Quotes About Artists

I know I'm the least technical guy in the sport. Most of the champions or guys at the top are real martial artists.

Every industry has got its distinct identity. The Malayalam film industry is right up there with some of the greatest content, artistes and technicians.

The exchange rate of the Rand against the dollar, pound or euro makes South Africa an attractive location. The positive side of this is it gives our artists and technicians an opportunity to work.

The first movies were made by technicians building their own cameras. Movies became an art when technicians worked on the technique and artists took care of the content.

Before I even got signed as a teen, I was singing with people like Hoyt Axton and Mickey Gilley. I worked with Jerry Lee Lewis and Little Richard.

I think I was probably an early teenager when I discovered Bessie Smith, Ma Rainey and a bunch of people that are on a long list of artists. They were important to me, especially as an early adolescent.

When it's all said and done, jazz with a capital J is where I'm coming from. Dexter Gordon, Billie Holiday, Miles Davis, Charlie Parker, Thelonious Monk - that's what I really studied when I was a teenager and what really fueled my passion.

I was really lost for a while in my teens. I was angry. But when I found music - Bob Dylan, Neil Young, Joni Mitchell - it was a new discovery. It was a door to this other world where I wanted to be.

All my favorite artists were pretty serious in the sense that their music was something I could sink my teeth into, from Peter Gabriel to U2 to these artists that made me want to read the lyrics and dig into it.

When you're on an independent film, you have a lot of great people there who are telling really true and authentic stories. But you also have a lot of con artists and people who think they can do something that they can't.

Like the seasons of the year, like history, truth also repeats itself. But we seldom recognize it when great poets or true artists - the prophets and the priests of our day - present it to us in garments spick and span, following the fashion of the age, the slant of its fancy, the turn and temper of its mind.

Few artists can afford artistic temperament.

In any artistic rendering of the city theme alienation is a constant. Given the anonymity the city provides, it could hardly be otherwise. Artists, especially writers, have recognised this dichotomy, and that cities have always proved a source of freedom by providing anonymity, notwithstanding the estrangement and isolation that goes with it. Indeed, the city's impetus towards modernity is to be found in that narrow zone between loss of community and discovery of self.

We must realize that artists are not in competition with each other. Help the young artists—find for them means to make their financial ways easier, that they may develop and fruit their fullest—but let us not ask them to please us in doing it.

A rule says, "You must do it this way." A principle says, "This works … and has through all remembered time." The difference is crucial. Your work needn't be modeled after the "well-made" play; rather, it must be well made within the principles that shape our art. Anxious, inexperienced writers obey rules. Rebellious, unschooled writers break rules. Artists master the form.

Artists, as a rule, understand nothing about business, or, for some reason or other, they aren't allowed to understand anything about it.

Certain numerologists in Germany had figured out that the number nine was fateful to German artists. Beethoven, Bruckner, and Mahler each wrote nine symphonies, Wagner nine operas that are still sung, Schiller, Hebbel, and Grillparzer each nine plays that are still produced.

Artists and art institutions have to learn how to play hardball. A democratic society needs a democratic art and we have a right to demand it.

In my day artists wanted to be outcasts, pariahs. Now they are all integrated into society

Artists try to ask questions, and within our society, unless there are artists, those questions don't get asked. And everybody blames the market.

Dance is certainly a sport, and they are phenomenal athletes, and they're also artists.

But meanwhile it's much easier to be an intellectual child or lunatic or beast than a harmonious adult man. That's why (among other reasons) there's such a demand for higher education. The rush to books and universities is like the rush to the public-house. People want to drown their realization of the difficulties of living properly in this grotesque contemporary world, they want to forget their own deplorable inefficiency as artists in life.

There may be no book on the mothers of poets, or artists in general, but it might one day be written and would be, I think, an enlightening read.

I've always felt that a lot of modern art is a con, and that the most successful painters are often better salesmen and promoters than they are artists.