Quotes about Artist

Nothing really at any period of my life was ever of the smallest importance to me compared with Art. But in the case of an artist, weakness is nothing less than a crime, when it is a weakness that paralyses the imagination

He has a simple and a beautiful nature...Don't spoil him. Don't try to influence him. Your influence would be bad. The world is wide, and has many marvellous people in it. Don't take away from me the one person who gives to my art whatever charm it possesses: my life as an artist depends on him.

Even now I cannot help feeling that it is a mistake to think that the passion one feels in creation is ever really shown in the work one creates. Art is always more abstract than we fancy. Form and colour tell us of form and colour--that is all. It often seems to me that art conceals the artist far more completely than it ever reveals him.

But in the case of an artist, weakness is nothing less than a crime, when it is a weakness that paralyses the imagination.

No artist has ethical sympathies. An ethical sympathy in an artist is an unpardonable mannerism of style. No artist is ever morbid.

When critics disagree, the artist is in accord with himself. We can forgive a man for making a useful thing as long as he does not admire it. The only excuse for making a useless thing is that one admires it intensely. All art is quite useless.

But you will tell me this is an inartistic age, and we are an inartistic people, and the artist suffers much in this nineteenth century of ours. Of course he does. I, of all men, am not going to deny that. But remember that there has never been an artistic age, or an artistic people since the beginning of the world. The artist has always been, and will always be, an exquisite exception.

The aim of every artist is to arrest motion, which is life, by artificial means and hold it fixed so that a hundred years later, when a stranger looks at it, it moves again since it is life.

An artist is a creature driven by demons. He doesn't know why they choose him and he's usually too busy to wonder why.

I'd have to listen to somebody - artist or shoe clerk. And the artist is more entertaining because he knows less about what he is trying to do.

I'm against the picture of the artist as a starry-eyed visionary not really in control or knowing what he does. I'd almost prefer the word 'craftsman'. He's like one of those old-fashioned ship builders who conceived the build of the boat in their mind and after that touched every single piece that went into the boat.

If you write great songs with meaning and emotion, they will last for ever because songs are the key to everything. Songs will outlast the artist and they will go on for ever if they are good.