Quotes

Quotes about Artists


Immature artists imitate. Mature artists steal.

Lionel Trilling

The refusal to rest content, the willingness to risk excess on behalf of one's obsessions, is what distinguishes artists from entertainers, and what makes some artists adventurers on behalf of us all.

John Updike

I think that one of the qualifications of artists should be a vow of celibacy. They should be confined to ruining only their own lives.

Roger Lewis

Bad artists always admire each others work.

George Bernard Shaw

I think that one of the qualifications of artists should be a vow of celibacy. They should be confined to ruining only their own lives.

Roger Lewis

To offer the complexities of life as an excuse for not addressing oneself to the simpler, more manageable (trivial) aspects of daily existence is a perversity often indulged in by artists, husbands, intellectuals—and critics of the Women's Movement.

Barbara Grizzuti Harrison

To offer the complexities of life as an excuse for not addressing oneself to the simpler, more manageable (trivial) aspects of daily existence is a perversity often indulged in by artists, husbands, intellectuals—and critics of the Women's Movement.

Barbara Grizzuti Harrison

Memory is the greatest of artists, and effaces from your mind what is unnecessary.

Maurice Baring

A rod twelve feet long and a ring of wire, A winder and barrel, will help thy desire In killing a Pike; but the forked stick, With a slit and a bladder,--and that other fine trick, Which our artists call snap, with a goose or a duck,-- Will kill two for one, if you have any luck; The gentry of Shropshire do merrily smile, To see a goose and a belt the fish to beguile; When a Pike suns himselfe and a-frogging doth go, The two-inched hook is better, I know, Than the ord'nary snaring: but still I must cry, When the Pike is at home, minde the cookery.

Thomas Barker

People need trouble—a little frustration to sharpen the spirit on, toughen it. Artists do; I don't mean you need to live in a rat hole or gutter, but you have to learn fortitude, endurance. Only vegetables are happy.

William Faulkner

For it is truly bizarre for artists to be universally ranked among the giants, for generation after generation . . . and then be cast from the highest slopes of Parnassus to the lower slopes of art's ever-growing dust-heap.

Joseph W. Alsop, Jr.

The individual, man as a man, man as a brain, if you like, interests me more than what he makes, because I've noticed that most artists only repeat themselves.

Marcel Duchamp

I would venture to warn against too great intimacy with artists as it is very seductive and a little dangerous.

Queen Victoria

Great innovators and original thinkers and artists attract the wrath of mediocrities as lightning rods draw the flashes.

Theodor Reik

Great innovators and original thinkers and artists attract the wrath of mediocrities as lightning.

Theodor Reik

Memory is the greatest of artists, and effaces from your mind what is unnecessary.

Maurice Baring

If the man who paints only the tree, or flower, or other surface he sees before him were an artist, the king of artists would be the photographer. It is for the artist to do something beyond this.

James Mcneill Whistler

Great innovators and original thinkers and artists attract the wrath of mediocrities as lightning rods draw the flashes.

Theodor Reik

I would venture to warn against too great intimacy with artists as it is very seductive and a little dangerous.

Queen Victoria

Artists must be sacrificed to their art. Like bees, they must put their lives into the sting they give.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

After a certain high level of technical skill is achieved, science and art tend to coalesce in esthetics, plasticity, and form. The greatest scientists are always artists as well.

The virtue of dress rehearsals is that they are a free show for a select group of artists and friends of the author, and where for one unique evening the audience is almost expurgated of idiots.

Alfred Jarry

Journeys, like artists, are born and not made. A thousand differing circumstances contribute to them, few of them willed or determined by the will --whatever we may think.

Lawrence Durrell

Great innovators and original thinkers and artists attract the wrath of mediocrities as lightning rods draw the flashes.

Theodor Reik

Authors | Quotes | Digests | Submit | Interact | Store

Copyright © Classics Network. Contact Us