ARTIST QUOTES II
quotations about artists
An artist is a dreamer consenting to dream of the actual world.
GEORGE SANTAYANA
The Life of Reason
The artist's mind and eye, as the poet's, were subjected to rigorous training. Henceforth, the artist's hands were to create the objects projected from his mind, after its process of selection and alchemy.
ANNA BALAKIAN
Surrealism: The Road to the Absolute
An artist is like a woman who can do nothing but love, and who succumbs to every stray male jackass.
HEINRICH BOLL
The Clown
Every Artist is a Cannibal, every Poet is a Thief.
All kill for inspiration and sing about their grief.
BONO
"The Fly"
Others besides practicing artists have imaginations. But most people are afraid to trust their imaginations and the artist is not.
SHERWOOD ANDERSON
"A Note on Realism", The Literary Review, Oct. 25, 1924
The function of the artist in a disturbed society is to give awareness of the universe, to ask the right questions, and to elevate the mind.
MARINA ABRAMOVIC
The Economist, Sep. 15, 2010
Weirdism is definitely the cornerstone of many an artist's career.
E. A. BUCCHIANERI
Brushstrokes of a Gadfly
A child when afraid thrusts out his arms, and those that are falling hold out the hand to passers-by for aid; similarly, creative artists project their sorrows and joys and all their sudden pain which is greater than their own strength. They hold them out like a net with which to ensnare, like a rope by which to escape. Like beggars on the street weighed down with misery and want, they give their words to passers-by. Each syllable gives relief because they thus project their own life into that of strangers. Their fortune and misfortune, their rejoicing and complaint, too heavy for them, are sown in the destiny of others.
STEFAN ZWEIG
prelude, Paul Verlaine
There are two men inside the artist, the poet and the craftsman. One is born a poet. One becomes a craftsman.
EMILE ZOLA
With most people, not describable as artists, all the finer part of their vitality goes into sex. They become third-rate poets during their courtship. All their instincts of drama come out freshly with their wives. The artist is he in whom this emotionality normally absorbed by sex is so strong that it claims a newer and more exclusive field of deployment. Its first creation is the Artist himself, a new sort of person; the creative man.
WYNDHAM LEWIS
Tarr
I am an artist ... I am here to live out loud.
EMILE ZOLA
To the artist is sometimes granted a sudden, transient insight.... 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
The Journal of Arnold Bennett
I am an artist you know ... it is my right to be odd.
E. A. BUCCHIANERI
Brushstrokes of a Gadfly
The greater the artist, the greater the doubt. Perfect confidence is granted to the less talented as a consolation prize.
ROBERT HUGHES
"Modernism's Patriarch", Time Magazine, Jun. 10, 1996
An artist should be as impartial as God.
WYNDHAM LEWIS
Tarr
Artists and researchers are linked closely together because they think creatively. They are very sensitive to their surroundings, to what's going on, to disruptions and tremors in our environment and society. Artists are researchers, and researchers are artists.
ANGELIKA TROJNARSKI
"Hello, Angelika: When it comes to cutting-edge art, CentralTrak casts its net internationally", Dallas Morning News, March 28, 2016
Artwork and artists are often expected to serve as enlightened beacons, guiding visitors over a bridge of dialogue between East and West, us and them, allowing us to see a "beautiful" side of an otherwise negatively perceived culture of political violence, intolerance, and irrationality.
LIVIA ALEXANDER
"Tracing Tradition in a Survey of Six Iranian Artists", Hyperallergic, March 18, 2016
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.
JAMES BALDWIN
Esquire, April 1960
It is the artist's business to create sunshine when the sun fails.
ROMAIN ROLLAND
Jean-Christophe
All the best artists have had a thing for pure black -- Turner, Manet, Goya. This black is like dynamite in the art world.
CHRISTIAN FURR
"Artists at war after top sculptor is given exclusive rights to the purest black paint ever which is used on stealth jets", Daily Mail, February 28, 2016