Top 670 Artist Quotes

Everybody is different. Some people like to share more. I just wouldn’t want to spoil someone’s opinion of me by them knowing me as a person instead of an artist.

I don’t consider myself a musician. I’m an artist.

I’m just a manga artist, so I can’t stand being scrutinized.

I am an artist no matter what I do. I live for creativity. I think everyone should. It is the antithesis of being destructive.

To be a true artist you have to play the way you feel – not the way others think you should feel.

The artist produces for the liberation of his soul. It is his nature to create as it is the nature of water to run down the hill.

The job of the artist is always to deepen the mystery.

Paul is a very creative artist but I’m more that thorough, meticulous, disciplined nut.

Freedom of speech is, to all Americans, as oxygen is to the human condition. It is a right that has been irreversibly programmed into our hard drive. We are free to speak our minds. An artist’s right to express him or herself as best suits their art, is the artist’s prerogative and it is guaranteed.

I pay attention to how every makeup artist does everything.

Basically, an artist should be a mirror, or a reflection of society or his or her environment. What you see is what you can articulate.

Being beautiful can be a curse, especially if you want to be an artist and create.

I have seen a lot of people, including myself, make a lot of tip money because of ‘Black Water,’ so this is a full circle moment. To collaborate and recreate this iconic song is just an amazing moment as an artist.

I did not want to be the gay artist, and I talked to my manager all the time, like, I don’t want to lead with that. I didn’t want people to look at me like that’s all I am.

Reggaeton is what opened the doors for me, and I’m always grateful for that. I’ll do reggaeton for life, but I want to show that I’m an artist who can do everything.

As an entrepreneur, as an investor, I’m trying to be as educated as I can to where the progression of technological capability is going and what it does to these different categories that, me as an artist and an influencer, I can get involved and bring value.

I think my original ambition was to be an artist.

The artist’s job is to be a witness to his time in history.

Only a bad artist thinks he has a good idea. A good artist does not need anything.

My mom’s an artist in every way. She’s a painter, a photographer. She’s a wanderer – always searching, always seeing. I guess you could say my mom gave me her eyes.

There’s a famous artist, Ron English, in New York, that just, or Andy Warhol for that matter, that did pop art that terrorized society. And that’s, for the last like 10, 15 years, that’s all I wanted to do, is terrorize society and make them look into a mirror and see what the hell we have wrought.

To the real artist in humanity, what are called bad manners are often the most picturesque and significant of all.

It is very good advice to believe only what an artist does, rather than what he says about his work.

Blake Lively is my style icon, and she always has rocking clothes and shoes. She keeps it really simple with hair and makeup, and I try to do the same thing. Onstage, I do a little smokier, a little more contouring, but I still always want to be an approachable and real artist, so I never try to go overboard.

As an artist, you have to work really, really hard because you gotta make something that will allow people to even take the chance to even listen to it, you know?

I spent three years there and encountered great teachers who gave me enough stimulation to last me for the rest of my life – Josef Albers, painter; Buckminster Fuller, inventor; Max Dehn, the mathematician, and many others. Through them, I came to understand the total commitment required if one must be an artist.

I only get involved with roles that I find intriguing, in top quality productions regardless of the medium. I try not to focus on the format itself and concentrate instead, on finding roles that challenge and entertain me as an artist.

My father wanted me to be a dentist like him, or any doctor, really. There was this attitude of, ‘The civil rights movement was not about you being an artist.’

I really enjoy doing remixes, but I don’t want to be known as just a ‘remix artist’ for the rest of my career.

I’ve been around long enough for people to know who I am and what my contributions are. They know me as more than just an artist. I think they know me as a woman as well.

For millions of women and men around the world, the playwright Eve Ensler is a beloved figure. She represents the epitome of the politically engaged artist, someone who uses her creative brilliance to illuminate injustice and give voice to the voiceless.

I think with anything where you delve into the back story of an artist, it kind of explains their work more intimately.

Nature is garrulous to the point of confusion, let the artist be truly taciturn.

I never knew Artist was going to get this big. When I was making it, I put my all into it. But you never know what’s going to happen with something you make.

At art college, I started to do music and then painting and drawing – and that would have been my ideal life, to be an artist and be paid for it, to be able to create stuff. I realized it was difficult, but I don’t know if I had the application for it.

David Fincher is a longtime friend. As a director, my wife had worked with him as a makeup artist when he would do Madonna videos years before, and his child and my oldest child were in preschool together, so we’re kind of dad-friends through that, too.

I have such an eclectic taste in music. Come to a backyard BBQ at my house, and I will run the gamut from Skynyrd to Sinatra to ’90s grunge, rap, R&B, and classic rock. I have issues. If I had to pick one, I love this country artist named Craig Morgan. His music and his songs are so relatable and tell such vivid stories.

I’m a fairly tormented artist, and I’m less willing to indulge myself in self-pity, outside of songwriting.

I barely knew I wanted to be an artist. I liked my art classes and painting was fun, I guess, but I didn’t realize that seeing the country was going to inspire me to further explore that… but that’s what it did.

My mother was a housewife but she was also an artist. My father was an electrical engineer.

As an artist, as an actor, as a writer, you have to use what’s personal to you. You have to be personal about your work; otherwise, it doesn’t ring true.

All children are artists. The problem is how to remain an artist once he grows up.

If I’m the biggest artist in the world, cool, but I want to just be me.

Sometimes it’s really weird being an artist, and I deal with that best by being myself.

Western art is built on the biographical passion of one artist for another.

To be a good artist, you need to be sensitive to the world around you, you need to be curious, you need to listen, you need to be willing to learn from people. A lot of great art is about people being moved by something or seeing something that stops them dead.

That would be something I would stress the most to any artist – is, number one, don’t ever allow, you know, success or whatever you want to call it to determine your worth as an artist or as a person. That’s number one. And number two, do it because you love it.

I was a really lousy artist as a kid. Too abstract expressionist; or I’d draw a big ram’s head, really messy. I’d never win painting contests. I remember losing to a guy who did a perfect Spiderman.

When I’m working on something, if I went to an exhibition of an artist I respect, then I usually come home quite depressed and look at what I’m doing and throw it all away and start again.

She was a performance artist calling herself Lady Gaga, who had a European dance-club sound and pop-star aspirations – elements that historically haven’t mixed.

I was trying to make my name just Artist in the beginning, but it was weird at first, because I wasn’t an R&B singer or nothing. Not an R&B singer. I didn’t do no melodic songs, none of that yet.

To be in any way a positive contribution, that’s all anybody wants to be. It’s all I’ve ever wanted to be. I wanted to be an artist, be a mother. You want to feel that in your life you’ve been of use, in whatever way that comes out.

I’m not religious, but by nature I am spiritual. I’m an artist, and creativity seems to go hand in hand with spirituality. But I have a knee-jerk reaction against organized religions. Actually, I have knee-jerk reactions against anything that’s organized.

On one hand, I think it’s very important to talk about race and talk about gender, because if it’s not talked about, then we won’t progress. What I have a problem with is when it becomes another form of tokenization, of shrinking me into a symbol instead of a multilayered, female Asian artist.

We are going to finish this picture just the way I want it… because you cannot compromise an artist’s vision.

I’m nothing else but an artist, I’m sure, and delighted to be.

The true artist is not proud: he unfortunately sees that art has no limits; he feels darkly how far he is from the goal, and though he may be admired by others, he is sad not to have reached that point to which his better genius only appears as a distant, guiding sun.