Artist Quotes - Page 53

I'm one of those people who thinks you can have a happy life and still be an artist

I have no conscience at all -- least of all an artistic conscience. All I have is nerves.

The difficulty in working with someone on a show like Idol or X Factor is they have an idea of what they think is cool in their heads, and it's important as a producer to maintain control of the session and not let it get side-tracked or chase too many rabbits. But it's also important to let the artist feel like their opinion matters, so that balance is difficult.

The genius is not in how much Stanley Kubrick does in “2001: A Space Odyssey,'' but in how little. This is the work of an artist so sublimely confident that he doesn't include a single shot simply to keep our attention. He reduces each scene to its essence, and leaves it on screen long enough for us to contemplate it, to inhabit it in our imaginations. Alone among science-fiction movies, “2001'' is not concerned with thrilling us, but with inspiring our awe.

Whether it's an orgy or a cocktail party, I know how to do it.

A lot of people aren't familiar with me, but it's not my job to make people familiar with me. There's millions of artists out there. I'm just gonna do what I wanna do, and if people feel the stuff that I'm doing, then great.

As an artist, it's so important to create music that puts a chill through your body or does something to make you feel good. I think my album has a little bit of everything in it and that's important to me.

Every artist, every scientist, must decide now where he stands. He has no alternative. There is no standing above the conflict on Olympian heights. There are no impartial observers. Through the destruction, in certain countries, of the greatest of man's literary heritage, through the propagation of false ideas of racial and national superiority, the artist, the scientist, the writer is challenged. The struggle invades the formerly cloistered halls of our universities and other seats of learning. The battlefront is everywhere. There is no sheltered rear.

All the things an artist must be: poet, explorer of nature, philosopher!

Film is definitely a director's medium. They're responsible for the look and everything, and you're a part of that process as an actor, and you try to contribute to the story. But I think it might sound a little pretentious for me to say I think of myself as an artist. I think of myself as a creative person.

It isn't that I dislike artists, but I can't stand anyone who puts on those ponderous airs of a man of character.

It is just the little difference between the good and the best that makes the difference between the artist and the artisan. It is just the little touches after the average man would quit that makes the master's fame.

The search for an equilibrium is essential for the artist, to be as aware of inner space as he is of outer space.

From the moment you are born, you could die. I think as an artist it is important to meditate on that.

I think that all artists, regardless of degree of talent, are a painful, paradoxical combination of certainty and uncertainty, of arrogance and humility, constantly in need of reassurance, and yet with a stubborn streak of faith in their own validity no matter what.

I feel it's my social responsibility to shine a light on areas that don't get seen. My personal feeling is that it's an artist's responsibility to be engaged with the culture. And when the culture is going through turmoil, I think an artist can't ignore that. I don't feel that every artist has to be politically engaged, but I can't imagine that you can be an active participant of this culture and not in some way reflect that in the work you are creating.

Dancing is surely the most basic and relevant of all forms of expression. Nothing else can so effectively give outward form to an inner experience. Poetry and music exist in time. Painting and architecture are a part of space. But only the dance lives at once in both space and time. In it the creator and the thing created, the artist and the expression, are one. Each participates completely in the other. There could be no better metaphor for an understanding of the mechanics of the cosmos.

I strongly suggest that we play down basics like who influenced whom, and instead study the way the influence is transformed, in other words: how the artist made it his own.

Because of piracy there has been a massive downturn in people buying music, which makes it more difficult for artists to make money from the sale of records.

It's impossible for a creative artist to be either a Puritan or a Fascist, because both are a negation of the creative urge. The only things a creative artist can be opposed to are ugliness and injustice.

Journeys, like artists, are born and not made. A thousand differing circumstances contribute to them, few of them willed or determined by the will-whatever we may think.

To those supporters who were told that I abandoned them, that is untrue. I abandoned greed, corruption, and compromise, never you, and never the artistic gifts and abilities that sustained me.

I'm never too nervous about releasing music. I like to see what the people think because it helps me make myself better as an artist for them.

I am Warhol. I am the No. 1 most impactful artist of our generation. I am Shakespeare in the flesh.

An artist should be taking risks. That's the whole idea of being an artist.