ...”
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“Through poverty, godhunger, the family debacle, I kept a sense of worth. I could limn and paint like no-one else in this human-wounded land: I was worth the while of living. Now my skill is dead. I should be.”
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“There are two kinds of artists left: those who endorse Pepsi and those who simply won't.”
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“Unlearning is the choice, conscious or unconscious, of any real artist. And it is the true sign of maturity.”
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“... artists ... all have a need that cannot be met by another human being.”
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“We do not know and cannot tell when the spirit is with us. Great talent or small, it makes no difference. We are caught within our own skins, our own sensibilities; we never know if our technique has been adequate to the vision.”
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“... the artist is not separate from the work and therefore cannot judge it.”
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“The artist deals with what cannot be said in words ... The novelist says in words what cannot be said in words.”
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“In order to be an artist, one must be deeply rooted in the society.”
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“... for ninety-one years, he did something remarkable. He stayed interested.”
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“Do lifelong artists pay a price for having chosen to make art? Of course. Everyone pays the price for his or her choices.”
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“In the end, I feel that one has to have a bit of neurosis to go on being an artist. A balanced human seldom produces art. It's that imbalance which impels us. I often think that all I want to do now is to avoid suicide, accidental or otherwise. Other than that, I think living on the edge is what drives my work and me beyond a certain point. The artist lives with anxiety. When you finally reach a plateau of achievement, there comes a new anxiety — the hunger to push on still further. That angst is what makes you go forward.”
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“... everything happens to an artist; time is always redeemed, nothing is lost and wonders never cease.”
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“The artist in all societies has traditionally been a kind of barometer, more sensitive to nuances and changes than others, because he is more deeply immersed in his culture and more interested in its meanings.”
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“The important thing is to keep producing. All artists have that quality. You have to be tenacious.”
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“... every artist is both male and female, and ... sometimes, the two great elements are in conjunction with him, so that all by himself he suddenly gets the melody and the burst of feeling of a great symphony without any external stimuli.”
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“There's a cultural conviction that any 'artist' must have personal suffering to back up their work, otherwise there's something undeserved and therefore inauthentic about it, perhaps even some sort of cheating.”
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“It's all a struggle. I don't know what should be there until it gets there.”
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“Living is a form of not being sure, not knowing what's next or how. The moment you know how you begin to die a little. The artist never entirely knows. We guess. We may be wrong, but we take leap after leap in the dark.”
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“... great artists can be uncertain. Of course they are while strugggling to find solutions. Tolstoi's scripts are almost indecipherable. Emily Dickinson provided four or more alternates for every word; Beethoven wrestled with endings to the point of exhaustion; in our day Jerome Robbins and his lack of decision are a byword in the dance profession. But all of these knew very well what they did not want, and what they did not want was the current coin, the well-worn usage. What they wanted was something newly experienced, and therefore unknown and hard to attain.”
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“An artist requires the upkeep of creative solitude. An artist requires the healing of time alone. Without this period of recharging, our artist becomes depleted. Until we experience the freedom of solitude, we cannot connect authentically. We may be enmeshed, but we are not encountered. Art lies in the moment of encounter. We meet our truth and we meet ourselves and we meet our self-expression.”
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“Many of us believe that 'real artists' do not experience self-doubt. In truth, artists are people who have learned to live with doubt and do the work anyway.”
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“[On Ade Bethune:] Her life itself stands as her major work of art, her great design, lovingly worked out over the years.”
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“I believe many of the paintings attributed to 'Unknown Masters' were actually the work of cloistered nuns.”
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“... the independence of the artist is one of the great safeguards of the freedom of the human spirit.”
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“At this holiday time I always think of our dear mother. I never saw her again after the day you took the fateful decision to send me to a lunatic asylum! I think of that lovely portrait I did of her in the shade of our beautiful garden. ... I doubt whether that hateful person I often mention to you [Rodin] would have the audacity to attribute it to himself, like my other works — that would be too much, the portrait of my mother!”
