Artist Hardship Quotes

To be an artist means: not to calculate and count; to grow and ripen like a tree which does not hurry the flow of its sap and stands at ease in the spring gales without fearing that no summer may follow. It will come. But it comes only to those who are patient, who are simply there in their vast, quiet tranquility, as if eternity lay before them. It is a lesson I learn every day amid hardships I am thankful for: patience is all! ~ Rainer Maria Rilke

I don't think you make a choice to be an artist. There was no decision for me. I've been expressing myself this way since I can remember. ~ Yoko Ono

Everyone has something of the spiti that animates the artist ~ Jude Morgan

A creative writer must study carefully the works of his rivals, including the Almighty. He must possess the inborn capacity not only of recombining but of re-creating the given world. In order to do this adequately, avoiding duplication of labor, the artist should know the given world. ~ Vladimir Nabokov

The New York Times is the worst newspaper in the world and it's extremely vicious to artists. ~ James Purdy

Wherever art appears, life disappears. ~ Robert Motherwell

Some settlers began with no implements but an ax. In conversation, the subject of axes
their ideal weight, their proper helves
was more popular than politics or religion. A man who made good axes, who knew the secrets of tempering the steel and getting the center of gravity right, received the celebrity of an artist and might act accordingly. The best ax maker in southern Indiana was "a dissolute, drunken genius, named Richardson." Men who really knew how to chop became famous, too. An ax blow requires the same timing of weight shift and wrist action as a golf swing, and as in golf those who where good at it taught others; sometimes all the men in one district learned their stroke from the same axman extraordinaire. A good stroke had a "sweetness" similar to the sound of a well-struck golf or tennis ball, and gave a satisfaction which moved the work along. ~ Ian Frazier

I was always making things. Even though art was what I did every day, it didn't even occur to me that I would be an artist. ~ Maya Lin

That is what diminishes the artist and his song. The artist is now hermetically sealed. The publishing company got him his deal and they expect to profit from his songs. So what if he is a better singer than a songwriter; let's put him in a room with a real songwriter. Something great is bound to come ... except very often nothing great comes out of such contrived match-ups. Nobody knows where a great song comes from, and that's why so many writers credit the Lord as a co-writer (though I notice they never offer Him half the writer's royalties) when they come up with a real gem. ~ Michael Kosser

When you are a real artist who is serious about your craft, you love good music. Period. ~ Lil' Kim

This man is different. He can fix anything, do anything. He doesn't work with knowledge, with science - the classified accumulation of facts. He knows nothing. It's not in his head, a form of learning. He works by intuition - his power is in his hands, not his head. Jack-of-all-trades. His hands! Like a painter, an artist. In his hands - and he cuts across our lives like a knife-blade. ~ Philip K. Dick

Talk about a struggling artist having to work against enormous odds ... But I love movies so much, so I'm going to do it. ~ Ariel Pink

Morale - the will to win, the fighting heart - are the honored hallmarks of the football coach and player. Likewise, they are characteristic of the enterprising executive, the successful troop leader, the established artist and the dedicated teacher and scientist. ~ Dwight D. Eisenhower

A fan's love for an artist is so deep, I know I will go whatever depths it takes to learn about people that I'm in love with. ~ Garth Brooks

I'm an actor, but I'm an artist. ~ Shia Labeouf

The businessman who wishes to gain a market by throttling a superior competitor, the worker who wants a share of his employer's wealth, the artist who envies a rival's higher talent - they're all wishing facts out of existence and destruction is the only means of their wish. If they pursue it, they will not achieve a market, a fortune, or an immortal fame - they will merely destroy production ~ Ayn Rand

Truthfully, I love being in the jungle. I love it when the make-up artists come to set, they come equipped with dirt and sweat. I spend my days climbing trees and I can crawl out of bed and walk on set and that's exactly all I have to look like. ~ Evangeline Lilly

I was born for the ocean, for the road, and I longed to build my reputation as a fearless nomad, forever roaming the country with a suitcase and my guitar. Light as the wind itself, a romantic mystery passing through people's lives, leaving them with moments of magic, wondering where I might be now. ~ Charlotte Eriksson

Sylvia would have taken it seriously- so strong was her devotion to the innate intelligence of form. Those pretty tools like glue and pens, pasting together look-books – for Sylvia it would have been like toy making or arranging jewels. Unfortunately, Sylvia's flair for design and graphics went unnoticed by the Mademoiselle staff, who had already pigeonholed her as a "writer". ~ Elizabeth Winder

