Artist Quotes - Page 168

I don't think of myself as an artist. I'm just a guy who can write.

If that's art, I'm a Hottentot!

A person taking stock in middle age is like an artist or composer looking at an unfinished work; but whereas the composer and the painter can erase some of their past efforts, we cannot. We are stuck with what we have lived through. The trick is to finish it with a sense of design and a flourish rather than to patch up the holes or merely to add new patches to it.

Any artist who doesn't think he's the best should quit.

A painting that is an act is inseparable from the biography of the artist.

Chicago still remains a Mecca of the Midwest - people from both coasts are kind of amazed how good life is in Chicago, and what a good culture we've got. You can have a pretty wonderful artistic life and never leave Chicago.

His art is the health of the artist.

The impulse of nature, fused through the personality of the artist by laws arising from the particular nature of the medium, produces the rhythm and the personal expression of a work. Then the life of the composition becomes a spiritual unity.

The plastic artist may or may not be concerned with presenting a superficial appearance of reality, but he is always concerned with the presentation - if not the representation - of the plastic values of reality.

It was Sophie ( Sophie Arp Tauber, woman artist and later Arp's wife) who, by the example of her work and her life, both of them bathed in clarity, showed me the right way. In her world, the high and the low, the light and the dark, the eternal and the ephemeral, are balanced in prefect equilibrium.

I used to have to downplay my sexuality because I wanted to be taken so seriously as a thespian and as an artist and as an actor, so I'd play crack heads and down trotting women and disguise myself, and I think as I've gotten older, I become more comfortable with who I really am and all parts of me knowing that my physical self doesn't diminish me in any way or my talent.

It was from the artists and poets that the pertinent answers came, and I know that panic would have broken loose had they been able to compare notes.

The critic, to interpret his artist, even to understand his artist, must be able to get into the mind of his artist; he must feel and comprehend the vast pressure of the creative passion.

The artist is not a reporter, but a Great Teacher. It is not his business to depict the world as it is, but as it ought to be.

My grandfather was not a musician but he was an artist - a painter, a decorative painter.

The expression of beauty is in direct ratio to the power of conception the artist has acquired.

Without artists, the order which we find in nature, and which is only an effect of art, would at once vanish.

I hate artists who are not of their time.

Without artists, the sublime idea men have of the universe would collapse with dizzying speed.

I try not to limit myself. The actors that inspire me are the comedians and the people able to shape-shift into different roles and into different media. That ensures your longevity as an artist and prevents you from getting bored with yourself and, hopefully, prevents people from getting bored with you.

I'm rarely grabbed by anything the way I was when I was 10 years younger. About the only relatively new artists whose albums I own are Beck, and They Might Be Giants.

Effective as perspective is... it becomes a deadening influence on an artist's natural way of seeing things once it is accepted as a system - as a mechanical formula.

Elvis Presley, The Everly Brothers, and a lot of American artists were my greatest influences.

I think there's an interest right now in the performance aspect of artworks, instead of just hanging things on walls. We're in a moment when a lot of younger artists are looking at work from the '60s and '70s - they are looking at the pieces by Marina Abramovic or Vito Acconci. These pieces have a time element. They were performed live. To perform them again now isn't simply an homage, because it's a different audience, a different moment.

I think it would be nice to sell 15 million albums as a solo artist. I'd have to deal with all the repercussions of that, but that wouldn't be too bad.