#Artists Quotes

“The artists must be sacrificed to their art. Like the bees, they must put their lives into the sting they give.”

“The poet, the painter, the sculptor, the musican, the architect, seek each to concentrate this radiance of the world on one point, and each in his several work to satisfy the love of beauty which stimulates him to produce.”

“The mind of an artist, in order to achieve the prodigious effort of freeing whole and entire the work that is in him, must be incandescent...there must be no obstacle in it, no foreign matter unconsumed.”

“But, I've always loved John Mayer and I think T-Pain is brilliant.”

“Criticism? An artist wants praise. Praise.”

“It is the nature of the artist to mind excessively what is said about him. Literature is strewn with the wreckage of men who have minded beyond reason the opinions of others.”

“All artists need a room of their own”

“There are no teachers, saints, prophets, good people, but the artists.”

“I really like Lady GaGa and everything she is for her fans.”

“(Talks about Miley Cyrus 'I always thought I'd be really fun to sing a song with Miley.”

“Varnishing is the only artistic process with which Royal Academicians are thoroughly familiar.”

“I have so many playlists full of Rihanna, Nicki Minaj, Lil Wayne, Chris Brown.”

“I think it is perfectly natural for any artist to admire intensely and love a young man. It is an incident in the life of almost every artist.”

“Nothing, indeed, is more dangerous to the young artist than anyconception of ideal beauty: he is constantly led by it either intoweak prettiness or lifeless abstraction: whereas to touch theideal at all you must not strip it of vitality. You must find it in life and re-create it in art.”

“The only people I would care to be with now are artists and people who have suffered: those who know what beauty is, and those who know what sorrow is: nobody else interests me.”

“Only mediocrities progress. An artist revolves in a cycle of masterpieces, the first of which is no less perfect than the last.”

“A writer is someone who has taught his mind to misbehave.”

“Artists reproduce themselves or each other, with wearisome iteration. But criticism is always moving on, and the critic is always developing.”

“Most of our modern portrait painters are doomed to absolute oblivion. They never paint what they see. They paint what the public sees, and the public never sees anything.”

“Matisse makes a drawing, then he makes a copy of it. He copies it five times, ten times, always clarifying the line. He’s convinced that the last, the most stripped down, is the best, the purest, the definitive one; and in fact, most of the time, it was the first. In drawing, nothing is better than the first attempt.”

“There ought to be an absolute dictatorship... a dictatorship of painters... a dictatorship of one painter... to suppress all those who have betrayed us.”

“They ought to put out the eyes of painters as they do goldfinches in order that they can sing better.”

“The productions of all arts are kinds of poetry and their craftsmen are all poets.”

“There should be a law that no ordinary newspaper should be allowed to write about art. The harm they do by their foolish and random writing it would be impossible to overestimate - not to the artist, but to the public, blinding them to all but harming the artist not at all.”

“I never felt so fervently thankful, so soothed, so tranquil, so filled with the blessed peace, as I did yesterday when I learned that Michael Angelo was dead.”

“We might adapt for the artist the joke about there being nothing more dangerous than instruments of war in the hands of generals. In the same way, there is nothing more dangerous than justice in the hands of judges, and a paint brush in the hands of a painter! Just think of the danger to society! But today we haven't the heart to expel the painters and poets because we no longer admit to ourselves that there is any danger in keeping them in our midst.”

“In the end there is only Matisse.”

“When I paint I feel that all the artists of the past are behind me.”

“No work of art ever puts forward views. Views belong to people who are not artists.”

“The artistic life is a long, lovely suicide.”

“The only artists I have ever known who are personally delightful are bad artists. Good artists exist simply in what they make, and consequently are perfectly uninteresting in what they are. A great poet, a really great poet, is the most unpoetical of all creatures. But inferior poets are absolutely fascinating. The worse their rhymes are, the more picturesque they look. The mere fact of having published a book of second-rate sonnets makes a man quite irresistible. He lives the poetry that he cannot write. The others write the poetry that they dare not realize.”

“All things considered, there is only Matisse.”

“When art critics get together they talk about Form and Structure and Meaning. When artists get together they talk about where you can buy cheap turpentine.”

“Today we haven't the heart to expel the painters and poets from society because we refuse to admit to ourselves that there is any danger in keeping them in our midst.”

“While one should always study the method of a great artist, one should never imitate his manner. The manner of an artist is essentially individual, the method of an artist is absolutely universal. The first personality, which no one should copy.”

“There is a notion that creative people are absent-minded, reckless, heedless of social customs and obligations. It is, hopefully, true for they are in another world altogether.”

“That is an artist as I would have an artist be, modest in his needs: he really wants only two things, his bread and his art--panemet Circen.”

“We are the sons of Sorrow; we are the poets and the prophets and the musicians.”

“No artist tolerates reality.”

“From what I remember, I remember always being a big fan of Kardinal Offishall. He just had that different flow and different flavor. He put himself on the record and that's the type of energy that we love.”

“I've been connected to the most culturally important albums of the past four years, the most influential artists of the past ten years. You have like, Steve Jobs, Walt Disney, Henry Ford, Howard Hughes, Nicolas Ghesquière, Anna Wintour, David Stern.”

“A lot of artists have a lot of different ventures, I think it's typical for a hip hop artist, at this point, to have a bunch of different ventures.”

“When you set about your composing, it may be necessary for your ease, and better distillation of wit, to put on your worst clothes, and the worse the better; for an author, like a limbeck, will yield the better for having a rag about him: besides that, I have observed a gardener cut the outward rind of a tree (which is the surtout of it) to make it bear well; and this is a natural account of the usual poverty of poets, and is an argument why wits, of all men living, ought to be ill clad.”

“The creative writer uses his life as well as being its victim; he can control, in his work, the self-presentation that in actuality is at the mercy of a thousand accidents.”

“I will try not to panic, to keep my standard of living modest and to work steadily, even shyly, in the spirit of those medieval carvers who so fondly sculpted the undersides of choir seats.”

“We don't really want to think that the artist is only very skilled, that he has merely devoted his life to perfecting a certain set of intelligible skills.”

“The artist brings something into the world that didn't exist before, and he does it without destroying something else.”

“There's almost nothing worse to live with than a struggling artist.”

“A writer's self-consciousness, for which he is much scorned, is really a mode of interestedness, that inevitably turns outward.”

“The refusal to rest content, the willingness to risk excess on behalf of one's obsessions, is what distinguishes artists from entertainers, and what makes some artists adventurers on behalf of us all.”