Artist Quotes - Page 184

Getting people to go above and beyond the call of duty can be achieved but only if you, the artist, are willing to go above and beyond any and all calls of duty yourself.

As an artist, it is great to be able to market yourself to people who don't know you, and people who do.

As with any true artist, change is the only constant.

This is the time for every artist in every genre to do what he or she does loudly and consistently. It doesn't matter to me what your position is. You've got to keep asserting the complexity and the originality of life, and the multiplicity of it, and the facets of it. This is about being a complex human being in the world, not about finding a villain. This is no time for anything else than the best that you've got.

You are an over-excited little man, with a need for self-expression far beyond the scope of your natural gifts. This is not discreditable. Neither does it make you an artist.

If there’s a thing, a scene, maybe, an image that you want to see real bad, that you need to see but it doesn’t exist in the world around you, at least not in the form that you envision, then you create it so that you can look at it and have it around, or show it to other people who wouldn’t have imagined it because they perceive reality in a more narrow, predictable way. And that’s it. That’s all an artist does.

The mission of the artist in an over-technologi zed society, is to call the old magic back to life.

The function of the artist is to provide what life does not.

Obscurity is a far greater threat to authors and creative artists than piracy.

I started off just trying to make a wish list for myself. I wanted to work with people I really admire myself. I wanted to work with other artists from other scenes so they could make my songs improve in a different way - people who have artistically different things to say.

It is in the intellectual and emotional response, the conscious and subconscious associations of the artist, that the potential power of painting lies.

Going to the office of some stranger and waiting in a line, in a hallway, with five other guys who look just like you, waiting your turn to go in and embarrass yourself, and then waiting around for feedback, which never comes. I really like that. For a young artist, it seems like the perfect thing to be doing, humiliation, over and over and over and over. Which I'm sure can't be the way that some people look at it, but I thought that was so great. The point of it is if you make your own stuff you don't have to deal with other people's bullshit.

Eden Robinson is one of those rare artists who comes to writing with a skill and maturity that has taken the rest of us decades to achieve.

Artists see the world in a very different way than everyone else, and it's important when the artist points a lens at the law.

Many artists use their own lives as a kind of case study to examine what it's like to be human.

I'm not a haiku artist, but I wanted to use the phrase 5, 7, 5 in the melody that flows over time. So the string melody, the first one is five notes, the next one is seven, and then the third one is five.

Henri-Georges Clouzot's cool, clammy, twisty 1955 thriller Diabolique is an almost perfect movie about a very nearly perfect murder, a film in which the artist's methods and the killers' are ideally matched, equal in cunning and in ruthlessness. The screenplay, adapted by Clouzot and three other writers from a novel by the crack French crime-fiction team of Pierre Boileau and Thomas Narcejac, is a fantastically elaborate piece of contrivance, but the scrupulous realism of the direction makes the unnatural tale somehow feel entirely likely.

The work of the artist is not so much what you say or what you know, it's recognizing what you know. That's what life is about. That's what photography is about. You see something, or you hear someone say something, and you say That is a truth. You know, deep in you. That's when you start shooting.

Something was still there, that something that distinguishes an artist from a performer: the revealing of self. Here I be. Not forlong, but here I be. In sensing her mortality, we sensed our own.

When I was younger I thought I was an artist, and inspiration would just come to me.

The best and only thing that one artist can do for another is to serve as an example and an inspiration.

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.

As rich as you think some of us are, for every $18.99 CD you buy, the artist usually sees a toonie or so. Pay your producer out of that. Then your manager. Then split it five ways among your band mates. Now don't act surprised when you see the drummer of a platinum-selling Canadian rock band behind the drive- thru window at Tim Hortons

I think labels for the most part want to sign new discoveries so that that label alone is seen to be responsible for the rise of the artist. Not many labels want bands who have already made their mark, because their success is usually attributed to some other label somewhere else at another time.

That's the thing about great artists: They find the thing that's most obvious to themselves, what's most conscious and natural, and they put it out there and the audience comes.