Quotes About Artist

The artist alone sees spirits. But after he has told of their appearing to him, everybody sees them

The true, prescriptive artist strives after artistic truth; the lawless artist, following blind instinct, after an appearance of naturalness. The one leads to the highest peaks of art, the other to its lowest depths.

The role of the artist is to be the witness of life, timbuktu.

The serious revolutionary, like the serious artist, can't afford to lead a sentimental or self-deceiving life.

All people are struggling to be creative in some way, and the artist is the one who has succeeded in this task of life.

I wish I could balance life as an artist and a mother, but sometimes when I am doing live concerts, I have to ask people to help me in my other role.

I think that this stage in my life is really, for a lot of reasons, pretty incredible. Being a solo artist and trying to take these bold steps on my own.

The artist... may suppose that ideas are his chief currency; but unless he is also attuned to feelings, in life and in art, he will not move his fellow human beings.

I've always felt that music is an art form that deserves to live the life of the artist.

Fiction is based on reality unless you're a fairy-tale artist, you have to get your knowledge of life from somewhere. You have to know the material you're writing about before you alter it.

As the decades go by, a painter's life becomes a life lived with oil paint, a story told in the thicknesses of oil. Any history of painting that does not take that obsession seriously is incomplete.

I've spent my life pursuing excellence as an artist, which is what I always wanted to do anyhow.

What experience has shown me is that it takes your life to become an artist.

Because she favours solitude and indwelling, an artist can live a significantly more claustrophobic life that she had ever intended.

I believe in the energy of art, and through the use of that energy, the artist's ability to transform his or her life, and by example, the lives of others.

[Documentary photography] is unwittingly literary, because it is nothing other than an observation of contemporary life apprehended at the right moment by an artist capable of seizing it. (1928)

Why is joy not considered a fit subject for an artist?

My life had been defined by the apartheid years. Now we were going into an era of democracy... and I believed that I didn't have really a function as an artist, as a useful artist, in that anymore.

The artist cannot look to others to validate his efforts or his calling. If you don't believe me, ask Van Gogh, who produced masterpiece after masterpiece and never found a buyer in his whole life.

Deborah Harry: Giorgio was great. He's a funny personality. In a way, he's a scientist. A bit like Leonardo da Vinci, he's this multilayered artist, a scientist, a curious person. He's kind of a mathematician, and we were all sort of in awe of him.

The familiar will always remain the likely starting point for the rendering of the unfamiliar; an existing representation will always exert its spell over the artist even while he strives to record the truth.

Nature reflected in art always reflects the artist's own mind, his predilections, his enjoyments, and therefore his moods.

He never retorted that the artist is not a bricklayer at all, but a horseman whose business it is to catch Pegasus at once, not to practise for him by mounting tamer colts. This is hard, hot and generally ungraceful work, but it is not drudgery. For drudgery is not art, and cannot lead to it.

as a writer, or any kind of artist, was not designed to, you know, to make you special or to even isolate you….What your role was, it seemed to me, was to bear witness. To what life is—does—and to speak for people who cannot speak. That you are simply a kind of conduit.