Artist Quotes - Page 305

You will face boredom and frustration your entire career as artists. You will be very frustrated seeking a voice/style that collectors can connect with. Once you accomplish that voice/style people are clamoring for, you will become bored doing it.

Like the eagle, we (artists) must be able to see clearly.

You can't steal an artist's songs and also tell him he can't license that music to a commercial.

Creative artists have great passion.

I have come to see that an artist is not given a form - a style - but his nature merely gives him the ingredients wherewith to shape an equation of life.

An artist is no bigger than the size of his mind.

Certain jobs [films] are for the business really, because they get an audience, they get a global audience. Certain jobs are as an artist. If I can keep moving forward and strike some form of balance between them two, then I'm going to feel content.

Most artists like to think of themselves as rugged individualists, as independent characters.

The only tool we have as artists is selectivity. If you're a painter, you select the color, the lines, how severe they should be. As an actor you develop how angry you should be. You select how angry you should be. You listen to the other actor and then you react. In film, sometimes the other actor isn't even there. You have to play the scene. What I do is I call on my experience on the stage. I play the scene and I hope that I reach a certain level of integrity because that's what I learned on the stage.

I'm a guy who had to perform some way. I had to perform in some way. If not as an actor, I'd perform as an artist. It would have been something that would be outstanding in its own way.

An artist has to be humble, an editor must be officious, and a publisher must be somewhere out in the galaxy enjoying godhood. It was a caste system, pure and simple. And it was accepted that way. Nobody thought of contracts, nobody thought of insisting on better deals.

If you're drawing a Western town, you can duplicate that Western town from instinct alone. Some artists may take it from other illustrations or duplicate what you've drawn, but it will never have that gut reality that's instinctive in the artist.

You know, whenever you're shooting a film there's different obstacles and challenges, whether it be from the makeup artist getting fired that you liked or whatever - the one that did the makeup the way you wanted. There's always stuff that changed, like the DP leaving the set, and there's a new guy in there, and the way he does lighting isn't the same as the last guy.

My role now is as an artist and as a mogul to inspire and give others opportunities.

I want to be remembered as an artist who was really passionate about his work. And as an inspiration. I do what I do to inspire people.

The bottom-line, you just have to. You do it because you want to do it and need to do it. You live life just one time. Why sit around and wait for the phone to ring? Even though I'm in a hit phenomenal show and it happens once every ten years - a show this big and popular - the last thing I want to do as an artist is feel comfortable and bide my time. Now is the time, more than ever, in this artistic explosion to do as much as we can!

There are a few artists that I'm really into. I mean, I'm a big Nick Cave fan. And there's a band from Australia called Big Heavy Stuff that's one of my favorite bands ever.

George Lucas is the reason that we got to make this movie, you know, he was the man that created this whole galaxy, and I am incredibly grateful to him. He's an artist and he's a grown-up. And I take him at his word, and it doesn't mean I agree with everything he says, but I respect, you know, his right to his opinion.

I suspect that money is a far greater distraction for the artist than hunger.

As nearly as possible in the spirit of Matthew Salinger, age one, urging a luncheon companion to accept a cool lima bean, I urge my editor, mentor and (heaven help him) closest friend, William Shawn, genius domus of The New Yorker, lover of the long shot, protector of the unprolific, defender of the hopelessly flamboyant, most unreasonably modest of born great artist-editors to accept this pretty skimpy-looking book.

However contradictory the coroner's report — whether he pronounces Consumption or Loneliness or Suicide to be the cause of death — isn't it plain how the true artist-seer actually dies? I say that the true artist-seer, the heavenly fool who can and does produce beauty, is mainly dazzled to death by his own scruples, the blinding shapes and colors of his own sacred human conscience.

Cinema for me is an area of philosophy and artistic statement.

I don't think paintings of nude women represent all women, but at the same time, I can't fault artists for putting out what inspires and challenges them. But for me, I'm not sure it's necessary for our bodies to define us, especially now when there are so many examples of femininity, of womanhood.

Through all the world there goes one long cry from the heart of the artist: Give me a chance to do my best.

I don't think of myself as a brand, simply a designer. A fashion designer who is married to an artist and together we have woven a body of worth through the years - with hopefully a recognizable signature. I look forward to one day becoming a brand... But that takes a business structure with brilliant business people to run it. I do look forward to that chapter in our life.