Artist Quotes

“You might as well ask an artist to explain his art, or ask a poet to explain his poem. It defeats the purpose. The meaning is only clear thorough the search.”
― Rick Riordan

“Closed in a room, my imagination becomes the universe, and the rest of the world is missing out.”
― Criss Jami, Diotima, Battery, Electric Personality

“Every artist was first an amateur.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson

“Remember it all, every insult, every tear. Tattoo it on the inside of your mind. In life, knowledge of poisons is essential. I've told you, nobody becomes an artist unless they have to.”
― Janet Fitch

“When you're socially awkward, you're isolated more than usual, and when you're isolated more than usual, your creativity is less compromised by what has already been said and done. All your hope in life starts to depend on your craft, so you try to perfect it. One reason I stay isolated more than the average person is to keep my creativity as fierce as possible. Being the odd one out may have its temporary disadvantages, but more importantly, it has its permanent advantages.”
― Criss Jami, Killosophy

“Inside you there’s an artist you don’t know about… say yes quickly, if you know, if you’ve known it from before the beginning of the universe.”
― Rumi

“The artist's job is not to succumb to despair but to find an antidote for the emptiness of existence.”
― Woody Allen, Midnight in Paris: The Shooting Script

“For me, the camera is a sketch book, an instrument of intuition and spontaneity.”
― Henri Cartier-Bresson

“I see myself forever and ever as the ridiculous [person], the lonely soul, the wanderer, the restless frustrated artist, the [person] in love with love, always in search of the absolute, always seeking the unattainable.”
― Henry Miller, Stand Still Like the Hummingbird

“As artists, we are eternally heartbroken.”
― Lady Gaga

“The advice I like to give young artists, or really anybody who'll listen to me, is not to wait around for inspiration. Inspiration is for amateurs; the rest of us just show up and get to work. If you wait around for the clouds to part and a bolt of lightning to strike you in the brain, you are not going to make an awful lot of work. All the best ideas come out of the process; they come out of the work itself. Things occur to you. If you're sitting around trying to dream up a great art idea, you can sit there a long time before anything happens. But if you just get to work, something will occur to you and something else will occur to you and something else that you reject will push you in another direction. Inspiration is absolutely unnecessary and somehow deceptive. You feel like you need this great idea before you can get down to work, and I find that's almost never the case.”
― Chuck Close

“To photograph is to hold one's breath, when all faculties converge to capture fleeting reality. It's at that precise moment that mastering an image becomes a great physical and intellectual joy.”
― Henri Cartier-Bresson, The Mind's Eye: Writings on Photography and Photographers

“A poet should be so crafty with words that he is envied even for his pains.”
― Criss Jami, Killosophy

“The aim of every artist is to arrest motion, which is life, by artificial means and hold it fixed so that a hundred years later, when a stranger looks at it, it moves again since it is life.”
― William Faulkner

“The object of the artist is the creation of the beautiful. What the beautiful is is another question.”
― James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

“Create with the heart; build with the mind.”
― Criss Jami, Killosophy

“Every artist dips his brush in his own soul, and paints his own nature into his pictures.”
― Henry Ward Beecher

“I have Social Disease. I have to go out every night. If I stay home one night I start spreading rumours to my dogs.”
― Andy Warhol

“I would like to paint the way a bird sings.”
― Claude Monet

“I'm tired of feeling like I'm fucking crazy.
I'm tired of driving till I see stars in my eyes.”
― Lana Del Rey

“Personality begins where comparison leaves off. Be unique. Be memorable. Be confident. Be proud.”
― Shannon L. Alder

“The Artist always has the masters in his eyes.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson

“As Aristotle said, 'Excellence is a habit.' I would say furthermore that excellence is made constant through the feeling that comes right after one has completed a work which he himself finds undeniably awe-inspiring. He only wants to relax until he's ready to renew such a feeling all over again because to him, all else has become absolutely trivial.”
― Criss Jami, Killosophy

“Every act of creation is first of all an act of destruction." ― Pablo Picasso”
― Pablo Picasso

“Absurdity is the ecstasy of intellectualism.”
― Criss Jami, Salomé: In Every Inch In Every Mile

“Each of us is an artist of our days; the greater our integrity and awareness, the more original and creative our time will become.”
― John O'Donohue, To Bless the Space Between Us: A Book of Blessings

“Did you just use juxtaposition in a sentence?"
"Yes, Sage" he said patiently. "We use it all the time with art, ... That, and I know how to use a dictionary”
― Richelle Mead, The Golden Lily

“I have forced myself to contradict myself in order to avoid conforming to my own taste.”
― Marcel Duchamp

“she was completely whole
and yet never fully complete”
― Maquita Donyel Irvin, Stories of a Polished Pistil: Lace and Ruffles

“I want to be famous but unknown!”
― Edgar Degas