Quotes About Artists

There are so many artists these days that are trying to imitate other artists and go for a certain style; there's a lot of bullshit in the music industry. I don't want to deviate from anything else other than the music, cause that's why I listen to my favorite records - not because I like the way the artists dress.

There are people out there who are into traditional country music and for those people you have artists like Brad Paisley and Josh Turner and Alan Jackson. Then you have artists with a progressive style of country music, like myself and Eric Church and Luke Bryan and Miranda Lambert.

I feel like artists that are always quite sad in real life always make really happy music, and artists who are really bouncy and bubbly always make really sad music.

In a way, I envy the freedom artists have. Artists can push themselves beyond their limits, in pursuit of their ideas and their vision, even if they are inhabited by demons that can also play tricks on them.

I prefer artists who are creative more than artists who are technical, I think everybody would agree with that.

To be an artist is a blessing and a privilege. Artists must never betray their true hearts. Artists must look beneath the surface and show that there is more to this world than what meets the eye.

Most inventors and engineers I've met are like me. They're shy and they live in their heads. The very best of them are artists. And artists work best alone.

You know, I didn't write my books for critics and scholars. I wrote them for students and artists. When I hear how much my work has meant to them--well, I can't tell you how happy that makes me. That means that this great stuff of myth, which I have been so privileged to work with, will be kept alive for a whole new generation. That's the function of the artists, you know, to reinterpret the old stories and make them come alive again, in poetry, painting, and now in movies.

We as artists cannot be politicians. We as artists can only be truth-tellers.

Art is a high calling - fears are coincidental. Coincidental, sneaky and disruptive, we might add, disguising themselves variously as laziness, resistance to deadlines, irritation with materials or surroundings, distraction over the achievements of others - indeed as anything that keeps you from giving your work your best shot. What separates artists from ex-artists is that those who challenge their fears, continue; those who don't, quit.

Maybe the way we have learned to look has changed in the last 25 years, and the exotic is much more acceptable. There are many artists now, younger artists, who work out of the exotic

I suppose the good artists, the righteous artists, somehow manage to be exuberant, and the embarrassed artist has this idea that everybody has to stop being so excited, which I find so distasteful.

With the artists that I named - Michael Jackson, Janet Jackson, Madonna, every time they come out with a new album, something's slightly different. In the case of Madonna, she'll come with one joint that'll be left, and then come totally right, but it's always hot. She's just got style. So, at the end, I want my name to be up there with those artists; for people to say, he's one of those iconic figures you can't put in a box.

I'm against government giving money to artists, but I'm not against artists taking money. Just like I don't have a moral problem with people taking healthcare from the government, but I don't think government should give it.

I'm proud that I've been able to work with other artists to make sure that the smallest voices - the voices of our children - have a chance to be heard. Artists can reach, inspire, and motivate young people and leaders in a powerful way.

All artists are anarchists in some way - some more extreme than others, but it's something that I think artists are supposed to do. We're supposed to present a different angle on everything, and I certainly think it is [art] as much as poetry, in my opinion.

We artists are hypersensitive, or we wouldn't be - couldn't be - artists.

A lot of artists are much more concerned about how their work is used and how it's disseminated. That, to artists, is as important as the money, for some people.

I feel like because black Cuban artists don't have the kind of pressure to thematize race in the way that African-American artists do, there's more space for them to do their art without having to discuss it in terms of racial identity.

I think music should be free. I think all communication should be free. I think people should respect artists, and there should be a certain respect for artists who give their music away for free. If your music winds up on Napster and you approve of it, then the person downloading your music should at least go to your concert, should at least purchase your songs.

Since the time of the ancient Greeks a democracy has depended on its philosophers and creative artists. It can only flourish by continuous probing, prodding, and questioning of the social conditions under which man exists and tries to better himself. One of the first moves of a dictatorship is to stifle the artists and thinkers who have the ability to stir up dissent from any prescribed dogma which might enslave them. Because the artist can arouse the curiosity and conscience of his community, he becomes a threat to those who have taken power.

Laborers want their kids to be merchants or business people. Business people want their kids to be professionals. Professionals want their kids to be academics, professors. Academics want their kids to be artists. And artists don't care if their kids are laborers or not. They can be anything.

I would have conversations with European artists. Meaning, people look at my painting and one person would say, "Oh, your painting is just like so-and-so!" Another person would say, "It's just like so-and-so." But at the end, it's a chain of relay like a marathon. There are so many so-and-so's that eventually it becomes mine. My dialogue was completely European, with the '40s, '50s, '60s artists, but on the exterior side I do big painting. It's post-Pollock. It's current. It's a meeting of the time. The Chinese side just comes out.

