Artist Quotes - Page 81

When I get compared to artists like Jose Gonzalez or Bon Iver, I can't help but think, "I've been doing this since they were in third grade."

The worst thing that can happen to an artist is to be subsidized by the state. It leads to an intellectual and artistic castration.

You see, what is my purpose of performance artist is to stage certain difficulties and stage the fear the primordial fear of pain, of dying, all of which we have in our lives, and then stage them in front of audience and go through them and tell the audience, I'm your mirror; if I can do this in my life, you can do it in yours.

I panic every time I put out a record. I think every artist does.

The artist does not really create; he discovers.

When I heard that there were artists, I wished I could some time be one. If I could only make a rose bloom on paper, I thought I should be happy! Or if I could at last succeed in drawing the outline of winter-stripped boughs as I saw them against the sky, it seemed to me that I should be willing to spend years in trying.

Footballers can be like artists when the mind and body are working as one. It is what Miles Davis does when he plays free jazz - everything pulls together into one intense moment that is beautiful.

Common Sense is that which judges the things given to it by other senses.

You know, for a long time I have been of the opinion that artists don't necessarily know what they're doing. You don't necessarily know what kind of universal concept you're tapping into.

The greatest work of an artist is the history of a painting.

I'm a really stoic artist. I'm serious a lot of times. I can joke and play sometimes, but most of the time, I'm stoic.

I don't consider myself an artist. I consider myself a very opinionated man who uses words as fighting tools.

A culture is as rich and as capable of surviving as it has imaginative artists, skilled men of science, a high ethic level, workable government, land and natural resources, in about that order of importance.

My mother encouraged me to be artistic. It was written in a contract at an early age that I would be an artist.

I began working within the streets of Harlem, where, after graduating from Yale [University, New Haven, CT], I became the artist in residence at the Studio Museum in Harlem [New York, NY]. I wanted to know what that was about. I would actually pull people from off of the streets and ask them to come to my studio.

I think that artists provide questions, not answers. We provide provocations rather than fully formed objects.

Bisexuality is almost a necessary factor in artistic production; at any rate, the tinge of masculinity within me helped me in my work.

Quite often, lyrics get misunderstood - and I never mind that. I guess what all artists want is for their work to touch someone or for it to bethought provoking.

The purpose of subject matter is to veil technique. The great artist uses the cloak of resemblance to hide the means.

I am not one of those artists who is cemented in one way. I am able to, you know, make the happy, jovial, lighthearted music too. We need that in life too. So it's like that to me.

When an artist paints a picture he does not want you to consider his personality as represented in that picture - he wants you to look at the beauty of that picture. No one cares who has painted the picture as long as it is beautiful.

Music needs to have a real sacred setting for people to understand it. You've got to start things off with friends who are like-minded or even strangers that are like-minded. Sending your music to established artists or labels or magazine, I mean there is something to be said for tenacity, for trying to pursue recognition that way, but it just doesn't make sense for the best work. And if you do make an amazing work, it's sometimes not the best way to be heard. You have to get on a sacred space, like a stage, and do your testifying that way.

For the artist, the color, the bouquet, the tinkling of the spoon on the saucer, are things in the highest degree. He stops at the quality of the sound or the form. He returns to it constantly and is enchanted with it.

Now one thing I think is really lame, is if you're an artist and you go to a karaoke bar and sing your own song. I like to get up there and sing stuff that I would never sing on stage anywhere else. Like Neil Diamond.

Something in me knows where I’m going, and - well, painting is a state of being. ... Painting is self-discovery. Every good artist paints what he is.