Artist Quotes - Page 90

Marginalized youth, workers, artists and others are raising serious questions about the violence of inequality and the social order that legitimates it. They are calling for a redistribution of wealth and power - not within the old system, but in a new one in which democracy becomes more than a slogan or a legitimation for authoritarianism and state violence.

The essential thing is to spring forth, to express the bolt of lightning one senses upon contact with a thing. The function of the artist is not to translate an observation but to express the shock of the object on his nature; the shock, with the original reaction.

The artist is the child in the popular fable, every one of whose tears was a pearl.

Don't make me out to be an artist. I am an engineer. I am after the facts, only the facts.

The first and most important thing is to remain free, free in each line you undertake, in your ideas and in your political action, in your moral conduct. The artist especially must remain free from all outer restraints.

We are often like rivers: careless and forceful, timid and dangerous, lucid and muddied, eddying, gleaming, still. Lovers, farmers, and artists have one thing in common, at least - a fear of 'dry spells,' dormant periods in which we do no blooming, internal droughts only the waters of imagination and psychic release can civilize.

There are so many things to take into account - your ambition, your ego, the press, the consumers. You can never be sure that you'll be on top of the pile again.

Since I cannot sing, I paint.

I want to use every second of my life, every time that I have in my life, to make me a better fighter. That's why I'm a martial artist. For me, it's more than a job - it's a way of living

One of the things that sells music is when the artist is looked at as someone who's come up from the streets. Not just any streets, but the toughest, meanest streets of the urban ghetto. And that's called 'street credibility'.

Just as a picture is drawn by an artist, surroundings are created by the activities of the mind

I'm developing artists for my new record label, my son's band, Intangible, being one of them.

Theres no question that photographs communicate more instantly and powerfully than words do, but if you want to communicate a complex concept clearly, you need words, too.

An artist chooses his subjects: that is the way he praises.

All great artists and thinkers are great workers.

If we are to love our neighbors, before doing anything else we must see our neighbors. With our imagination as well as our eyes, that is to say like artists, we must see not just their faces but the life behind and within their faces. Here it is love that is the frame we see them in.

I said to Mr. Pavarotti once ... a marvelous man and a great artist ... I said to him ... "Maestro, I'm having trouble closing out a note so that it's almost as thin as a butter knife ... finish it out quietly like that." I said, "I have trouble doing that. What do you think I should do?" He said, "Justa close up your mouth." That's all he said, and I fell on the floor. I thought he was gonna give me a dissertation.

It seems to me madness to wake up in the morning and do something other than paint, considering that one may not wake up the following morning.

When the artist activates his being, awakens to his surroundings, and sets himself the task of creating, connections are made out of conscious awareness that return coalesced as inspiration.

The great piano virtuoso Paderewski was once playing before an audience of the rich and the royal. After a brilliant performance, an elegant lady waxed ecstatic over the great artist. She said, "Ah Maestro, you are a genius!" Paderewski tartly replied, "Ah yes, madam, but before I was a genius I was a clod!" What he was saying was that his present acclaim was not handed to him on a silver platter. He, too, was once a little boy laboriously practicing his scales. And even at his peak, behind every brilliant performance there were countless hours of practice and preparation.

It took time to really build myself a reputation as a good live performer, a musician and an artist.

Charge less, but charge. Otherwise, you will not be taken seriously, and you do your fellow artists no favours if you undercut the market.

Recollect that to a woman who gets her living by her pen, 'time is money,' as it is to an artist. Therefore, encroaching on her time is lessening her income. And yet how often is this done (either heedlessly or selfishly) by persons professing to be her friends, and who are habitually in the practice of interrupting her in her writing hours.

The artist's job? To be a miracle worker: make the blind see, the dull feel, the dead to live.

The past is of no importance. The present is of no importance. It is with the future that we have to deal. For the past is what man should not have been. The present is what man ought not to be. The future is what artists are. The facts: nothing matters but the facts: worship of the facts leads to everything, to happiness first of all and then to wealth.