Artist Quotes - Page 258

There are a lot of artists who haven't lost anything to domesticity. In my case, it probably did happen.

Look, people are allowed their own opinions and they don't always coincide with yours. As an artist you just have to keep plugging on.

Nature can afford to be prodigal in everything, the artist must be frugal down to the last detail. Nature is garrulous to the point of confusion, let the artist be truly taciturn.

When we choose a man to beautify our towns, we do not automatically call on the major artists of the world. ... We now lavishly praise Frank Lloyd Wright, but we never made any community use of him, though he longed for the chance.

All men are creative but few are artists.

Let me formulate the artistic disposition as follows: it is reacting with one's ideal to the flaw in oneself and in the world, and somehow making that reaction formation solid enough in the medium so that it indeed becomes an improved bit of real world for others.

As an artist, you do understand you're never going to please everybody.

I must be more sensible and realize that at my age, illusions are hardly permitted and they will always destroy me.

Doubtless there are things in nature which have not yet been seen. If an artist discovers them, he opens the way for his successors.

It is impossible for emotion not to come on us in thinking of that time now flowed away.

I wanted to meet other artists. I suppose I simply felt that I was taking pot shots at clay pipes. Pop! Down goes Gertrude, down goes Jean Cocteau, down goes André Gide.

There is a line from the Marina Tsvetaeva poem I'm so fond of: "In this most Christian of worlds/ All poets are Jews." What she means is that writers and artists are outside the normal flow of daily life, the normal flow of society in general.

Not everything we do as artists has deep intent. If we push barriers, that's great, but sometimes we just do our work. Whether we make some kind of statement, consciously or unconsciously, we shouldn't take the innocence away from what we do.

Talking to god and coming back because that's what we have to do. That's your responsibility as a director, as an artist, as a performer. Your responsibility is back again to your people.

I'm an artist. I'm interested in how art gets made.

As an artist, I used to think that my responsibility was to do good work. But I had to learn from the 70s on that being a public figure presents another aspect of responsibility.

I believe myself to be an artist. That was my calling, to do my work, and what's most important to me is to do the best work I possibly can. And that is what means the most, that is what will endure.

Trust is everything between two artists, or between subject and artist. You have to have trust or nothing good will come out of it.

Besides me wanting to be an artist, I wanted to be a movie star.

What a model of an artist was for me was an artist who worked. Picasso was the ultimate model, because the work ethic he had.

I always wanted to be an artist, writer and poet since I was seven, and one has to live long enough to evolve as an artist and do one's finest work.

I don't have an image of myself, when I'm walking down the street, like I'm a rock star or something. I'm a human being, I'm a friend, I'm a mom, I'm a writer, and I'm an artist. I do play electric guitar and all of that but in the end I'm just a person. I really don't live like a rock star, economically or socially. I still live a pretty simple life beside the traveling aspect of it.

That's what artists do, that's what poets do - we all do it. We start with something, and sometimes we destroy everything that we've made in order to get to the core place where we started from.

Europe isn't something connected by the Euro. Every little dimension of Europe is so hugely different, and I think America is different in its states as well, so I never really think of things in big blocks, in terms of other artists.

I don't want names, but you have to have bumped into some pretty nasty artists with pretty big chips on their shoulders. I'd like an anecdote about the most obnoxious personality you had the misfortune of working with, albeit as anonymously as you feel comfortable divulging.