Artist Quotes - Page 8

She was rare, few and far betweenShe suspected he would be as wellAnd the thought of two rare, few and far between individualsDoing all that was necessary for that rare, few and far between Meeting to occurDrove her to write

God, what a ghastly enterprise to be in, though--and what an odd way to achieve success. I'm an exhibitionist who wants to hide, but is unsuccessful at hiding; therefore, somehow I succeed.

An artist's job is to make new clichés.

Art is a human activity consisting in this that one man consciously by means of external signs hands on to others feelings he has worked through and other people are infected by these feelings and also experience them.

Music is the fastest motivator in the world.

I celebrate myself, I paint and dance and sing myself, and what I assume you will assume, for every atom as of me as good belongs to dreamy You. I am a song. I am a poem. I am the soil and a gem. I am a stargate and a voyage. I am the ocean and your soul.

The object of art is to give life a shape.

My mom told me once that Wyatt loved her the way a boy will love his mother, but I loved her the way an artist loves another. Jo taught me what that meant.

Closed in a room, my imagination becomes the universe, and the rest of the world is missing out.

There have been times I've felt so much art in my soul I grew sick of artists.

When I use the word rebel for the artist, I do not refer to revolutionary or to such things as taking over the dean’s office; that is a different matter. Artists are generally soft-spoken persons who are concerned with their inner visions and images. But that is precisely what makes them feared by any coercive society. For they are the bearers of the human being’s age-old capacity to be insurgent.

My eyes roved over the walls covered with my collages and prints of famous paintings. Magritte, Kandinsky, Kahlo. My origami shapes hung from fishing wire, dangling over my bed. They shivered in the slight breeze blowing through my open window. It was my own little escape pod, but none of it was enough tonight.

You are the artist, and your days the canvas. Will you create an original masterpiece, or live a paint-by-numbers kind of life?

Sorrowful and great is the artist's destiny.

To be happy to be sad and sad to be happy is to sing an echo in that beautiful language called Sorrow.

Be regular and orderly in your life like a bourgeois so that you may be violent and original in your work.

A person of large dreams does not allow other people’s opinion to damper his or her zestfulness. Overcoming fear of making an irreversible, lifetime mistake is the first step of living an artistic existence.

Soft on the neck of either dove love's hands let slip the reins: and while we look for light of love, love's twilight wanes...

Musicians are artists, as silence is their canvas.

She who is a dancer can only sway the silk of her hair like the summer breeze.

Curiosity is the beginning of all creativity.

I romanticize life the way artists see scenery or a dreamer gazes up at the stars.

Haven't I told you scores of times, that you're always beginners, and the greatest satisfaction was not in being at the top, but in getting there, in the enjoyment you get out of scaling the heights? That's something you don't understand, and can't understand until you've gone through it yourself. You're still at the state of unlimited illusions, when a good, strong pair of legs makes the hardest road look short, and you've such a mighty appetite for glory that the tiniest crumb of success tastes delightfully sweet. You're prepared for a feast, you're going to satisfy your ambition at last, you feel it's within reach and you don't care if you give the skin off your back to get it! And then, the heights are scaled, the summits reached, and you've got to stay there. That's when the torture begins; you've drunk your excitement to the dregs and found it all too short and even rather bitter, and you wonder whether it was really worth the struggle. From that point there is no more unknown to explore, no new sensations to experience. Pride has had its brief portion of celebrity; you know that your best has been given and you're surprised it hasn't brought a keener sense of satisfaction. From that moment the horizon starts to empty of all hopes that once attracted you towards it. There's nothing to look forward to but death. But in spite of that you cling on, you don't want to feel you're played out, you persist in trying to produce something, like old men persist in trying to make love, with painful, humiliating results. ... If only we could have the courage to hang ourselves in front of our last masterpiece!

It is not about the glory of the human form more about being human.

O wayfarer! Yearn finds quench, not in meadows, seashores or altitude of mountain peaks; but when being becomes dance.

The importance of an artist is to be measured by the quantity of new signs which he has introduced to the language of art.

You have to have time to be sorry for yourself to be a good Abstract Expressionist.

The crazy creatives are the creatives who never go completely mad. They aren't so easily disheartened by the seemingly endless amounts of scrutiny that creative individuals tend to receive because they, like insanity, are the ones who feed off of opposition and negative feedback and manage to continue along with a healthy ambition. It is the crazy that teaches us to use our gifts wisely and own all the attackers.