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“The great conductor is always a despot by temperament and intractable in his ways. ... The artist is obliged to keep his laughter and tears to himself. If they want to emerge, in spite of himself, then he must hide them or unleash them in someone else.”
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“Artists often think they are going to die before their time. They seem to possess a heightened sense of the passing of the hours.”
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“Great artists treasure their time with a bitter and snarling miserliness.”
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“Part of the business of being an artist is abetting talent. The best do that.”
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“I hope he will make his name, as you call it. Though I believe many artists make a name without making an income.”
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“Dead artists always bring out an older, richer crowd.”
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“One must be born an artist in order to do the work of becoming one.”
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“A really good picture looks as if it's happened at once. It's an immediate image. For my own work, when a picture looks labored and overworked, and you can read in it — well, she did this and then she did that, and then she did that — there is something in it that has not got to do with beautiful art to me. And I usually throw these out, though I think very often it takes ten of those over-labored efforts to produce one really beautiful wrist motion that is synchronized with your head and your heart, and you have it, and therefore it looks as if it were born in a minute.”
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“Artists are the traditional interpreters of dreams and nightmares ...”
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“I do not suppose that any artist imagines he has attained perfection, and, far from any such presumption on my part, I have never yet been quite satisfied with any work of mine.”
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“If nothing will finally survive of life besides what artists report of it, we have no right to report what we know to be lies.”
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“Every field of our business now is becoming filled with people who don't have any sense of letting us be artists. It has become a dollar-sign business, and therefore we're finding it hard to do what we primarily came into it for: to be artists. Too many of us are becoming cold-hearted business people, and we're being treated as business people. When an artist no longer does the things that he enjoys, then he's no longer an artist.”
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“The only compensation for the artist is the chance to feed hungry hearts.”
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“... artists often lie behind on the field long after the art combine, the broad-bladed harvester of informed criticism, has mowed, bailed, and stored the crop.”
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“The most demanding part of living a lifetime as an artist is the strict discipline of forcing oneself to work steadfastly along the nerve of one's own most intimate sensitivity.”
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“... the capacity to work feeds on itself and has its own course of development. This is what artists have going for them.”
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“Their [artists'] essential effort is to catapult themselves wholly, without holding back one bit, into a course of action without having any idea where they will end up. They are like riders who gallop into the night, eagerly leaning on their horse's neck, peering into a blinding rain. And they have to do it over and over again.”
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“... you don't need talent to be an artist. 'Artist' is just a frame of mind. Anybody can be an artist, anybody can communicate if they are desperate enough.”
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“The only thing I know is that I paint because I need to, and I paint always whatever passes through my head, without any other consideration.”
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“... we eat up artists like there's going to be a famine at the end / of those three minutes when there are in fact an abundance / of talents just waiting lets put some / of the giants away for a while and deal with them like they have / a life to lead.”
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“A primitive artist is an amateur whose work sells.”
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“If I didn't start painting, I would have raised chickens.”
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“I wonder whether it might not even be possible to generalize and say the successful artist is one who, among other things, finds by luck, labor, instinct, or whatever a form and image to reflect in power (never in literal representation) the original sensory experiences that were received by the [child's] innocent mind. And by contrast, a failed or weak artist would then be one for whom, among other things, the way back is lost or confused or the reflecting image a counterfeit one or mechanically imitative.”
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“The artist moves in a circle to reclaim the past.”
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“No artist is pleased. ... There is only a queer divine dissatisfaction, a blessed unrest that keeps us marching and makes us more alive than the others.”
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“No artist is ahead of his time. He is his time; it is just that others are behind the times.”
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“'Why are there no great women artists?' sounds as ignorant of human geography as the query 'Why are there no Eskimo tennis teams?'”
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“The untutored child possesses two qualities which are always preserved in the mature artist: imagination, and the ability to encounter his own feelings.”
