Artist Quotes - Page 282

The function of the artist is to make people like life better than they have before.

Artists are useful to society because they are so sensitive. They are supersensitive. They keel over like canaries in coal mines filled with poison gas, long before more robust types realize that any danger is there.

I want you to adore the Universe, to be easily delighted, but to be prompt as well with impatience with those artists who offend your own deep notions of what the Universe is or should be. ‘This above all ...’

Much of the blame is the malarkey that artists have created to glorify war, which as we all know, is nonsense, and a good deal worse than that — romantic pictures of battle, and of the dead and men in uniform and all that. And I did not want to have that story told again.

I'm an old guy, and I was protesting during the Vietnam War. We killed fifty Asians for every loyal American. Every artist worth a damn in this country was terribly opposed to that war, finally, when it became evident what a fiasco and meaningless butchery it was.

I think the most important thing for me is a challenge. I'm not happy, creatively, unless I'm faced with a challenge. So, overcoming those challenges and really discovering characters that aren't like me helps me grow, as a person and as an artist.

I think music should be free. I think all communication should be free. I think people should respect artists, and there should be a certain respect for artists who give their music away for free. If your music winds up on Napster and you approve of it, then the person downloading your music should at least go to your concert, should at least purchase your songs.

Just black executives have a bias against older artists. We don't respect our elders. That's not because of white people. That's because of black leadership. We just have that problem, and it's something that I am going to spend the rest of my life trying to conquer.

I think I'm inspired mostly by other artists that aren't actors, like writers or singers or artists, for being so brave.

Well, you know, people don't know me as a country artist and I am new to the genre. But that's how I grew up singing.

I am either blessed or cursed with having little barrier between feeling emotions and displaying them for all to see. My heart is on my sleeve. It's not comfortable but... I am an artist so it's useful and my friends are used to me getting teary at any moment.

People sometimes get a little extra criticism when they try something that they don’t normally do, but I think that’s just a natural thing for artists. It’s like, "Okay, I did that, and now I want to try this."

I'd hate to be a writer forever and never perform, and I'd hate to perform and not write. I get sad if time has passed and I haven't written or made anything. I'm an artist.

I'm inspired by everything that I encounter, from the environment to people to other songs, movies and artists.

So it's like the underground world no longer exists economically cause they're not giving money back to their supporting artists.

I'm one of those artists that people take my music without my consent. People love to snatch my music and do things on their own. You got people that put me on beats I never rapped on. I just feel that it's a bad thing.

I feel like everyone directs their own career according to their taste, what they migrate to emotionally and what kind of artists they want to work with.

We had the city trying to demolish two of our exhibition spaces, which was at first pretty disturbing. But following the freak-out is the realization that an attachment to any kind of form is pointless. Forgive me if I seem like a complete nihilist, but if the demolition trucks show up and the buildings come down, then that just presents a new setting in which an artist can work. The real challenge is trying to conceal my delight in the process.

If you're going to be an artist, you need to be an original.

Making a video is one of the most exciting things for artists and fans. It's like a payoff.

My dream artists to collaborate with are probably Cee Lo Green and Imogen Heap. They're completely out of my genre but they're both musical geniuses.

In college, I faced an interesting problem. I wanted to play music all the time and yet I wasn't ready for anyone to hear it. To remedy this, I took to retreating to stairwells as a safe place to sing and write music. It was there that I wrote most of my songs in college and really grew into an artist.

It's a really cool time for artists who want to strive for a little more depth in what they want to say to come forward. We live in a very fast world right now. We've got all this media and music which is so accessible to us, it's here one minute gone the next.

I am a lifelong career artist, which itself is a bit of a miracle. It's really challenging to be a career artist. I would say that the argument for grant funding is not only did my movie do some social good - hopefully it opened people's eyes - but you created a working artist. I'm hiring cinematographers, I'm hiring production designers, I'm hiring producers.

The big labels have less of a stranglehold on artists and how they record and where they go.