Artist Quotes - Page 218

My time in Weimar Berlin was the most elegant in my life. I would have parties for a hundred people - writers, scientists, artists.

I have so much music that I do. Just like how a visual artist is always sketching something but they might not share it, I'm always writing songs or coming up with melodic lines on piano or guitar. It's therapy. It's always happening.

What an artist worries about as he plans his pictures, makes his sketches, or wonders whether he has completed his canvas, is something much more difficult to put into words. Perhaps he would say he worries about whether he has got it 'right'.

There have been, in recent years, many Asian American pioneers in the public eye who've defied the condescendingly complimentary 'model minority' stereotype: actors like Lucy Liu, artists like Maya Lin, moguls like Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh. They are known, often admired.

If the studios paid the artists, how would they ever be able to afford the executives?

Practically all writers and artists are aware of their destiny and see themselves as actors in a fateful drama. With me, nothing is momentous: obscure youth, glorious old age, fateful coincidences - nothing really matters. I have written a number of good sentences. I have kept free of delusions. I know I am going to die soon.

If you can't fail then how can you possible develop as a communicator or as a creator of anything? We are locked into a deeply unhealthy notion that somehow you've got to succeed all the time. An appalling notion. Any painter or writer will tell you that that is no way to proceed. One of the things that will kill off a decent actor, especially a young actor early on and they will never recover from it, is too much success. It's disastrous. You stop being criticized, therefore you stop challenging yourself. You then can't afford to fail because there's too far to fall.

I didn't think of being an artist until after I went away to boarding school. There were other things to be interested in. And it seemed like a nightmare.

... artists were intended to be an ornament to society. As a society in themselves they are unthinkable.

I think that people have been claiming hip-hop as being dead since the moment it started. I think there are people - and I can be included in that category sometimes - that get frustrated feeling like maybe the industry has handcuffed itself, or trained its artists to do or think about music in a way that classically hasn't led to the greatest records in hip-hop.

We all wish we were better. I wish I were a better artist, wish I were a kinder person, wish I were all kinds of things. But we're stuck with ourselves. I have good friends. And that in itself convinces me that I deserve to live.

My one failing as an artist is that I depend on reference material to perhaps a greater extent than I should. Delacroix said that if you can draw a man falling out of a window and have the drawing finished before he hits the ground then you're a real artist. I wasn't that kind of artist.

I love being convincing. I love when a gesture is convincing and I love doing research for a picture. If you're telling a story you need a background. Just like a novelist needs background information to make a story interesting, I think an artist needs it for a picture too.

The fact that few painter-fine-artists used photography in their work made it appealing.

There's so much going on today. I continually hear, sometimes from artists, that everything's done. It's been done. I fail to see that.

There is no trajectory so pathetic as that of an artist in decline.

Death is pitch-dark, but colors are light. To be a painter, one must work with rays of light.

The artist should always be the student.

[Miley Cyrus] got a fantastic voice. I do think she's a fantastic artist and does great songs. I wish her all the best.

I kind of like the way that I came up as an artist. I like experimenting.

... an artist should paint from the heart, and not always what people expect. Predictability often leads to the dullest work, in my opinion, and we have been bored stiff long enough I think.

As an artist, you have to maintain focus and eliminate the distraction of second-guessing yourself based on the opinions of others.

I think that we all have to have that rite of passage of dating the tortured artist who seems cooler than we think we are; we aspire to be like them, and we're excited that somebody is turning us on to new music or a new lifestyle.

Is it not the artist who - like our dreams - dissolves the pretenses that hide us from ourselves, disclosing both our self-serving fantasies and our unsuspected potentialities?

... at no point have I yet found artistic truth and theological truth at variance.