An artist is a dreamer consenting to dream of the actual world.
I think it’s important as an artist to never forget where you’re from.
The greatest compliment I ever got was when people called me an artist, and I understand that solo aspect of being an artist, when you’re in there by yourself, trying to do something great, and people who don’t even know you can come up and just dump on you.
As an artist, you’re pretty sheltered backstage. You often don’t know what’s going on out there.
An artist needs to live to create, and to live means to suffer.
To write a good song, an artist has to drawn from reality. There has to be some spark from realism that communicates a real feeling to someone else. You have to be real. Or you have to be a really good storyteller.
My desire to be an artist really came out of being broke and unemployed and incapable of holding a job down. That’s what it was driven by for sure.
When I see a new artist I give myself a lot of time to reflect and decide whether it’s art or not.
Everything I do, whether it’s producing or signing an artist, always starts with the songs. When I’m listening, I’m looking for a balance that you could see in anything. Whether it’s a great painting or a building or a sunset.
My father came to Chennai at the age of 16 from a village in Coimbatore. He was an artist and was clear he wanted to do something, so he came to Chennai and joined an art course for eight years before he came into films.
An artist is always alone – if he is an artist. No, what the artist needs is loneliness.
It is the artist’s business to create sunshine when the sun fails.
I follow politics in a big way, and always have since I was a kid. I’ve got opinions, but they’re opinions on both sides – not just anti-Republican, which is a real popular thing for a rap artist to do. If you dis Republicans, nobody will get mad. I think the two-party system sucks. It’s absolutely ignorant.
I am very conscious of who I am as an artist and as an inspirational person.
The war was a mirror; it reflected man’s every virtue and every vice, and if you looked closely, like an artist at his drawings, it showed up both with unusual clarity.
Inside you there’s an artist you don’t know about. He’s not interested in how things look different in moonlight.
The ability to make somebody feel something: that’s art. However you look at it, whether you’re an author, a painter, a singer, a rapper, a spoken-word artist – art.
I passionately hate the idea of being with it; I think an artist has always to be out of step with his time.
The dignity of the artist lies in his duty of keeping awake the sense of wonder in the world. In this long vigil he often has to vary his methods of stimulation; but in this long vigil he is also himself striving against a continual tendency to sleep.
Whoever wants to know something about me – as an artist which alone is significant – they should look attentively at my pictures and there seek to recognise what I am and what I want.
I’m not a driven businessman, but a driven artist. I never think about money. Beautiful things make money.
I talk about the gods, I am an atheist. But I am an artist too, and therefore a liar. Distrust everything I say. I am telling the truth.
I can draw really well. And I like to paint. I’m a bit of an artist.
I think it would be nice to sell 15 million albums as a solo artist. I’d have to deal with all the repercussions of that, but that wouldn’t be too bad.
To be an artist you have to give up everything, including the desire to be a good artist.
I’ve been a signed artist, but it’s only been a full year-and-a-half. I’m still kind of new to money and this kind of lifestyle, so me being in a messed up predicament wasn’t too long ago.
An artist must never be a prisoner. Prisoner? An artist should never be a prisoner of himself, prisoner of style, prisoner of reputation, prisoner of success, etc.
I have done only two portraits: one of the artist Francesco Clemente and another of Andy Warhol.
Of course, every artist has ‘minor works’ that they do, but I don’t think I have any ‘minor disciplines.’ Each discipline I approach as a major undertaking that I put my whole self into.
I’m going to become the best-remembered artist of my generation by staying away from the party as often as possible. That way, people will remember me, not because I was great, but because I didn’t cause them any later embarrassment.
I fight for the debunking of the artist and an end to individual pictures.
I’m an artist and an engineer, which is, increasingly, a more common kind of hybrid. But I still fall into this weird crack where people don’t seem to understand me.
I feel like my mission is to be honest with myself. My mission is to share my truth – share, not give. I think that’s what an artist is supposed to do: I think they share.
I love all types of music. Jazz, classical, blues, rock, hip-hop. I often write scripts to instrumentals like a hip-hop artist. Music inspires me to write. It’s either music playing or completely silent. Sometimes distant sound fuels you. In New York there’s always a buzzing beneath you.
Half your battle is won when the writing is good, and then you as an artist bring your personality into it.
I did a film called ‘The Escape Artist’ for Francis Coppola. I had the title role.
I suppose for me as an artist it wasn’t always just about expressing my work; I really wanted, more than anything else, to contribute in some way to the culture that I was living in. It just seemed like a challenge to move it a little bit towards the way I thought it might be interesting to go.
I think, basically, if you talk to anybody, you can gauge an idea of what it’s like to feel deceived. You don’t have to have run into a con artist to feel like you’ve been deceived by someone.
A movie star is not an artist, he is an art object.
When making any record, a producer has a list of things you hope an artist brings to the studio. Songs that are strong even without the bells and whistles.
My favorite artist in the world is Michael Jackson, and he revolutionized the music video aspect of music.
I swear I pick up little gems from every artist that I work with. That’s why I’m so appreciative that I’ve been able to be a songwriter first.
I’m not trying to feed off of a concept that another artist had – that’s not what I do.
I set my sights upon becoming the kind of artist who would make a contribution to art history.
The function of the artist is to invent, not to chronicle.
Every human is an artist. And this is the main art that we have: the creation of our story.
The greatest artist has no conception which a single block of white marble does not potentially contain within its mass, but only a hand obedient to the mind can penetrate to this image.
I think that to explore the uncomfortable and the politically incorrect is the job of the artist.
An artist don’t make you bigger than life – being that person that can break artists can make you bigger than life.
The mere drawing and painting world of the pattern designer and the applied artist must become a world that builds again.
I don’t in any way disparage any time I’ve had in the trenches because it really has made me the artist I am today.
Making social comment is an artificial place for an artist to start from. If an artist is touched by some social condition, what the artist creates will reflect that, but you can’t force it.
I have a master plan as an artist. I’ve always said I’m not going to be punching nobody’s clock. I will work as an artist to survive in this world.
You need a big ego to be an artist.
It ought to be illegal for an artist to marry. If the artist must marry let him find someone more interested in art, or his art, or the artist part of him, than in him. After which let them take tea together three times a week.
I am an artisan. I only became an artist when people watch what I do. That is when it becomes art.
I know as a consumer I want a story. I want a defining – I don’t want just an album full of singles. I want to get to know the artist beyond what everyone else can hear on the radio.
The artist in me cries out for design.
I have come to believe that a great teacher is a great artist and that there are as few as there are any other great artists. Teaching might even be the greatest of the arts since the medium is the human mind and spirit.
I know who I am and what I’m doing in my life and what I’ve accomplished and continue to accomplish as a performer, as a writer, as an artist, as a person, as a human being.
To restrict the artist is a crime. It is to murder germinating life.
I wanted to get out of this country and experience different ways of seeing the world. So I went to Europe, but I went as an artist. I was increasing my skill set and exploring storytelling through painting.
Labels are curators of taste, and the best ones know how to monetize what an artist is trying to do.
I respect cats that can rap and everything, but the artist that inspires me is Turf Talk.
I think a businessman can be an artist just as much as a writer or a sculptor, so I’m real proud of what the company has become.
The man who throws a bomb is an artist, because he prefers a great moment to everything.