Artist paint images unseen, musicians create sounds that emerge from silence, and authors write from a synthetic point of view about a world that can never exist.

A distaste for the new is not always fear of the unknown, but sometimes ambition. Some people don't like the new way simply because they never got a chance to master the old way.

Art-speech is the only truth. An artist is usually a damned liar but his art if it be art will tell you the truth of his day. And that is all that matters. Away with eternal truth. The truth lives from day to day and the marvelous Plato of yesterday is chiefly bosh today.

What immense satisfaction it must be to fashion a story like [Maupassant's]! One must say 'fashion' because it is not merely writing, but massing and cutting away like a sculptor, chiseling lean and clear. And to put one's work confidently in the crucible of Time; to know that in six perfect pages is the finest form of one's idea: This satisfaction is the only true reward of the artist, and this his highest possible joy on Earth.

I've never been somewhere I belonged, but there are places where I think I could be happy. Like San Francisco. Well, do art museums count? Because I feel like I belong in them.

What I wear on and off stage is my mask. You see, a mask doesn't hide you, it exposes you.

No one cares about the artist Kafka, who troubles us with his puzzling aesthetic, because we'd rather have Kafka as the fusion of experience and work, the Kafka who had a difficult relationship with his father and didn't know how to deal with women.

Master the art of selfloveand you will never have to seekvalidationever again.

The soul of an artist cannot be muted indefinitely. It must either be expressed or it will consume the host.

Do you know how hard it is to paint kindness?” She leaned her hip against a desk in the corner of the room, still watching me. “It’s the only part of a person I really want to capture. Everything else seems to get lost in layers of deception or defensiveness. But not kindness. You can’t hide it. And people either are or they aren’t.

The words of the Quran all seemed strangely familiar yet so unlike anything I had ever read before,’ he told us. He embraced Islam in 1977, and changed his name to Yusuf, the Arabic for Joseph. ‘I identified with the story of Joseph in the Quran,’ he said. ‘His brothers sold him like goods in the market place.’ Yusuf felt the music business had treated him not like an artist but as a commodity.

An artist is one who has mastered the art of dissolving himself through his works!

We strolled to the end of the platform. We came to a man with a signal lamp and I saw that as he passed us he looked at a conductor standing on another platform and made a drinking movement with his hand near his mouth. We stopped past the end of the roof and looked at the sun. "You see the sun, Koekebakker?" The sun was especially clear, right in front of us, close by, bigger and redder than I had ever seen it. It almost touched the rails, it didn't flash brightly on things anymore, there was a dull glow only on the frosted windowpanes of the train shed to the right of the track. "You think I'm drunk?" I did indeed. "It doesn't matter, Koekebakker, when I'm sober I don't understand anything anyway.""Do you understand what the sun wants from me? I have thirty-four setting suns leaning against the wall, one on top of the other, all facing the wall. But every evening it's there again.""Unless it's cloudy," I said. But he wouldn't let himself be distracted."Koekebakker, you've always been my best friend. I've known you since--how long has it been?""Thirteen years. That's a long time. You know what you need to do? Do me a favor. You have a hatbox?"I didn't say anything."Put it in a hatbox, Koekebakker. In a hatbox. I want to be left alone. Put it in a hatbox, a plain old hatbox. That's all it's worth."Bavinck blubbered drunkard's tears. I looked around helplessly. A man in a uniform with a yellow stripe on his cap came up to us and spoke to me."I think it would be better, sir, if you took the gentleman home.

We should comport ourselves with the masterpieces of art as with exalted personages - stand quietly before them and wait till they speak to us.

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.

According to the scientist, time is interminable and inexhaustible. The artist is more inclined to relate the passage of time as a subject involving the randomness of memory and humankind’s ability to create vivid recollections. Astute artists depict collections of disjointed thought fragments in paintings and literature in order to stir the pot of human consciousness. Art rests upon the correspondence between the impact of external experience and the finiteness of human life. An artist attempts to articulate answers to the mystery of being by rendering a thoughtful interpretation of the world that we occupy and experience through our senses.

You know it's ART, when the check clears.

