Creative Artists Quotes

There isn't any great mystery about me. What I do is glamorous and has an awful lot of white-hot attention placed on it. But the actual work requires the same discipline and passion as any job you love doing, be it as a very good pipe fitter or a highly creative artist. ~ Tom Hanks

Today we've learned to celebrate mediocrity. Back in the day we had creative artists; today we have created artists. ~ Lionel Richie

All the lies and evasions by which man has nourished himself civilization, in a word is the fruits of the creative artist. It is the creative nature of man which has refused to let him lapse back into that unconscious unity with life which characterizes the animal world from which he made his escape. ~ Henry Miller

The nation is bound together by its creative artists and not by parallel lines of rusting steel. ~ Pierre Berton

Like all artists, I go through creative spurts. ~ Nikki Sixx

I'm a great believer in the hereafter, in karma, in reincarnation. It does make sense. I believe that God is not just a law-giver, but a creative artist. The greatest of all. And what characterises artists is that they want to redo their work. Maybe it didn't come off perfectly, so they want to see it done again, and improved. Reincarnation is a way for God to improve his earlier works. ~ Norman Mailer

One feature about Los Angeles that I particularly love is the chance for association with all kinds of creative artists, a thing I never before have had. I certainly do love a number of the writers, the painters, the musicians, and the sculptors that I meet here ... Next to the sunshine, I appreciate it the most of anything in California. ~ Gene Stratton-Porter

I think one of the things that writers and creative artists generally have to deal with is the censors that we have in our heads, the voices that we have that say you better not tell that and don't tell that, and people will think you're not a good girl, and your grandmother's going to be mad at you and all of those things. ~ Pearl Cleage

I find it hard to believe that the machine would go into the creative artist's hand even were that magic hand in true place. It has been too far exploited by industrialism and science at expense to art and true religion. ~ Frank Lloyd Wright

Imagine a life-form whose brainpower is to ours as ours is to a chimpanzee's. To such a species, our highest mental achievements would be trivial. Their toddlers, instead of learning their ABCs on Sesame Street, would learn multivariable calculus on Boolean Boulevard. Our most complex theorems, our deepest philosophies, the cherished works of our most creative artists, would be projects their schoolkids bring home for Mom and Dad to display on the refrigerator door. ~ Neil DeGrasse Tyson

Creative Artists Agency put together a project of extraordinary mediocrity and colossal stupidity. Otherwise, it was great. ~ Mikhail Baryshnikov

June Jordan once said something which is just wonderful. I'm paraphrasing her-that her function as a poet was to make revolution irresistible. Well o.k. that is the function of us all, as creative artists, to make the truth, as we see it irresistible. ~ Audre Lorde

Creative artists have great passion. ~ Jack Welch

Their task [creative artists], therefore, is to communicate directly from one inward world to another, in such a way that an actual shock of experience will have been rendered: not a mere statement for the information or persuasion of a brain, but an effective communication across the void of space and time from one center of consciousness to another. ~ Joseph Campbell

The artist does not exist except as a personification, a figure of speech that represents the sum total of art itself. It is painting that is the genius of the painter, poetry of the poet, and a person is a creative artist to the extent that he participates in that genius. ~ Harold Rosenberg

Art, like morality, consists in drawing the line somewhere. ~ Gilbert K. Chesterton

The creative artist seems to be almost the only kind of man that you could never meet on neutral ground. You can only meet him as an artist. He sees nothing objectively because his own ego is always in the foreground of every picture. ~ Raymond Chandler

I pay tribute to the writing always. The writer is a creative artist and the director is an interpretive artist and the actors are interpretive. You take zero and make it into something, that's always amazing to me. ~ Clint Eastwood

Although in society in general, the idea of an Irish composer of 'classical music', or whatever you want to call it, is still a strange item, generally speaking. Even in the arts, among our fellow creative artists in other disciplines, you still feel slightly out of it. ~ John Kinsella

Poets do not go mad; but chess-players do. Mathematicians go mad, and cashiers; but creative artists very seldom. I am not, as will be seen, in any sense attacking logic: I only say that this danger does lie in logic, not in imagination. ~ G.K. Chesterton

Be assertive, be attentive and be creative. The world needs people who can add value. ~ Gift Gugu Mona

Art is the queen of all sciences communicating knowledge to all the generations of the world. ~ Leonardo Da Vinci

Any kind of creative activity is likely to be stressful. The more anxiety, the more you feel that you are headed in the right direction. Easiness, relaxation, comfort - these are not conditions that usually accompany serious work. ~ Joyce Carol Oates

Unless you have tested the assumptions in your business model first, outside the building, your business plan is just creative writing. ~ Steve Blank

We do express our emotions, our reactions to events, breakups and infatuations, but the way we do that - the art of it - is in putting them into prescribed forms or squeezing them into new forms that perfectly fit some emerging context. That's part of the creative process, and we do it instinctively; we internalize it, like birds do. And it's a joy to sing, like the birds do. ~ David Byrne

