Artist Quotes - Page 57

My father, George, has also affected the choices in my life regarding films. I like films that take chances or say something different or experiment. Growing up with him, I was surrounded by different artists - not just actors or film-makers but cartoonists, poets, writers.

Men of lofty genius when they are doing the least work are most active.

. . . All artists’ work is autobiographical. Any writer’s work is a map of their psyche. You can really see what their concerns are, what their obsessions are, and what interests them.

I feel like when you're an artist and you first come out - people don't want you to be as creative as you could possibly be as a musician. More so they really want you to stick to something.

I believe that a truly valuable artist must be an artist who realizes the impossibility of his task -and then continues to do it.

I've heard many times that with all good artists it's ultimately a self-portrait even if it's an abstraction. I feel my work is very much who I am. I didn't try to make it that way; it just is. It reflects who I am and also my interests.

That dichotomy between the public consumption of the work and my intent and practice in making it is an uneasy one for me, on occasion.

It's humbling because a lot of times people think because they are the artist or the celebrity or whatever they want to call themselves that they're above being a fan. If you like something, you can like it. You don't have to be afraid to say that so I really appreciate it and you know, to me, people are people.

Added to the moral solitude of the murderer comes the solitude of the artist, which can acknowledge no authority, save that of another artist.

The only artist who does not deserve respect is the one who works to please the public, for commercial success or for official success.

All I want are high heels, high heels. If I was a girl, I'd wear a lot of high heels. High, stiletto heels.

I don't like being under someone elses thumb. I'm very supportive of other female artists, especially those trying to make their own statement... trying to do what they want instead of being someone else's Barbie doll.

What gives the artist real prestige is his imitators.

The whole of nature is an endless demonstration of shape and form. It always surprises me when artists try to escape from this.

An artist earns the right to call himself a creator only when he admits to himself that he is but an instrument.

When I began competing with the other artists in New York, I discovered classical North Indian music.

Every day a new picture is painted and framed, held up for half an hour, in such lights as the Great Artist chooses, and then withdrawn, and the curtain falls. And then the sun goes down, and long the afterglow gives light.

Above all, an artist must never be too easily satisfied with what he has done.

Prizefighting ain't the noblest of arts and I ain't the noblest artist

An artist is a person who has invented an artist.

I know of no American who starts from a higher level of aspiration than the journalist. . . . He plans to be both an artist and a moralist -- a master of lovely words and merchant of sound ideas. He ends, commonly, as the most depressing jackass of his community -- that is, if his career goes on to what is called a success.

Data is what distinguishes the dilettante from the artist

The transition state of manners and language cannot be too often insisted upon: for this affected the process at both ends, giving the artist in fictitious life an uncertain model to copy and unstable materials to work in.

An entertainer is someone who pleases others, and an artist tries to please himself. An artist is on a journey: they don't know where they're going, what is going to happen, but they know they are not there yet, and there is some continuity and growth. I think of myself as an entertainer: I'm a performing entertainer, I'm a stand-up comic. But there's an artist at work here, too. One who interprets his world through his own filter.

Of all human struggles there is none so treacherous and remorseless as the struggle between the artist man and the mother woman.