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Great artistic talent in any direction... is hardly inherent to the man. It comes and goes; it is often possessed only for a short phase in his life; it hardly ever colors his character as a whole and has nothing to do with the moral and intellectual stuff of the mind and soul. Many great artists, perhaps most great artists, have been poor fellows indeed, whom to know was to despise.
-Hilaire Belloc
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To the artist is sometimes granted a sudden, transient insight which serves in this matter for experience. A flash, and where previously the brain held a dead fact, the soul grasps a living truth! At moments we are all artists.
-Arnold Bennett
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I could draw Bloom County with my nose and pay my cleaning lady to write it, and I'd bet I wouldn't lose 10 % of my papers over the next twenty years. Such is the nature of comic-strips. Once established, their half-life is usually more than nuclear waste.
-Berke Breathed
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In a certain sense every creative person is a reformer, but this does not mean that he must be in his work a propagandist for good roads, shorter hours, and a low tariff. All these are excellent things, but they need not be the concern of the artist.
-Heywood Broun, "New York World", August 26, 1926
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The artist has one function--to affirm and glorify life.
-W. Edward Brown
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For the serious artist does not satisfy needs
-Anthony Burgess
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Nothing exists until or unless it is observed. An artist is making something exist by observing it. And his hope for other people is that they will also make it exist by observing it. I call it creative observation. Creative viewing.
-William S. Burroughs
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In order to create, we draw from our inner well. This inner well, an artistic reservoir, is ideally like a well stocked fish pond... If we don
-Julia Cameron
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The role of the artist I now understood as that of revealing through the world-surfaces the implicit forms of the soul, and the great agent to assist the artist was the myth.
-Joseph Campbell
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In a portrait, I
-Henri Cartier-Bresson
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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.
-Marc Chagall
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An artist cannot fail; it is a success to be one.
-Charles Horton Cooley
Life and the Student
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I would awake at sunrise, and without washing or dressing sit down before the easel which stood right beside my bed. Thus the first image I saw on awakening was the painting I had begun, as it was the last I saw in the evening when I retired . . . I spent the whole day seated before my easel, my eyes staring fixedly, trying to 'see', like a medium (very much so indeed), the images that would spring up in my imagination. Often I saw these images exactly situated in the painting. Then, at the point commanded by them, I would paint, paint with the hot taste in my mouth that panting hunting dogs must have at the moment when they fasten their teeth into the game killed that very instant by a well-aimed shot. At times I would wait whole hours without any such images occuring. Then, not painting, I would remain in suspense, holding up one paw, from which the brush hung motionless, ready to pounce again upon the oneiric landscape of my canvas the moment the next explosion of my brain brought a new victim of my imagination bleeding to the ground.
-Salvador Dali
My Secret Life
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Taste! It doesn't exist. An artist makes beautiful things without being aware of it.
-Edgar Degas
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The artist, a traveller on this earth, leaves behind imperishable traces of his being.
-Francois Delsarte
Delsarte System of Oratory
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The artist simply reveals, he doesn't explain. Freud tried to figure this out because he felt it very important to understand what makes a creative person tick. And he said that he had failed. In other words, I don't think that the artist is a scientist; he's almost the antithesis of the scientist. He cannot explain, he can only state. He makes a poetic statement, and the psychiatrist figures out why that is a universal truth. The psychiatrist tells people why they behave the way they do; the artist tells how they behave.
-William Eastlake
interview, 1978
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The defining function of the artist is to cherish consciousness.
-Max Eastman
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Genial manners are good, and power of accommodation to any circumstance, but the high prize of life, the crowning fortune of a man is to be born with a bias to some pursuit, which finds him in employment and happiness, -- whether it be to make baskets, or broadswords, or canals, or statutes, or songs. I doubt not this was the meaning of Socrates, when he pronounced artists the only truly wise, as being actually, not apparently so.
http://rwe.org/comm/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=173&Itemid=210
-Ralph Waldo Emerson
Conduct of Life - Considerations by the Way, 1860
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In my prints I try to show that we live in a beautiful and orderly world and not in a chaos without norms, as we sometimes seem to. My subjects are also often playful. I cannot help mocking all our unwavering certainties. It is, for example, great fun deliberately to confuse two and three dimensions, the plane and space, or to poke fun at gravity. Are you sure that a floor cannot also be a ceiling? Are you absolutely certain that you go up when you walk up a staircase? Can you be definite that it is impossible to eat your cake and have it?
Variant translation: I can't keep from fooling around with our irrefutable certainties. It is, for example, a pleasure knowingly to mix up two and three dimensionalities, flat and spatial, and to make fun of gravity.
-M. C. (Maurits Cornelis) Escher
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What is an artist? A provincial who finds himself somewhere between a physical reality and a metaphysical one. It's this in-between...this frontier country between the tangible world and the intangible one -- which is really the realm of the artist.
-Federico Fellini
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Great artists are people who find the way to be themselves in their art. Any sort of pretension induces mediocrity in art and life alike.
-Margot Fonteyn
Margot Fonteyn: Autobiography, 1976
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In the artist's recreation of the world we are enabled to see the world.
-John W. Gardner
The Art of Fiction: Notes on Craft for Young Writers
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The flat sound of my wooden clogs on the cobblestones, deep, hollow and powerful, is the note I seek in my painting.
-Paul Gauguin
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But I owe something to Vincent, and that is, in the consciousness of having been useful to him, the confirmation of my own original ideas about painting. And also, at difficult moments, the remembrance that one finds others unhappier than oneself.
-Paul Gauguin
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Sooner or later people will learn to recognize your worth
-Paul Gauguin
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Books about Artist, The