I think hip-hop has more to do with rock and roll. Kanye West is, in many ways, a rock artist. ~ Ian Astbury

At the deepest level, the creative process and the healing process arise from a single source. When you are an artist, you are a healer; a wordless trust of the same mystery is the foundation of your work and its integrity. ~ Rachel Naomi Remen

Art is the most passionate orgy within man's grasp. ~ John Donne

An artist who makes pictures that look good but express nothing is like a writer whose words sound good but have no meaning. ~ Gerald Brommer

The artist must scorn all judgment that is not based on an intelligent observation of character. He must beware of the literary spirit which so often causes a painting to deviate from its true path - the concrete study of nature - to lose itself all too long in intangible speculations. ~ Paul Cezanne

My father was a psycho-analyst and I think that fact was very influential on my development as an artist. Trying to search beneath the surface of things for an unexpected sense of mystery. ~ Gregory Crewdson

Schinkel's aesthetic was not a crudely materialistic "truth to material" affair ... but rather an attempt to inform iron and other industrial materials with an appropriate beauty through the direct collaboration of the artist in the manufacturing process. ~ Karl Friedrich Schinkel

[The artist] is like a pump; he has inside him a great pipe that reaches down into the entrails of things, the deepest layers. He sucks up what was lying there below, dim and unnoticed, and brings it in great jets to the sunlight. ~ Gustave Flaubert

I feel sometimes an American artist must feel, like a baseball player or something - a member of a team writing American history.. ~ Willem De Kooning

With patient hope, we can endure any hardship. ~ Lailah Gifty Akita

Artists are always the Johnny Appleseeds of gentrification. ~ Scott Hutchins

A dreamer rises above their inherent fearfulness that they will always produce inferior work and grants oneself a license to put forth their best effort. ~ Kilroy J. Oldster

Art arises when the secret vision of the artist and the manifestation of nature agree to find new shapes. ~ Kahlil Gibran

The studio was immense and gloomy, the sole light within it proceeding from a stove, around which the three were seated. Although they were bold, and of the age when men are most jovial, the conversation had taken, in spite of their efforts to the contrary, a reflection from the dull weather without, and their jokes and frivolity were soon exhausted.

In addition to the light which issued from the crannies in the stove, there was another emitted from a bowl of spirits, which was ceaselessly stirred by one of the young men, as he poured from an antique silver ladle some of the flaming spirit into the quaint old glasses from which the students drank. The blue flame of the spirit lighted up in a wild and fantastic manner the surrounding objects in the room, so that the heads of old prophets, of satyrs, or Madonnas, clothed in the same ghastly hue, seemed to move and to dance along the walls like a fantastic procession of the dead; and the vast room, which in the day time sparkled with the creations of genius, seemed now, in its alternate darkness and sulphuric light, to be peopled with its dreams.

Each time also that the silver spoon agitated the liquid, strange shadows traced themselves along the walls, hideous and of fantastic form. Unearthly tints spread also upon the hangings of the studio, from the old bearded prophet of Michael Angelo to those eccentric caricatures which the artist had scrawled upon his walls, and which resembled an army of demons th ~ James Hain Friswell

The truly original artist invents his own signs. ~ Henri Matisse

The paintings by dead men who were poor most of their lives are the most valuable pieces in my collection. And if an artist wants to really jack up the prices of his creations, may I suggest this: suicide. ~ Kurt Vonnegut

The defining function of the artist is to cherish consciousness. ~ Max Eastman

I wanted Kimi to be a Japanese record with a Japanese title. I wanted it to be for them. They appreciate things on a different level, and take their art very seriously - that's special if you're an artist. ~ Matthew Sweet

It is the artists of the world, the feelers and the thinkers who will ultimately save us; who can articulate, educate, defy, insist, sing and shout the big dreams. ~ Leonard Bernstein

As an artist, I feel so fortunate to be able to learn from all these great musicians that came before me, when some people have nobody that came before them. ~ Kiesza

The worst thing you can do as an artist is to repeat yourself. ~ Conor Oberst

Since art exists for humanity it is not unreasonable to assume that humanity has some rights in the matter. Who pays the piper calls the tune. An artist cannot be at once a rebel and a comfortable citizen. ~ Walter J. Phillips

I am biased towards the belief that every painter must be grounded in strong and faultless drawing skills, and until one has not experimented with all styles of painting and has not comprehended their potentialities one's work is not complete. Even an abstract painter must know how to draw as well as a figurative artist. As for me, drawing has never created any problem, since I know how to draw anatomy correctly if I had to, I understand the function of muscle groups and sculpture. ~ Guity Novin