(Interviews Ntozake Shange) "What do you think an artist's job is?"
"To keep our sensibilities alive, so we aren't numb by our struggles to survive. That's what I think our job is right now. ~ Eileen Myles

Little did she know, I really did want to get hurt. It was irrational and probably stupid, but I wanted to feel the pain of having my emotions stomped all over. All of the best creative minds in the world had their hearts broken. It's what made their art genuine, vital, human. It had the potential to elevate me from just a "good" artist into a great one. ~ L. H. Cosway

Described as a "workaholic speed-writing freak" by fellow writers, a "creative writing class drill sergeant" by his writing 'padawans', Voinov is a self-confessed geek and has enlarged his days by 12 secret hours in return for the sacrifice of ten albino virgin pygmy hippos. ~ Aleksandr Voinov

Most people die before they are fully born. Creativeness means to be born before one dies. ~ Erich Fromm

Last words? I'm sure it has been an eventful journey. Someone will want to make your eulogy creative, I have no doubt. I can only wonder what will happen to the mind of the person that is forcefully debugged with their consciousness this deep into the WoAnLiNe. It's going to make an interesting case study for some boring old zero that has that kind of time. I should erase your Animus while I'm at it. It would keep these sorts of problems from happening in the future, troublemaker. ~ Brandon R. Chinn

If I want to, I can sign 20 films for ridiculous amounts of money, but I really want to do different kinds of cinema. I want creative satisfaction. ~ Karisma Kapoor

Artists don't come much cooler and well rounded than Lady Gaga. Love and respect. ~ Nile Rodgers

Artists and artisans both demonstrate with perfect clarity that a person is least able to appropriate for himself those things which are most peculiarly his. His works leave him as birds do the best in which they were hatched.

In this respect an architect's fate is the strangest of all. How often he employs his whole intellect and warmth of feeling in the creation of rooms from which he must exclude himself. Royal halls owe their splendor to him, and he may not share in the enjoyment of their finest effects. In temples he draws the line between himself and the holy of holies; the steps he built to ceremonies that lift up the heady, he may no longer climb; just as the goldsmith worships only from afar the monstrance which he wrought in the fire and set with jewels. With the keys of the palace the architect hands over all it's comforts to the wealthy man, and has not the least part in them. Surely in this way art must little by little grow away from the artist, if the work, like a child provided for, no longer teaches back to touch its father. ~ Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

With independents[films] you sort of make them on the go and there is that little bit more creative freedom. You don't have the money to slow down! ~ Jennifer Aniston

The bigger the budget, the more you can afford to compromise with Mother Nature. The smaller the budget, the more you're like, "Okay, well, we have to do this, but how can we afford to do it." That's when you have to get really creative on the business side, as far as making compromises. ~ Thomas Ian Nicholas

Especially for fostering creative, conceptual work, the best way to use money as a motivator is to take the issue of money off the table so people concentrate on the work. ~ Daniel H. Pink

Let us ... leave art to the artists, and let us try to use the medium of photography to create photographs that can endure because of their photographic qualities. ~ Albert Renger-Patzsch

The creative act, the defeat of habit by originality, overcomes everything. And I really believe that. And what I try to teach young people, or anybody in any creative field, is that every idea should seemingly be outrageous. ~ George Lois

I've always looked at directing as the next step for me in my creative career, and after spending the better part of the last decade on a television set absorbing as much as I could from in front of the camera, I'm now eager to learn as much as I can from behind it. ~ Ian Anthony Dale

The degree of rigidity is a matter of profound interest in the study of literary fictions. As an extreme case you will find some novel, probably contemporary with yourself, in which the departure from a basic paradigm, the peripeteia in the sense I am now giving it, seems to begin with the first sentence. The schematic expectations of the reader are discouraged immediately. Since by definition one seeks the maximum peripeteia (in this extended sense) in the fiction of one's own time, the best instance I can give is from Alain Robbe-Grillet. He refuses to speak of his 'theory' of the novel; it is the old ones who talk about the need for plot, character, and so forth, who have the theories. And without them one can achieve a new realism, and a narrative in which 'le temps se trouve coupé de la temporalité. Il ne coule plus.' And so we have a novel in which,. the reader will find none of the gratification to be had from sham temporality, sham causality, falsely certain description, clear story. The new novel 'repeats itself, bisects itself, modifies itself, contradicts itself, without even accumulating enough bulk to constitute a past--and thus a "story," in the traditional sense of the word.' The reader is not offered easy satisfactions, but a challenge to creative co-operation. ~ Frank Kermode