Norman Rockwell spent his career painting pictures that helped people understand their own feelings...pictures that enriched their own experiences and celebrated their own lives. But the art establishment branded him an 'illustrator', a sentimental one at that. Real artists, they said were doing art for art's sake, not for the sake of the bourgeois public. Real artists were putting swiggles, smears or daubs of paint on the canvas. They were doing 'innovative' and 'creative' work. If they were hideous and grotesque; we know that's what life really is!

For spiritual companions I have had the many artists who have relied on nature to help shape their imagination. And their most elaborate equipment was a deep reverence for the world through which they passed. Photographers share something with these artists. We seek only to see and to describe with our own voices, and, though we are seldom heard as soloists, we cannot photograph the world in any other way.

I didn't have to be a pop singer with a certain look. When I started, there was really a revolution in natural artists with blues and folk artists crossing over; otherwise, I wouldn't have been able to get started.

Many artists stick to making and hire a manager to focus on their business. Artists that build websites and mobile apps can do that, too.

The word mystical is an even worse word than spirituality - that artists take drugs, and then they add some crazy extra thing to what we all know is real. But our job as artists or as human beings is to investigate what we really think is real.

Canadian artists in Canada, if you're not doing something big internationally, they definitely don't give us super big respect right away. You have to really earn it. In my opinion, that's what makes us Canadian artists stronger. By the time we are out on the world stage, we are so prepared.

I think a lot of high-profile artists like to make people think that. Oh, Im trying to choose my next project. This is a job. Sometimes your next job is so you can provide for your family; your kids are 16 and getting ready to go to college.

The moment artists can just do what they love to do then music will go right back to where it used to be. I mean back in the '60s and '70s and '80s, that's what it was.

If you view computer designers as artists, they're really into more of an art form that can be mass-produced, like records, or like prints, than they are into fine arts. They want something where they can express themselves to a large number of people through their medium, and their medium is technology and manufacturing.

Women had to work like slaves in the art world, but a lot of men got to the top through their charm. And it hurt them. To be young and pretty didn't help a woman in the art world, because the social scene, and the buying scene, was in the hands of women - women who had money. They wanted male artists who would come alone and be their charming guests. Rothko could be very charming. It was a court. And the artist buffoons came to the court to entertain, to charm. Now it has changed, now the younger men are in - older women and younger men.

Canada has been a breeding ground for great comedic actors, sketch artists and stand-up comedians. We grew up with a different perspective on the world.

Artists are the traditional interpreters of dreams and nightmares.

If the affairs of the world were put in the hands of the screwball artists, it couldn’t be in a worse state than it is now !

My dream artists to collaborate with are probably Cee Lo Green and Imogen Heap. They're completely out of my genre but they're both musical geniuses.

Well, Jeff Buckley for me is one of the greatest singers I've ever heard. And the reason why is he has an amazing range, amazing emotional power in his voice. And the music he put around it also just had this passion and this soul to it and this spirit to it that very few artists have, and he passed at a very young age.

If the goal is to get the best artists, actors, and filmmakers in the world to create the best movies, Hollywood does a decent job. And I think no one would disagree with me that it also makes a ton of bad movies and employs a bunch of hacks.

Friends, we have now won....I say to Aymaras, Quechuas, Chiquitaos, and Guaranis: for the first time we are going to be presidents. And I want to say to businesses, intellectual professionals, and artists: do not abandon us.

It's tragic that extremists co-opt the notion of God, and that hipsters and artists reject spirituality out of hand. I don't have a fixed idea of God. But I feel that it's us - the messed-up, the half-crazy, the burning, the questing - that need God, a lot more than the goody-two-shoes do.

Hurry ruins saints as well as artists.

These are dangerous days we live in and you, the artists, are our last defense.

But you know, we have more hits than you can possibly think about. One of my personal favorite artists is the wonderful artist named Cher. And although I love much of her late stuff, her early stuff was the stuff that I really, really loved.

Creativity does not belong exclusively to professional artists and geniuses; it is the birthright of every single human being. Creativity is our common heritage. You don’t need to quit your job and move to Paris in order to lay claim to this heritage - all you have to do is clear some space in your life for whimsy, invention, sensory pleasure, and play. Most of all, you have to learn how to follow your curiosity more than your fear.

I assumed from the outset that photography was already art, and that I and other people working in photography were artists. I understand now that this was a minority point of view.

It's high time for the art world to admit that the avant-garde is dead. It was killed by my hero, Andy Warhol, who incorporated into his art all the gaudy commercial imagery of capitalism (like Campbell's soup cans) that most artists had stubbornly scorned.

For artists it's a lot easier to make art in bad times than it is in good times. When you've got no money it's easy to just drink your way through it and make great art. But if you're making lots of money it can be very problematic.