There’s this misconception that artists should create their own mythologies, through how they live. Not true. They should create their own mythologies through their work. In whatever styles, textures and approaches they choose to use.

Someone asked me a while back, ‘Why do artists always write about love?’ And I was like, ‘Love is the coolest thing that’s ever happened in the world.’

The mind loves the unknown. It loves images whose meaning is unknown, since the meaning of the mind itself is unknown.

Good artists copy; great artists steal.

When critics disagree the artist is in accord with himself.

There’s definitely some sort of dissent brewing between labels, publishing companies and artists. A lot of it has to do with older licensing schemes.

I hope to depart in no other way than looking back with love and wistfulness and thinking, oh paintings that I would have made..

…when you look at a photo or realistic drawing of a face, you see it as the face of another. But when you enter the world of the cartoon, you see yourself.

As much as people are griping about the Internet taking sales away from artists, it’s been a huge promotional tool for me.

Magic is always there. Sometimes it just takes an artist to find it and show the rest of us where to look.

As an artist I have always tried to be faithful to my vision of life, and I have frequently been in conflict with those who wanted me to paint not what I saw but what...

I feel as though whenever I create something, my Mr. Hyde wakes up in the middle of the night and starts thrashing it. I sometimes love it the next morning, but other times it is...

He was the most astonishing contradiction of components I’d ever encountered. Shy yet fiercely communicative when putting an idea into your head. Vocally astringent regarding his own abilities but not to the point that he...

Artists are those who can evade the verbose.

An artist’s responsibility is simple: to say through his art what can’t be said any other way.

People who have a creative side and do not live it out are most disagreeable clients. They make a mountain out of a molehill, fuss about unnecessary things, are too passionately in love with somebody...

Before, I could only guess of who I was. Now, thanks to my art, I know who I am

You don’t hear no artists from Compton showing vulnerability.

I think that cars today are almost the exact equivalent of the great Gothic cathedrals; I mean the supreme creation of an era, conceived with passion by unknown artists, and consumed in image if not...

Country artists, I met a lot of them when I was five, six years old. I had an uncle who was a country and western singer and I met Lefty Frizzell when I was five...

Great people never sleep because their dreams keep them awake and striving.

It seems obvious, looking back, that the artists of Weimar Germany and Leninist Russia lived in a much more attenuated landscape of media than ours, and their reward was that they could still believe, in...

Most artists are notoriously insecure, and I fall into that category.

Divinity is accident of nature, magic is the work of an art.

There are a lot of artists that I love, and I think they’re really talented, and they’re good dancers as well. I’ve always wished that I could combine that.

In the case of Michel Angelo we have an artist who with brush and chisel portrayed literally thousands of human forms; but with this peculiarity, that while scores and scores of his male figures are...

… I find myself most drawn to: art that has arisen from a deeply personal conversation between the artist and the work at hand. It is art that walks perilously close to the Edge, that...

Writing is the only art form where a good number of the artists make a slice of their living criticizing one another in print, in public.

The artist must manage to make posterity believe that he never existed.

An artist’s work is one long conversation with life.

The individual, man as a man, man as a brain, if you like, interests me more than what he makes, because I’ve noticed that most artists only repeat themselves.

Too Clear, too clean. The problem was precision, perfection; the problem was “digitization” which sucked the life out of everything that got smeared through its microscopic mesh. Film, photography, music: dead. “An aesthetic holocaust!

Back then: to be regarded as well-known, one had to be great. Today: to be regarded as great, one has to be well-known.

I’ve decided the act that cannot wait / is the important will to create / But, ah, if my belly is ignored / the pantry door I shall implore / But I’ve been known to...

I’ve been told my old city possesses a ‘thriving arts scene,’ whatever that is; personally, I think artists should lie low and stick to their work, not line-dance through the parks.

Women have sat indoors all these millions of years, so that by this time the very walls are permeated by their creative force, which has, indeed, so overcharged the capacity of bricks and mortar that...

People assume that all artists make for terrible business people, but I’m in complete charge of my own career.

The last thing we discover in composing a work is what to put down first.

A great magician is as divine as God and his stage is as majestic as the paradise.

…it’s just another one of those things I don’t understand: everyone impresses upon you how unique you are, encouraging you to cultivate your individuality while at the same time trying to squish you and everyone...

I suppose that was an example of close attention to detail that is common to writers and artists. It is imperative, whether consciously or not, that one observe the vast as well as the infinitesimal...

When dealing with writers it breaks down like this: a regular writer is your average everyday megalomaniac. Like every artist, there’s a part of them that believes–nay, knows–the world turns for them. Most are harmless....

There aren’t a lot of female story artists, and it’s baffling to me. There are a lot of kids in school that are female and I wonder, ‘Where did they all go?’ People have brought...

Todo niño es un artista que canta, baila, pinta, cuenta historias y construye castillos. Los grandes artistas son personas extrañas que han logrado preservar en el fondo de su alma esa candidez sagrada de la...

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.

Usually, I cut songs by other people that are artists that I already love.

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...

Good artists exist simply in what they make, and consequently are perfectly uninteresting in what they are.

The sooner you finish procrastinating, the sooner you can get back to your art.

How rich art is; if one can only remember what one has seen, one is never without food for thought or truly lonely, never alone.