Suicide carried off many. Drink and the devil took care of the rest

I am not a finished poem, and I am not the song you’ve turned me into. I am a detached human being, making my way in a world that is constantly trying to push me aside, and you who send me letters and emails and beautiful gifts wouldn’t even recognise me if you saw me walking down the street where I live tomorrowfor I am not a poem. I am tired and worn out and the eyes you would see would not be painted or inspiredbut empty and weary from drinking too much at all timesand I am not the life of your party who sings and has glorious words to speakfor I don’t speak muchat alland my voice is raspy and unsteady from unhealthy living and not much sleep and I only use it when I sing and I always sing too muchor not at alland never when people are around because they expect poems and symphonies and I am nota poembut an elegyat my bestbut unedited and uncut and not a lot of people want to work with me because there’s only so much you can do with an audio take, with the plug-ins and EQs and I was born distorted, disordered, and I’m pretty fine with that,but others are not.

As a kid I never knew what I wanted to be when I grow up, but the only thing I knew was that I wanted to create things. And then I wanted to be an astronaut. I would paint stars and the atmosphere and then frame and hang the universe up on my bedroom wall. A few years down the line while I was still stargazing, I came to realize that I’m halfway around the world chasing something and the whole time it’s in my backyard. From the very beginning I was who I always wanted to be.

But nowadays I feel guilty that I am granted the immunity of the artistically gifted, having never actually achieved anything to prove myself worthy.

It is by continuing to put out good work that the artist best shows his gratitude.

If what makes a person an artist is their work, they should be admired; if what makes a person an artist is themselves, they should be adored.

During the act of making something, I experience a kind of blissful absence of the self and a loss of time. When I am done, I return to both feeling as restored as if I had been on a trip. I almost never get this feeling any other way. I once spent sixteen hours making 150 wedding invitations by hand and was not for one instance of that time tempted to eat or look at my watch. By contrast, if seated at the computer, I check my email conservatively 30,000 times a day. When I am writing, I must have a snack, call a friend, or abuse myself every ten minutes. I used to think that this was nothing more than the difference between those things we do for love and those we do for money. But that can't be the whole story. I didn't always write for a living, and even back when it was my most fondly held dream to one day be able to do so, writing was always difficult. Writing is like pulling teeth. From my dick.

I notice I may have somehow mixed up two events, my visit with Rita to Briceland on our way to Cantrip, and our passing through Briceland again on our way back to New York, but such suffusions of swimming colors are not to be disdained by the artist in recollection.

But Hannah's friend didn’t understand the volatile balancing act between art and sanity, that the act of creation was like walking a tightrope during an earthquake. She didn’t understand Hannah’s stupid need for validation, or that the size of the audience increased the stakes and multiplied the fear. She didn’t understand that creativity was dangerous, that, yes, there were some people who could stand before a canvas, paint a sunset that would bring the world to its knees, and return to their loved ones as a complete person who didn’t hurt, didn’t cry, didn’t spill blood to appease the host of fickle muses. But Hannah did. Hannah’s best ideas—sometimes her only ideas—were buried beneath the skin.

Artist communities love to bullshit each other and glad-hand one another, and there's no room for the crippling honesty of comedy."I'm a painter" -- well... you don't...probably need to do that.. . . if you're painting something that doesn't exist, I understand that, I can appreciate- . . . but if your pain- 'oh, it's a barnyard scene in autumn'--well then just take a picture of a barn in autumn! It's way better than a painting! - Before Turning the Gun on Himself [2012]

The advantage of having an artistic tradition is that the younger artist could see an organic link between the real life of one's country and its art work which is a sublimation of that life.

I appreciate a book intended to be judged by its cover. The insincere readers are often weeded out while the sincere readers remain curious.

What would you do if you saw something nobody else could see?”The tape gun fell out of Luke’s hand, and hit the tiled hearth. He knelt to pick it up, not looking at her. “You mean if I were the only witness to a crime, that sort of thing?”“No. I mean, if there were other people around, but you were the only one who could see something. As if it were invisible to everyone but you.”He hesitated, still kneeling, the dented tape gun gripped in his hand.“I know it sounds crazy,” Clary ventured nervously, “but…”He turned around. His eyes, very blue behind the glasses, rested on her with a look of firm affection. “Clary, you’re an artist, like your mother. That means you see the world in ways that other people don’t. It’s your gift, to see the beauty and the horror in ordinary things. It doesn’t make you crazy—just different. There’s nothing wrong with being different.

God writes love and speaks poetry.

What's an artist but the dregs of his work - the human shambles that follows it around?