Artist Quotes

I only really started to go to plays and to be interested in drama 20 years ago when as an artist I was already well-rounded. I think I'm more disciplined today.

I think being an artist, or just being creative, or imaginative, or aware, where I think everybody starts out, and by about the age of 10, that's been pretty effectively whipped out by education.

You know, there's a saying in art that in order to be universal you must be specific. So I think every artist feels that he is dealing with specific things but that it also has significance universally.

To the real artist in humanity, what are called bad manners are often the most picturesque and significant of all.

That was a wonderful period in my life. I mean, I didn't become an artist, but somebody let me do something I loved. What a luxury, to do something you love to do.

Nowadays you need so much money to be able to launch a new artist, notably in America; you would hardly believe the sums involved.

They shaved my head, eyebrows. This is not a sci-fi picture. It's not a fantasy picture. You're dealing with something that's supposed to be in reality. But we had a genius makeup artist.

I am isolated as an artist, not as a person.

I am an artist. The track is my canvas, and the car is my brush.

To me, every interview, even if you love the artist, needs to be somewhat adversarial. Which doesn't mean you need to attack the person, but you do need to look at it like you're trying to get information that has not been written about before.

The responsibility of an artist is to be honest with themselves.

I don't know what people find or like in me, I'm hopelessly commonplace! Current appreciation of my work is a bit highbrow, I've always considered myself a popular artist.

An artist must be free to choose what he does, certainly, but he must also never be afraid to do what he might choose.

Every artist dips his brush in his own soul, and paints his own nature into his pictures.

Artists have really never had any representation on Capitol Hill, because it's not the nature of the artist to join together and make a unified presence. Those days kind of died in the '60s.

I do struggle with how much and in which way, as an artist or celebrity, that you voice your political views.

Far from wishing to awaken the artist in the pupil prematurely, the teacher considers it his first task to make him a skilled artisan with sovereign control of his craft.

It betrays hubris on the part of the artist to think his medium is limiting him, and I think we all recognize this.

If you write great songs with meaning and emotion, they will last for ever because songs are the key to everything. Songs will outlast the artist and they will go on for ever if they are good.

In every work of art the subject is primordial, whether the artist knows it or not. The measure of the formal qualities is only a sign of the measure of the artist's obsession with his subject; the form is always in proportion to the obsession.

I was a visual artist primarily and a writer, even from a very young age. I wrote a lot of stories and poetry and... I had a desire to create always. And I always had a desire to show my work.

I decided on the spot that I would be an artist, and I assure you, it was no ordinary artist I had in mind.

One of the things I want to do as an artist is to connect generations.

An artist is never ahead of his time but most people are far behind theirs.

They told me that they are starting a classic label, and wanted me to be the first artist. So I signed, and am producing myself, and writing my own music, but I'm their first artist on their classic label. And I have creative control.

I feel the symbolic world is the nub of a problem for an artist.

Whatever an artist's personal feelings are, as soon as an artist fills a certain area on the canvas or circumscribes it, he becomes historical. He acts from or upon other artists.

No one can make the album they made 10 years ago with a straight face. There are two reasons: one is you change as a person. To be a true artist, I have to be true to who I am now and write that way. And the second thing is these are different times.

The reviewer is a singularly detested enemy because he is, unlike the hapless artist, invulnerable.

Once in his lifetime every artist feels the hand of God and creates something that comes alive.