I couldn’t decide whether it was better to be the art, or the artist.

… but now men who could work preferred to beg, and the artists forgot that their calling was noble and became imitators instead of creators, charging exorbitant sums for the rubbish they churned out with one eye closed.

So you have to be humble in dealing with the spaces and make sure they are used according to their unique purpose for which there is no alternative…art, if you like, is really a lack of alternatives.”-Jonathan Meese

We are all artists painting our desires on the canvas of life.

The hack is like a politician who consults the polls before he takes a position. He’s a demagogue. He panders.

He showed videotape of himself committing acts of self-violence and informing news crews that he had been assaulted by a marauding mob of irate art historians.

Are artists and writers the only people entitled to lives of their own?

When critics disagree the artist is in accord with himself.

I have no idea how long Quisser was gone from the table. My attention became fully absorbed by the other faces in the club and the deep anxiety they betrayed to me, an anxiety that was not of the natural, existential sort but one that was caused by peculiar concerns of an uncanny nature. What...

All of us had problems, it seemed, whose sources were untraceable, crossing over one another like the trajectories of countless raindrops in a storm, blending to create a fog of delusion and counter-delusion. Powerful forces and connections were undoubtedly at play, yet they seemed to have no faces and no names, and it was anybody’s...

Every production of an artist should be the expression of an adventure of his soul.

It is impossible to see how good work might be accomplished by people who think that our life in this world either signifies nothing or has only a negative significance.If, on the other hand, we believe that we are living souls, God’s dust and God’s breath, acting our parts among other creatures all made of...

A lot of the hip hop artists don’t write music. They write words.

Some artists are normal people who just happen to make things because we can’t figure out how in the hell to communicate with people.

I like dirty boys. Mechanics, construction workers, artists who get paint and clay everywhere. They gotta have rough hands.

Artists are dishonest creatures really. They foist their version of reality upon us while making it all up. Writers, painters, musicians, auteurs—they’re all the same.

As artists, we have to be brave. If we aren’t brave, we aren’t artists.

But if modesty is interpreted not as diffidence or self-effacingness, but as non-overweening, a realistic assessment of the job to be done and one’s ability to do it, then you might say the chief virtue of excellent artists is their modesty…But knowing your limits and going to them isn’t arrogance. It’s greatness of spirit.

Through the years, I have learned there is no harm in charging oneself up with delusions between moments of valid inspiration.

I like messing around, and I like working with artists who I respect.

Artists are people with a genius for finding a new answer, a new connection, or a new way of getting things done.That would be you.

I am not an adventurer by choice but by fate.

Art is the reflection of pure emotion and mind, the nature of sensation. An artist illustrates that.

I think a lot of Indians want Indian artists to be cultural cheerleaders rather than cultural investigators.

I think all artists need to try to improve, or their work gets stale.

An artist should create beautiful things, but should put nothing of his own life into them.

A ‘black’ man who draws a ‘black’ person with big lips is called observant. A ‘white’ man who does the same is called a racist.

He never looks you straight in the eye; or if he does, it is somehow vaguely, indefinitely; he does not pierce you with the hawk’s eye or the falcon’s gaze of a cavalry officer. The reason for that is that he sees, at one and the same time, both your features and those of some...

I was at the Royal Art School. That was a preparatory school specially for art teachers. You see, it was not so much for the development of artists. But we had there terribly stiff training.

They’d lived their lives on tightropes, never knowing where the next paycheck was coming from or if one was coming at all, their personal lives a mishmash of backstage affairs and dressing room brawls endured for the brief heady adrenaline rush brought by the orchestra’s overture and glare of white lights.

Dreamers dream the dream, Artists live it.

Then Martine said: “So yuo will be poor now all your life, Babette?”Poor?” said Babette. She smiled as if to herself. “No, I shall never be poor. I told you that I am a great artist. A great artist, Mesdames, is never poor.We have something, Mesdames, of which other people know nothing.

I think artists who are attracted to working on the Net will adjust their work to the capabilities of a very small screen.

Some people are really drawn to technology and I liken them to artists.

Artists,” he said, “are people who say, ‘I can’t fix my country or my state or my city, or even my marriage. But by golly, I can make this square of canvas, or this eight-and-a-half-by-eleven piece of paper, or this lump of clay, or these twelve bars of music, exactly what they ought to be!

It’s impossible for a creative artist to be either a Puritan or a Fascist, because both are a negation of the creative urge. The only things a creative artist can be opposed to are ugliness and injustice.

Possible reality [is obtained] by slightly bending physical and chemical laws.

I will admit that I wanted to shout for standing on the top of a scaffold in front of a good new wall always goes to my head. It is a sensation something between that of an angel let out of his cage into a new sky and a drunkard turned loose in a royal...

It is the poet and philosopher who provide the community of objectives in which the artist participates. Their chief preoccupation, like the artist, is the expression in concrete form of their notions of reality. Like him, they deal with the verities of time and space, life and death, and the heights of exaltation as well...

Such meeting reveal that which we all darkly suspect about those whose art we have loved: that they are unlikely to be whatever it is we imagine them to be.

For the true artist, there is no trivial thing.

The craving for recognition is every artist’s Achilles heel.

It’s not an artist’s job to change people or save the world.

To be an artist was to have failure as your constant bedfellow.

The priceless gifts (life, love, joy, goodness, family, nature) are freely given by the Creator.

Artists are agents of chaos. It is the artistsjob to encourage entropy, to promote chaos. Idols must be killed, icons crushed, beliefsshattered. It is the artists job to encourage legitimate, unadulterated, raw thought andemotion. Art that does nothing new, that simply fills an established role, is not art.It is a product. A stale, stagnant product...

Like many people who dress in black, the lump of coal was interested in becoming an artist.

The courage to dream, the courage to act.

Essential acts to master for self realisation;Master the act of learning.Master the act of writing.Master the act of reading.

Everything is an art, which must be mastered.