Artist Quotes - Page 211

until you learn that an artist cannot afford to scorn any phase of life that is human, you will never do great work.

I completely believe that - literature for me is a way of life. That's probably true of all writers or all artists. I think in the end this kind of activity absorbs one in such a way that it becomes one's way of life.

I actually quite like promo, which is quite odd for an artist, but recording's not the easiest thing.

Artists should never think of themselves as an idol. Fame is a side effect of one's work.

There's nothing more tragic than artists from the 70s still doing art from the 70s.

I want to be an artist, not an erotic freak. I don’t want to be sold to the public as a celluloid aphrodisiac.

I want to be an artist, an actress with integrity, and that includes all kinds of parts.

Anything can be misinterpreted. People can look at Christ on a cross and think, This is an image of murder, this is violent, this has sexual imagery in it. And it just - I think it's my job as an artist to be out there pushing people's buttons and making them question everything.

It is hard to describe the thrill of creative joy which the artist feels when the conviction seizes her that at last she has caught the very soul of the character she wishes to portray, in the music and action which reveal it.

All children are artists, and it is an indictment of our culture that so many of them lose their creativity, their unfettered imaginations, as they grow older.

We do live, all of us, on many different levels, and for most artists the world of imagination is more real than the world of the kitchen sink.

The concentration of a small child at play is analogous to the concentration of the artist of any discipline. In real play, which is real concentration, the child is not only outside time, he is outside himself.

I think my dream would have been to be a solo artist. But it didn't work out like that, and I also love to sing lots of musical stuff; I was really good at that, I've got a big voice. I dropped into musical theater and really enjoyed it and I sang for about nine years of my career.

I only know this - that you can’t give advice to an artist.

Who is an artist? I say we take a title. No one gives it to us. We make our lives.

In the business of portrait photography, one must combine the artist and the craftsman.

The Jackass movies are honestly some of the best movies I've ever seen. I laugh so hard at them. Those guys are geniuses. If they had grown up with a different group of people, they could've been performance artists at Bard College, and people would be writing papers about them.

To wish for the crazy times one last time and freeze it in the memory of a camera is the least a great artist can do.

I think it's almost a unique control that artists can have now more than they ever did, I think if you don't be proactive about how you want your music to be visually represented, I think other people will do it for you - so how comfortable are you with people putting their own two cents on it?

Just because I'm a recording artist doesn't mean I'm not an artist. Because I had to grow.

I don't think I realized what was going to be the hardest part of becaming an artist until I dove off the diving board ... first I had to overcome a pre-speculated idea of me. I had to sort of burst through that and introduce myself, and that was the first hurdle, and then now sing in front of everybody, and then that was the second one, and I'm the offspring of - you know, who I'm the offspring of - I had a few hurdles to get through, no doubt about it. But the scales never tipped in the other direction too much.

Ballet dancers are a self-chosen elite. To survive and surmount years of disciplinary preparation and seasons of even more arduous performance requires rigid determination and almost mindless self-abnegation. One other factor is difficult to predetermine: without a certain admixture of hysteria - sometimes masking as self-obsession, sometimes even counterfeiting incipient madness - performers, at once acrobats, artists, and animals, make little public impression.

It should be not only a synergy, but a complicity between the viewer and the artist, and so I'm wide open to that.

Everyone is here on earth as an artist; to tell his particular story or sing her irreplaceable song; to leave a unique creative signature.

It's easy to look down from the summit you've reached, or even the summit I've reached, and talk about the responsibilities of the artist, but most people are just trying to get their foot in the door and make a living.