Quotes on Artist

It is often during the worst of times that we see the best of humanity–awakening within the most ordinary of us that which is most sublime. I do not believe that it is circumstance that produces such greatness any more than it is the canvas that makes the artist. Adversity merely presents the surface on which we render our souls’ most exacting likeness. It is in the darkest skies that stars are best seen.

The experience of being in between-between the time we leave home and arrive at our destination; between the time we leave adolescence and arrive at adulthood; between the time we leave doubt and arrive at faith. It is like the time when a trapeze artist lets go the bars and hangs in midair, ready to catch another support: it is a time of danger, of expectation, of uncertainty, of excitement, or extraordinary aliveness.

If you want to be an entertainer, then go be an entertainer and give people what they want. If you want to be an artist, then you have to be true to yourself, and you have to be prepared to confront expectations - and you have to be prepared to disappoint your fans, too.

Look, people are allowed their own opinions and they don't always coincide with yours. As an artist you just have to keep plugging on.

To me, eyewear goes way beyond being a prescription. It's like makeup. It's the most incredible accessory. The shape of a frame or the color of lenses can change your whole appearance.

He who would do good to another must do it in Minute Particulars: general Good is the plea of the scoundrel, hypocrite, and flatterer, for Art and Science cannot exist but in minutely organized Particulars.

The artist in his calling of interpreter creates because he must. He is so much of a voice that, for him, silence is like death

We don't really want to think that the artist is only very skilled, that he has merely devoted his life to perfecting a certain set of intelligible skills.

People aren't going to support an artist just because they have an audio file. They have to feel a real connection.

She died with a knife in her hand in her kitchen, where she had cooked for fifty years, and the death was solemnly listed in the newspaper as that of an artist.

It is only after years of preparation that the young artist should touch color - not color used descriptively, that is, but as a means of personal expression.

When I was 17, I worked in a mentoring program in Harlem designed to improve the community. That's when I first gained an appreciation of the Harlem Renaissance, a time when African-Americans rose to prominence in American culture. For the first time, they were taken seriously as artists, musicians, writers, athletes, and as political thinkers.

It became like a symbolic thing, to be “an artist.” After Duchamp, I realized that being an artist is more about a lifestyle and attitude than producing some product.

All great scientists have, in a certain sense, been great artists; the man with no imagination may collect facts, but he cannot make great discoveries.

Every time you work, you have to do it all over again, to rid yourself of this dross. I suppose for a person who is not an artist or not attempting art, it is not dross, because it is the common exchange of everyday life.

I work with structure, but I go outside the box and give it my own spin. I adore the challenge of creating truly modern clothes - where a woman's personality and sense of style are realized.

This making studies and then taking them home to use them is only half right. You get composition, but you lose freshness; you miss the subtle and, to the artist, the finer characteristics of the scene itself.

Artists are the antennae of the race, but the bullet-headed many will never learn to trust the great artists.

Art is a lie that makes us realize truth.

Guilt is cancer. Guilt will confine you, torture you, destroy you as an artist. It's a black wall. It's a thief.

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