Artist Quotes - Page 212

I have always thought of myself as a performer first and way down the line as a recording artist.

I think the stakes are always high when you're an artist of color - to get things right, to get things perfect and make everybody happy. But I'm not concerned with politicians and what they think. And I'm not always going to succeed. I'll have missteps, but I hope that people will be patient with the show and us and know that our intentions are good.

I think the biggest lesson is the common one that gets in the way of most of us as artists - there are these messages in society that if you aren't hitting certain metrics, then you're not successful and you're not valid.

I like to be in the zone. I like being in the studio with the artists, with the producers, with the musicians, feeling it, and going there. I feel like I have a lot of content to start writing about.

What interested me the most was that when I [traveled to Europe] I knew what Joseph Beuys was doing, he knew what I was doing, and we both, we just started to talk. How did I know what Daniel Buren was doing, and to an extent, he knew exactly what I was doing? How did everybody know? It's an interesting thing. I'm still fascinated by it because, why is it now, with the Internet and everything else, you get whole groups of artists who have chosen to be regional? They really are only with the people they went to school with.

I see artists as a great battalion moving through paint, words, music towards cosmological interpretation.

The main thing that attracts me to Buddhism is probably what attracts every artist to being an artist - that it's a godlike thing. You are the ultimate authority. There is no other ultimate authority.

The proper aim of education is to promote significant learning. Significant learning entails development. Development means successively asking broader and deeper questions of the relationship between oneself and the world. This is as true for first graders as graduate students, for fledging artists as graying accountants.

You think you're an artist; prove it

Nobody needs an Artist, but everyone needs ART.

If you can see a thing you don't have anymore it's very heartbreaking. To hold onto things longer than we actually can hold onto them is a desire. Writers and artists are trying to record these things they can no longer have. We're a heartbroken lot. Taking pictures is a brave act in which you try to explain and remember a thing you can't have anymore.

In high school I was good at math and everybody wanted me to do something with that - mathematics or engineering - which was a nightmare scenario for me. Meeting other artists and going to punk rock shows at that age, there was a feeling of freedom and community that I wanted to partake in.

When I started dating I had relationships with people who came from families that weren't at all artistic or whatever, and they didn't understand how to communicate. I find that so boring.

My job as an artist is to take all my thoughts and feelings and put them on your iPod so that you can digest them. Whatever it is that brings you comfort and joy as a mode of resistance, do it. If it's music, that's what I do, that's my mode of resistance, I refuse for the world to steal my joy. If it's church, go to church, if it's working with kids, work with kids, but do something positive in your community that's going to lift you up.

I'd seen all the great entertainers by the time I was 14 or 15. My mother was artistic. My father was a bookmaker, so he had access to all those nightclubs, and he was smitten by certain artists, and we would go see them. We'd see comics like Sid Caesar and Milton Berle - those kind of artists - many of whom I worked with later in my life.

You start to become successful, and everybody starts to drive your money train to the bank, and they're not thinking anymore about what you want as an artist or if any of that even matters to you. It genuinely upsets people in my life that I don't care about money, and that's not my problem.

Because the artist deals in future realities, he always seeks improvements or changes in the existing reality. This makes the artist, inevitably and invariably, a rebel against the status quo. The artist, day by day, by postulating the new realities of the future, accomplishes peaceful revolution.

There is a strong feeling in the Middle West that the artist is not pulling his own weight no matter how hard he may work, that the other people are doing the real stuff.

A lot of artists are such narcissists.

I think as an artist you evoke feeling and change and through that you send a message.

I think there can be a misrepresentation of who I am a lot of times because I might be more quiet than other artists. I don't walk in the room going, "Here I am!" I'm going to be the guy standing in the corner taking everything in. I think that can be taken the wrong way, as if I'm not interested in what's going on around, but it's not really the case.

I want to be the kind of artist who keeps pushing on every album. I don't want to settle on a sound.

I think you can see the evolution of me as an artist, and just becoming confident and coming into my own and becoming my own person throughout each mixtape. One thing I could learn from looking back at my old mixtapes, what I could learn from my old self, is just to keep that hunger and that drive and that feeling of an underdog and also the feeling of being a fan, still lookin up to people - you just want to impress them.

Now I'm a symbol of what to be and how hard to work. I have heads of major labels say, "I wish you could teach our artists how to do it." At one point I was the punching bag of what not to be, and now I'm the model of what to be.

The man who reacts to the universe with a cry of impotent anguish is acceptable as an artist only if he can persuade us that he has sanely considered the other possible reactions and found them inadequate.