Nothing is original. Steal from anywhere that resonates with inspiration or fuels your imagination. Devour old films, new films, music, books, paintings, photographs, poems, dreams, random conversations, architecture, bridges, street signs, trees, clouds, bodies of water, light and shadows. Select only things to steal from that speak directly to your soul. If you do this, your work (and theft) will be authentic. Authenticity is invaluable; originality is non-existent. And don't bother concealing your thievery - celebrate it if you feel like it. In any case, always remember what Jean-Luc Godard said: "It's not where you take things from - it's where you take them to."
[MovieMaker Magazine #53 - Winter, January 22, 2004 ] ~ Jim Jarmusch

I'm the culinary and creative consultant for The Water Club. ~ Geoffrey Zakarian

If you deny yourself your own passion, your own path, your own longing, your own drama, your own life force, your own truth - then you might be tempted to live vicariously through those who allow themselves theirs. Your creative energy has got to go somewhere, even if it is projected onto others. You're tempted to live a life of fantasy if you deny yourself a life of truth. ~ Marianne Williamson

Working with Robert, Robert [Elswit] is a storyteller. He's not a cinematographer, he's a storyteller. And to me, that's the graduation I hope to get to in my profession. That I'm not just an actor, I'm a storyteller. And I think that takes a long time in, when you have one job on a movie set. Makeup artists, actor, whatever. To graduate from just that to storyteller. ~ Jake Gyllenhaal

As he was wont to remark, Nature has had her day; she has finally exhausted through the nauseating uniformity of her landscapes and her skies, the sedulous patience of men of refined taste. Essentially, what triteness Nature displays, like a specialist who confines himself to his own single sphere; what small-mindedness, like a shopkeeper who stocks only this one article to the exclusion of any other; what monotony she exhibits with her arrangements of mountains and seas! Page 20.
There is no doubt whatever that this eternally self-replicating old fool has now exhausted the good-natured admiration of all true artists, and the moment has come to replace her, as far as that can be achieved, with artifice. ~ Joris-Karl Huysmans

I think a lot of artists no longer want to participate in or be associated with narrative because of its corruptedness in contemporary culture. ~ Rachel Cusk

As a songwriter, you're never off - for me, anyway. There's a certain mentality of people that decide, "Oh, we're going to try to write songs from this time of the day to this time of the day." Almost treat it like a real job. I can't do that. I've never been able to write songs like that. You never know when something creative is going to hit you, or emotion or whatever. You can take it, and turn it into something that makes somebody feel something. I love that about my job. ~ Kenny Chesney

The nightmare takes various forms, comes in sleep, or in wakefulness, and can be pictured most simply like this: There is a blindfolded man standing with his back to the brick wall. He has been tortured nearly to death. Opposite him are six men with their rifles raised ready to shoot, commanded by a seventh, who has his hand raised, When he drops his hand, the shots will ring out, and the prisoner will fall dead. But suddenly there is something unexpected - yet not altogether unexpected, for the seventh has been listening all this while in case it happens. There is an outburst of shouting and fighting in the street outside. The six men look in query at their officer, the seventh. The officer stands waiting to see how the fighting outside will resolve itself. There is a shout: 'We have won!' At which the officer crosses the space to the wall, unties the bound man, and stands in his place. The man, hitherto bound, now binds the other. There is a moment, and this is the moment of horror in the nightmare, when they smile at each other: It is a brief, bitter, accepting smile. They are brothers in that smile. The smile holds a terrible truth that I want to evade. Because it cancels all creative emotion. The offer, the seventh, now stands blindfolded and waiting with his back to the wall. The former prisoner walks to the firing squad who are still standing with their weapons ready. He lifts his hand, then drops it. The shots ring out, and the body by the wall falls twitching. The si ~ Doris Lessing

Just as creativity enables us to envision novel solutions to tough problems, it can also enable us to develop original paths around rules, all the while allowing us to reinterpret information in a self-serving way. Putting our creative minds to work can help us come up with a narrative that lets us have our cake and eat it too, and create stories in which we're always the hero, never the villain. If the key to our dishonesty is our ability to think of ourselves as honest and moral people while at the same time benefitting from cheating, creativity can help us tell better stories - stories that allow us to be even more dishonest but still think of ourselves as wonderfully honest people. ~ Dan Ariely

Those people who recognise that imagination is reality's master, we call sages, and those who act upon it, we call artists. ~ Tom Robbins

Everyone knows how creative the Scots are.
They're always sculpting, painting, singing songs, & writing plays.
They invented television, the telephone, & deep-fried Mars bars. ~ David Baillie

The creation lives as genesis beneath the visible surface of the work. All intelligent people see this after the fact, but only the creative see it before the fact - in the future. ~ Paul Klee

When dreams come true creativity becomes art. ~ Martin Schuster

Artists are terminally dissatisfied. With life. With love. With their work. You like being tortured, don't you, little Luna? Sadness has a bittersweet aftertaste. Keeps us going." He lit up his joint. "Being an artist is a miserable job. You're pregnant with your work, only to give the baby away. An entire year of careful strokes of a brush, just to have someone else buy the painting. ~ L.J. Shen