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“[On John Tunnard:] One day a marvelous man in a highly elaborate tweed coat walked into the gallery. He looked a little like Groucho Marx. He was as animated as a jazz-band leader, which he turned out to be. He showed us his gouaches, which were as musical as Kandinsky's, as delicate as Klee's, and as gay as Miró's.”
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“Dwells within the soul of every Artist / More than all his effort can express; / And he knows the best remains unuttered, / Sighing at what we call his success.”
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“[On the way she paints with her fingers, not using the intermediary of a brush:] The more you get physically into the paint you lose, you forget yourself. You become the paint, you become the form, you become the structure. It starts to become an outpouring thing, that is why you are doing it.”
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“The artist grips his idea and will not let it go until it has blessed him, as the angel blessed Jacob.”
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“Through all the world there goes one long cry from the heart of the artist: Give me leave to do my utmost!”
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“Legend adheres to artists whose deaths seem the corollaries of their works. ”
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“I don't believe artists should be subjected to experiences that harden the sensibilities; without sensibility no fine work can ever be done.”
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“What an artist is for is to tell us what we see but do not know that we see.”
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“The artist must be an egotist because, like the spider, he draws all his building material from his own breast. But just the same the artist alone among men knows what true humility means. His reach forever exceeds his grasp. He can never be satisfied with his work. He knows when he has done well, but he knows he has never attained his dream. He knows he never can.”
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“Being an artist is the only place where I can think clearly and learn what being alive is all about.”
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“Scandal is as good as an early death for a great artist.”
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“The tricky thing about being a writer, or about being any kind of artist, is that in addition to making art you also have to make a living.”
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“To rebel or revolt against the status quo is in the very nature of an artist.”
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“The artist has always been and still is a being somewhat apart from the rest of humanity.”
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“I think most of the people involved in any art always secretly wonder whether they are really there because they're good or there because they're lucky.”
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“Clay. It's rain, dead leaves, dust, all my dead ancestors. Stones that have been ground into sand. Mud. The whole cycle of life and death.”
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“My painting is so biographical, if anyone can take the trouble to read it.”
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“The key is what is within the artist. The artist can only paint what she or he is about.”
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“When you make any kind of artwork, you have to serve it. You could easily call the artist a servant.”
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“If you can't fail then how can you possible develop as a communicator or as a creator of anything? We are locked into a deeply unhealthy notion that somehow you've got to succeed all the time. An appalling notion. Any painter or writer will tell you that that is no way to proceed. One of the things that will kill off a decent actor, especially a young actor early on and they will never recover from it, is too much success. It's disastrous. You stop being criticized, therefore you stop challenging yourself. You then can't afford to fail because there's too far to fall.”
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“All writers, musicians, artists, choreographers/dancers, etc., work with the stuff of their experiences. It's the translation of it, the conversion of it, the shaping of it that makes for the drama.”
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“i'm a struggling artist / not a starving artist / there's a big difference.”
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“This seclusion of the artist with his work, sometimes misconceived as a selfish thing, is in truth as needful a tool as any, if a vision is to be made clear to others. And all the men I have known do creative work obtained it; either mechanically, by the walls of a workroom, or by that withdrawal into themselves which is part of their power.”
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“... I certainly fall in love with artists. I think that's probably the aspiration of an artist, to make a listener empathize so deeply that they do fall in love with you.”
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“An artist, in giving a concert, should not demand an entrance fee but should ask the public to pay, just before leaving, as much as they like. From the sum he would be able to judge what the world thinks of him — and we would have fewer mediocre concerts.”
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“Painting is a lot harder than pickin' cotton. Cotton's right there for you to pull off the stalk, but to paint, you got to sweat your mind.”
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“Good artists are full of anger. They see the conditions of our time, the reality, the truth ...”
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“I had great masters. I took the best of them of their teachings, of their examples. I found myself, I made myself, and I said what I had to say.”
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“I paint people to learn to know them.”
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“An artist has the right to be judged by her best work.”
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“... this mysterious thing, artistic talent: the key to so much freedom, the escape from so much suffering.”
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“I paint pictures which do not exist and which I would like to see.”