Artist Quotes - Page 9

It is human nature to want to exchange ideas, and I believe that, at bottom, every artist wants no more than to tell the world what he has to say.

If you forget the words to your own song, you can always claim artistic license. Forget the words to the national anthem and you're screwed.

The key to the mystery of a great artist is that for reasons unknown, he will give away his energies and his life just to make sure that one note follows another... and leaves us with the feeling that something is right in the world.

The modern artist is living in a mechanical age and we have a mechanical means of representing objects in nature such as the camera and photograph. The modern artist, it seems to me, is working and expressing an inner world - in other words - expressing the energy, the motion, and other inner forces.

You are a paintbrush in hands of the Artist.

I was worried in the '80s that the best abstract painting had become obsessed with materiality, and painterly gestures and materiality were up against the wall.

An artist is attracted to certain kinds of form without knowing why. You adopt a position intuitively; only later do you attempt to rationalize or even justify it.

We might say that both the artist and theneurotic bite off more than they can chew, but the artist spews it back out again and chews it over in an objectified way, as an ex­ternal, active, work project.

If America could be, once again, a nation of self-reliant farmers, craftsmen, hunters, ranchers, and artists, then the rich would have little power to dominate others. Neither to serve nor to rule: That was the American dream.

Through her paintings, she breaks all the taboos of the woman's body and of female sexuality.

We have to give our opinion, we have to say something, or we are a part of it. As an artist I am forced to say something.

What’s any artist, but the dregs of his work?

Artists have really never had any representation on Capitol Hill, because it's not the nature of the artist to join together and make a unified presence. Those days kind of died in the '60s.

If that condition of mind and soul, which we call inspiration, lasted long without intermission, no artist could survive it. The strings would break and the instrument be shattered into fragments.

Artists are the gate keepers of truth. We are civilization’s radical voice.

Failure and its accompanying misery is for the artist his most vital source of creative energy.

There comes a moment in a young artist's life when he knows he has to bring something to the stage from within himself. He has to put in something in order to be able to take something.

Donald Trump is a world-class con artist. He conned all these people that signed up for Trump University. Now he's trying to do the same thing to Republican voters. He's trying to convince them that somehow he's the guy that is going to stand up to illegal immigration, but he hires illegal immigrants, that he's fighting for American workers, but he's hiring foreign workers for his hotels, that he's going to bring back jobs from China and from Mexico, but, in fact, he's creating jobs in China and Mexico, because that's where all of his suits and ties that he sells are made.

The only true voyage, the only bath in the Fountain of Youth, would be not to visit strange lands but to possess other eyes, to see the universe through the eyes of another, of a hundred others, to see the hundred universes that each of them sees, that each of them is; and this we do [with great artists]; with artists like these we do really fly from star to star.

The artist must try to raise the level of taste of the masses, not debase himself to the level of unformed and impoverished taste.

What does the artist do? He draws connections. He ties the invisible threads between things. He dives into history, be it the history of mankind, the geological history of the Earth or the beginning and end of the manifest cosmos.

Presumably, as a Martial artist, I do not fight for gain or loss, am not concerned with strength or weakness, and neither advance a step nor retreat a step. The enemy does not see me. I do not see the enemy. Penetrating to a place where heaven and earth have not yet divided, where yin and yang have not yet arrived, I quickly and necessarily gain effect.

The artist enriches the soul of humanity. The artist delights people with a thousand different shades of feeling.

I think my iTunes is a kind of strange and embarrassing mix of show tunes and artists that I have no perception of whether or not they're huge or not, you know? I'm the kind of person who doesn't realize that The Arcade Fire is a big deal, but then I expect everybody to know Cocoon, and people tend to not know Cocoon.

Every artist is supposed to get emotional. You're painting pictures of emotions.