Artist Quotes - Page 101

On "Tonight" I think I was torn dreadfully between writing what I wanted to write, but keeping it in a style that would follow up what I had just done. That's where I feel I was untrue to myself as an artist . . . that album and, to a lesser extent, "Never Let Me Down."

Every artistic expression is either influenced by or adds something to politics.

Spotify has paid more than two billion dollars to labels, publishers and collecting societies for distribution to songwriters and recording artists.

My parents never had any money. It was cash flow. It flows, and you got your fingers in it for a little while, and it flows away. That's all I know about money. And I don't know, it flows and it's a river, but you can never, ever keep it. As an artist, I can't keep it. But hey, a man who dies with a cent in the bank is a foolish man. So I guess I'm going against the conservators. I'm a spendthrift.

If you're an artist and you have dreams don't stop fighting because dreams really do come true.

I never took drug to escape. I know some people take drugs to escape, but I took drugs because I was an experimenter. And an artist. And I was always trying to go to the other side of that veil and get information, like all writers have done through the millennia. To get some insights on how the whole thing works, if there's any way to know how it works, and write about it.

Once I started reinventing for myself what being an artist was - not going into a studio, but making things on my own terms in response to being out in the world - I started to really enjoy it... I realized that everything else for me was hell.

Since the industrial revolution, cities, and especially the inner cities, were the places for the newly arrived. Voluntary immigrants seeking economic betterment, refugees, the bohemians, the artists - all of those people were crammed into densely populated neighborhoods and tenements. And as people climbed up the economic ladder they moved out, which really accelerated with the "white flight" phenomenon in the '60s and '70s.

Art solves nothing, either for the artist himself or for those who receive his art.

To be given the opportunity to help shape new artists' careers and mentor them to see their dreams come to fruition is a task I welcome with open arms.

I think an artist can fit under a few different categories depending on how much you explore your creativity. It can vary from artist to artist from musician to performer to vocalist. I thrive on creativity. So in the long run I want to be an all around entertainer.

In every work of art, the artist himself is present.

I want to be really special, I want to be really good. It's not enough to be famous for me. Famous is empty so quickly, it's not what people think it is. It's wonderful, but if you're famous and you feel that you're an artist inside and everyone thinks you're just a celebrity, it's really painful.

One difference between artists and ordinary people is that artists have big egos. In some cases, it's the only difference.

I love all types of music. Jazz, classical, blues, rock, hip-hop. I often write scripts to instrumentals like a hip-hop artist. Music inspires me to write. It's either music playing or completely silent. Sometimes distant sound fuels you. In New York there's always a buzzing beneath you.

I like Los Angeles. So many artistic people, and I just love the weather.

The virtue of the camera is not the power it has to transform the photographer into an artist, but the impulse it gives him to keep on looking.

Really the truth is just a plain picture. A plain picture of, let's say, a tramp vomiting in the sewere. You know, and next door to the picture Mr. Rockefeller or Mr. C. W. Jones on the subway going to work. You know, any kind of picture. Just make a collage of pictures.

He was, as Billy Name said in the acclaimed Ric Burns documentary about Andy Warhol, uninterested in being a second-tier artist. He was uninterested in being a first-tier artist! He wanted to be, you know, a god. Someone who completely changed the...he wanted to be Zeus with the lightning bolt and nothing less would have satisfied him.

Speaking of line, what artist of line was ever able to find more depth and volume than Hirschfeld? He was an illustrator and a caricaturist, but first and foremost, an artist.

My process started when I was born. The process is life experience. I believe that what makes you an artist, or at least an artist who can communicate the ideas that they want to get across, are people that have life experience.

All artists have runners, people that tell them what to do, business managers, lawyers, these - if they get the right ones, they're lucky, and if they get the wrong ones, they're unlucky.

An amateur may not be an artist, though an artist should be an amateur.

Drag artists are more men than real men. You need a lot of courage, personality, and guts to go out there. Even if you look good or you look bad, you still need to have all of those things to be on stage. You're going to get criticized by everyone.

Direct address has been a consistent tactic in my work, regardless of the medium that I'm working in.