Artist Quotes - Page 40

If poets often commit suicide, it is not because their poems are bad but because they are good. Whoever heard of a bad poet committing suicide? The reader is only a little better off. The exhilaration of a good poem lasts twenty minutes, an hour at most. Unlike the scientist, the artist has reentry problems that are frequent and catastrophic.

When the artist ... intends from the beginning to be obscure and take obscurity as his objective or goal for its own sake and wishes to astonish, shock, and seem mysterious, that is a swindle.

Resistance in my experience always kicks in when you're trying to move from a lower level to a higher level or to identify with a braver part of yourself or your higher nature. So it's that negative repelling force. It's kind of the dragon that we have to slay every day if we're artists or entrepreneurs.

Today the influences of your society pressure you to be successful before your time. They are pulling you down. They have pulled you down, you big, sweet, magnificent, young, potential artists. They have pulled you down so far that you are on the verge of destruction. Only you don't know it because you want to be a success

In order to acquire a growing and lasting respect in society, it is a good thing, if you possess great talent, to give, early in your youth, a very hard kick to the right shin of the society that you love. After that, be a snob.

I don't need to praise anything so justly famous as Frost's observation of and empathy with everything in Nature from a hornet to a hillside; and he has observed his own nature, one person's random or consequential chains of thoughts and feelings and perceptions, quite as well. (And this person, in the poems, is not the "alienated artist" cut off from everybody who isn't, yum-yum, another alienated artist; he is someone like normal people only more so - a normal person in the less common and more important sense of normal.)

My job is to be an artist and thus I use different media to deal with the status of the body in our society.

Advertising agencies don't care about a better world in the end. They are servants of their client: what the client wants is what they get. Their only problem is to not lose the budget. I think its a shame because advertising is so boring and it can be so interesting. They should ask more artists to make interesting campaigns.

I see the artist as a participant, a co-producer of reality.

Among the Indians, as among other nations, some people are born artists, but most are not. I am a born artist. I have as much interest in my people as any anthropologist, and I have studied our culture and lore. My aim is to reassemble the pieces of a once proud culture, and to show the dignity and bravery of my people.

I can take a lot of pats on the back. I love it when I get admiring letters from people. And, of course, I'd love it if the critics would notice me, too.

My responsibility as a poet, as an artist, is to not look away.

Anybody can be a rapper, but not anybody can be a classical artist.

An artist should always bite the hand that feeds him - but not too hard.

Because artists can be extremely eccentric and insane, and unfortunately, the people they hurt the most are the people that are closest to them.

OK, it was black, it was below grade, I was female, Asian American, young, too young to have served. Yet I think none of the opposition in that sense hurt me.

People ask why there are so few female artists who succeed. It's because women are not ready to sacrifice as much as men. Women want a man, they want a family, they want to have children, they want to be loved, and to be an artist. And they can't; it's impossible.

All great scientists have, in a certain sense, been great artists; the man with no imagination may collect facts, but he cannot make great discoveries.

Did you know Richard Nixon is the only president whose formal portrait was painted by a police sketch artist?

The moment I accept that there's an artistic, redeeming quality in puns, I have a horrible feeling I'll get hooked.

I'm not a pop artist. For me pop never was.... Pop is concerned with exteriors. I'm concerned with interiors. When I use objects, I see them as a vocabulary of feelings. I can spend a lot of time with objects, and they leave me as satisfied as a good meal. I don't think pop artists feel that way.

An economy where advertisers thrive while journalists and artists struggle, reflects the values of a society more interested in deception and manipulation than in truth and beauty

The object of the artist is the creation of the beautiful. What the beautiful is is another question.

Most of us, no matter what we say, are walking in the dark, whistling in the dark. Nobody knows what is going to happen to him from one moment to the next, or how one will bear it. This is irreducible. And it's true of everybody. Now, it is true that the nature of society is to create, among its citizens, an illusion of safety; but it is also absolutely true that the safety is always necessarily an illusion. Artists are here to disturb the peace.

Every good painter paints what he is.