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Artist Quotes

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Artist Quotes

“Cultures that may seem as durable as stone can break like glass, leaving all the things that held them together unattended. I believe that the craftsman, the artist, the cook, and the silversmith are peacemakers. They instill grace; they lull the world to calm.”

WorldBelieveMaySeemsTogetherArtistCultureI BelieveBreakGraceStonesLeavingCalmGlassesCooksInstillPeacemakerCraftsmanLulls
Book:House of Stone: A Memoir of Home, Family, and a Lost Middle East
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“To burn always with this hard, gemlike flame, to maintain this ecstasy, is success in life. ... While all melts under our feet, we may well grasp at any exquisite passion, or any contribution to knowledge that seems by a lifted horizon to set the spirit free for a moment, or any stirring of the senses, strange dyes, strange colours, and curious odours, or work of the artist's hands, or the face of one's friend.”

WellsMayHardMomentsHandsSeemsFacesSpiritArtistPassionFeetStrangeSensesCuriousFlamesContributionColourHorizonEcstasySuccess In LifeExquisiteStirring
Book:The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry
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“For now, I'm supposing that all movements are equal, which they're not, except in this respect: that none of them gives a damn about artists beyond their immediate utility. Good movements will use a writer just as ruthlessly as bad ones; since they all fancy they have better things to do than worry about one man's artistic survival.”

MenGivingUseArtistWorryMovementEqualSurvivalArtisticDamnThings To DoFancyOne ManUtilitySupposingSupposing ThatBetter Things To Do
Book:The good word and other words
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“Every artist knows that there is no such thing as "freedom" in art. The first thing an artist does when he begins a new work is to lay down the barriers and limitations; he decides upon a certain composition, a certain key, a certain relation of creatures or objects to each other. He is never free, and the more splendid his imagination, the more intense his feeling, the farther he goes from general truth and general emotion.”

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Book:Willa Cather on Writing: Critical Studies on Writing as an Art
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“In the days before machinery men and women who wanted to amuse themselves were compelled, in their humble way, to be artists. Now they sit still and permit professionals to entertain them by the aid of machinery. It is difficult to believe that general artistic culture can flourish in this atmosphere of passivity.”

MenWayBelieveStillsWantedArtistCultureDifficultMen And WomenHumbleAidsArtisticAtmospherePermitCompelledMachineryPassivity
Book:Complete Essays: 1930-1935
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“Americans ... do not naturally apply the term "bourgeois" to themselves, or to anyone else for that matter. They do like to call themselves middle class, but that does not carry with it any determinate spiritual content. ... The term "middle class" does not have any of the many opposites that bourgeois has, such as aristocrat, saint, hero, or artist - all good.”

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Author:Allan Bloom
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“That's the difference between the serious artist and the craftsman--the craftsman can take material and because of his abilities do a professional job of it. The serious artist, like Proust, is like an object caught by a wave and swept to shore. He's obsessed by his material; it's like a venom working in his blood and the art is the antidote.”

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Book:Truman Capote: Conversations
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“No matter how humble your work may seem, do it in the spirit of an artist, of a master. In this way you lift it out of commonness and rob it of what would otherwise be drudgery.”

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Book:He Can Who Thinks He Can, and Other Papers on Success in Life: From the Renowned Author of Inspirational Works like How to Get what You Want, Prosperity and How to Get It, The Miracles of Right Thought, Self-Investment and Masterful Personality
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“The man who tells the tale if he has a tale worth telling will know exactly what he is about and this business of the artist as a sort of starry-eyed inspired creature, dancing along, with his feet two or three feet above the surface of the earth, not really knowing what sort of prints he's leaving behind him, is nothing like the truth.”

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Book:Lord of the Flies
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“Art is craft: all art is always and essentially a work of craft: but in the true work of art, before the craft and after it, is some essential durable core of being, which is what the craft works on, and shows, and sets free. The statue in the stone. How does the artist find that, see it, before it's visible? That is a real question.”

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Book:The Wave in the Mind: Talks and Essays on the Writer, the Reader, and the Imagination
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“No artist's masterpiece can match a mother's creation of a successful child, one who has been freed to explore and to grow. ... Success is measured not only by who we are, but by what gifts we give. As the old chief said, "The gift is not complete until it is given again." Ah, the mother whose gift to the world is a person !”

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Book:Give Me Liberty: Freeing Ourselves in the Twenty-First Century
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“Our father the novelist; my husband the poet. He belongs to the ages - just don't catch him at breakfast. Artists, celebrated for their humanity, they turn out to be scarcely human at all.”

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Book:Alan Bennett Plays 2: Kafka's Dick; Insurance Man; Old Country; Englishman Abroad; Question of Attribution
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“Good art means the ability of any one man to pin down in some permanent and intelligible medium a sort of idea of what he sees in Nature that nobody else sees. In other words, to make the other fellow grasp, through skilled selective care in interpretative reproduction or symbolism, some inkling of what only the artist himself could possibly see in the actual objective scene itself.”

MenMeanArtIdeasCareArtistAbilitySceneFellowsObjectivesMediumsPermanentOne ManPinsSymbolismReproductionGood ArtSelective
Author:H. P. Lovecraft
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“The poetical tendency of the present and of the preceding century has been divided in a manner singularly curious. One loud and conspicuous faction of bards, giving way to the corrupt influences of a decaying general culture, seems to have abandoned all the properties of versification and reason in its mad scramble after sensational novelty; whilst the other and quieter school constituting a more logical evolution from the poesy of the Georgian period, demands an accuracy of rhyme and metre unknown even to the polished artists of the age of Pope.”

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Author:H. P. Lovecraft
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“It is so important for me to keep authentic Cuban sounds alive. All of these great artists have changed the landscape of Latin music and it's an honor to have them on this album ["90 Millas," released in September of 2007]. I believe this album will expose a new generation to the richness of Cuban music.”

BelieveImportantArtistI BelieveSoundAliveGenerationsChangedHonorAlbumsLandscapeLatinSeptemberGreat ArtRichnessGreat ArtistNew GenerationCubanLatin MusicCuban Music
Author:Gloria Estefan
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“A total work of art is only possible in the context of the whole of society. Everyone will be a necessary co-creator of a social architecture, and, so long as anyone cannot participate, the ideal form of democracy has not been reached. Whether people are artists, assemblers of machines or nurses, it is a matter of participating in the whole.”

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Author:Joseph Beuys
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“Back in the early days like for the Temptations, Supremes and Four Tops, artist development was alive in record companies. Every artist had a moment to develop the record visually. When the web took over and camera phones, it stripped the artists of the power to figure it out. So there's a need to bridge that gap and that's my job.”

NeedsMomentsJobsArtistCompanyRecordsFourAliveFiguresDevelopmentCamerasPhonesSupremeTemptationBridgesGapsRecord Companies
Author:Laurieann Gibson
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“I shall not find a painting more beautiful because the artist has painted a hawthorn in the foreground, though I know of nothing more beautiful than the hawthorn, for I wish to remain sincere and because I know that the beauty of a painting does not depend on the things represented in it. I shall not collect images of hawthorn. I do not venerate hawthorn, I go to see and smell it.”

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Author:Marcel Proust
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“I said to Mr. Pavarotti once ... a marvelous man and a great artist ... I said to him ... "Maestro, I'm having trouble closing out a note so that it's almost as thin as a butter knife ... finish it out quietly like that." I said, "I have trouble doing that. What do you think I should do?" He said, "Justa close up your mouth." That's all he said, and I fell on the floor. I thought he was gonna give me a dissertation.”

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Author:Frank Sinatra
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