Quotes on Artist

The main thing is to be moved, to love, to hope, to tremble, to live. Be a man before being an artist!

Those people who recognise that imagination is reality's master, we call sages, and those who act upon it, we call artists.

The public history of modern art is the story of conventional people not knowing what they are dealing with.

The artist has a special task and duty... reminding people of their humanity and the promise of their creativity.

This image of wanting to be an artist - that I would in some way become an artist -was very strong. I knew for a long, long time that that's what I would be. But nothing I ever did seemed to bring me any nearer to the condition of being an artist. And I didn't know how to do it.

To my mind, it is the duty of the younger Negro artist, if he accepts any duties at all from outsiders, to change through the force of his art that old whispering 'I want to be white,' hidden in the aspirations of his people, to 'Why should I want to be white? I am a Negro - and beautiful!'

All art is a kind of confession, more or less oblique. All artists, if they are to survive, are forced, at last, to tell the whole story, to vomit the anguish up.

The great artists of the world are never Puritans, and seldom even ordinarily respectable.

Didn't you know I'm going to be the greatest, most entertaining author and artist in the world? Well, don't feel badly, I didn't either!

The poet ranks far below the painter in the representation of visible things, and far below the musician in that of invisible things.

Creativity is allowing yourself to make mistakes. Art is knowing which ones to keep.

I never paint dreams or nightmares. I paint my own reality.

Any magazine-cover hack can splash paint around wildly and call it a nightmare, or a witches sabbath or a portrait of the devil; but only a great painter can make such a thing really scare or ring true. That's because only a real artist knows the anatomy of the terrible, or the physiology of fear.

Our works in stone, in paint, in print, are spared, some of them, for a few decades or a millennium or two, but everything must finally fall in war, or wear away into the ultimate and universal ash - the triumphs, the frauds, the treasures and the fakes. A fact of life: we're going to die. "Be of good heart," cry the dead artists out of the living past. "Our songs will all be silenced, but what of it? Go on singing." Maybe a man's name doesn't matter all that much.

I could paint for a hundred years, a thousand years without stopping and I would still feel as though I knew nothing.

I would like to paint the way a bird sings.

The artist must bow to the monster of his own imagination.

The secret to so many artists living so long is that every painting is a new adventure. So, you see, they're always looking ahead to something new and exciting. The secret is not to look back.

As the centuries unfold, millions of artists will live on the moon and paint the moon and Mars as we go out into the universe.

I have seen, and heard, much of Cockney impudence before now; but never expected to hear a coxcomb ask two hundred guineas for flinging a pot of paint in the public's face.

I know now that most people are so closely concerned with themselves that they are not aware of their own individuality, I can see myself, and it has helped me to say what I want to say in paint.