National Artist Quotes

Art should be for sale. The artist should not. ~ A.E. Samaan

It was in May 1934 that the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the USSR granted Birobidzhan the status of the Jewish Autonomous Region, a major step toward achieving the coveted status of a national republic, the apogee of Soviet-style autonomism. At ~ Masha Gessen

[G]et two-thirds of the states to alter the Constitution; come out with their national religion, and then let the people get their throats ready. ~ Anne Royall

If succeeding generations of Americans don't understand the concepts of justice, individual rights, free enterprise, capitalism, sovereignty or national security, there can be no guarantee that those concepts - or others like them - will continue. ~ George Nethercutt

I didn't have time to be anyone's muse ... I was too busy rebelling against my family and learning to be an artist. ~ Leonora Carrington

The awesome thing about being an artist? You can't be fired from your own mind. ~ Rose McGowan

This is the first national administration we've ever seen where the housewife couldn't afford to buy groceries and the farmer couldn't afford to grow them. ~ Jimmy Carter

Many heroic things happened during slavery. And remember that there was a national movement away from it even at the time. The era of Reconstruction and then the subsequent dismantling of Reconstruction sent us in a tailspin. Then we had the Civil Rights movement. Now we have our first non-white president. We have a pattern of moving apart and then coming back together throughout the history of this country. Each time, we come closer. ~ Wynton Marsalis

I took up drama and did so much extracurricular work, like the National Youth Theatre and Guildhall's Saturday school. Acting is where I felt most comfortable and how I wanted to express myself. ~ Douglas Booth

Artists of my generation were not educated. We were not given the equipment because it was generally believed to be irrelevant. ~ Eric Fischl

The American flag is the symbol of our freedom, national pride and history. ~ Mike Fitzpatrick

Color helps to express light, not the physical phenomenon, but the only light that really exists, that in the artist's brain. ~ Henri Matisse

In the old world that is passing, in the new world that is coming, national efficiency has been and will be a controlling factor in national safety and welfare ~ Gifford Pinchot

A lot of artists are scared to do that, they are scared to step out on their own. What am I the super villain of western Canada is that what I am? Is Classified the clean cut, staying true to his roots, hip hop guy from the East coast that stays in his lane and he made it big staying true to what he did and didn't make corny music? Then that is what he is and I am proud of him for that. ~ Shane Bunting

One of the basics of a good system of innovation is diversity. In some ways, the stronger the culture (national, institutional, generational, or other), the less likely it is to harbor innovative thinking. Common and deep-seated beliefs, widespread norms, and behavior and performance standards are enemies of new ideas. Any society that prides itself on being harmonious and homogeneous is very unlikely to catalyze idiosyncratic thinking. Suppression of innovation need not be overt. It can be simply a matter of peoples walking around in tacit agreement and full comfort with the status quo. ~ Nicholas Negroponte

Genius - the pursuit of madness. ~ Criss Jami

In my view, after fifty years of service in the United National system, I perceive the utmost urgency and absolute necessity for proper Earth government. There is no shadow of a doubt that the present political and economic systems are no longer appropriate and will lead to the end of life evolution on this planet. We must therefore absolutely and urgently look for new ways. ~ Robert Muller

Someone has a great fire in his soul and nobody ever comes to warm themselves at it, and passers-by see nothing but a little smoke at the top of the chimney and then go on their way. ~ Vincent Van Gogh

it. If you find yourself asking yourself (and your friends), "Am I really a writer? Am I really an artist?" chances are you are. ~ Steven Pressfield

The idea that modernisation makes for enhanced national power and rapid progress and helps everyone achieve greater happiness has its origins in the astonishing political, economic and military successes of western Europe in the 19th century. ~ Pankaj Mishra

I'm a believer in the notion that artists who do good work believe in the ideas of extremes. ~ Wayne Thiebaud

With men one could have clever, uplifting conversations, and men understood the work of an artist; but everything else-idle talk, tenderness, playfulness, love, contentment unmarred by thought-did not flourish among men; for that there had to be women and new places and constantly new impressions. ~ Hermann Hesse

Measuring national prestige by gold medals is like using Viagra to judge the potency of a man. ~ Ai Weiwei

In order for the artist to have a world to express he must first be situated in this world, oppressed or oppressing, resigned or rebellious, a man among men. ~ Charles Baudelaire

As the artist matures she is continuously shaken by what she
manages to discover: by the earth shifting beneath her feet once again,
by her own amazed, ringing laughter. ~ Eric Maisel

I never took drug to escape. I know some people take drugs to escape, but I took drugs because I was an experimenter. And an artist. And I was always trying to go to the other side of that veil and get information, like all writers have done through the millennia. To get some insights on how the whole thing works, if there's any way to know how it works, and write about it. ~ Creed Bratton

For me as an artist, the expansiveness of my interests and my influences make me enigmatic. I think any man can be that way - if you love enough interesting things. ~ CeeLo Green

Making a judgment, taking a stand and then acting against an injustice or acting to support excellence is the stuff of the everyman hero. If you are an aspiring artist and you wish to avoid "judgments," you'll find that you have nothing to say. ~ Steven Pressfield

She died with a knife in her hand in her kitchen, where she had cooked for fifty years, and the death was solemnly listed in the newspaper as that of an artist. ~ Janet Flanner

Soon I worked during twelve years in theater works of the prestigious Theatre National Populaire. It was the best time of my life, the most difficult, the most interesting, the most exciting. ~ Maurice Jarre

Any 'artist' makes a living by expressing what others can't - because they're unaware of their feelings, they're too afraid to express those feelings, or they lack the skills to communicate and be understood. ~ Chuck Palahniuk

A weaker currency is a national tariff. After we get a weaker currency, we have to take advantage of that. Or else, we will waste it once more in inflation and in the inability to raise competitiveness. ~ Uday Kotak

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

As [William] Valentiner noted in his uncompleted memoirs Remembering Artists, [Diego] Rivera's [Detroit Industry] murals rooted the Detroit Institute of Arts to the many-faceted jewel of its central court because of the harmonious, fertile relationship between "the industrialist" and "the artist." Rivera remarked to Valentiner how especially struck he was that "Edsel had none of the characteristics of the exploiting capitalist, that he had the simplicity and directness of a workman in his won factories and was like one of the best of them." Their relationship was like the murals themselves, a superb expression of pluralism, toleration, and empathy for the other, and of a cosmopolitan sense of all the Americas, not just of the United States of America or Detroit alone. ~ John Dean

Memory cannot produce a picture that Imagination has not retouched; and her pictures, even the ones least touched by Imagination, are no mere photographs, but the world of an artist. ~ Henry De Vere Stacpoole

A famous artist is approached by a student. "You don't remember me," the student says correctly, "but years ago you said something that changed my life. You said, 'Photography is death.' After that," says the student, "I threw out my camera. I began again. I want to thank you for changing my life."

"Leave me alone," says the artist. "Photography is life. ~ Amy Hempel

Things have changed a great deal since the days of Mr. Mayer. The studios no longer control, as they did in those days, artists or directors or producers, as the case may be. ~ Lew Wasserman

People shouldn't trust artists and they shouldn't trust art. Part of the fun of art is that it invites you to interpret it. ~ Tony Kushner

There is simply too much unnecessary suffering in our world. And we should see that as a national security risk, by the way. Given enough time, desperate people will tend to do desperate things. At a certain point you won't be able to build enough prisons or enough bombs to eradicate the effects of all that violence inside so many hearts. ~ Marianne Williamson

No amount of technical knowledge and competence is, of itself, sufficient to make a craftperson into an artist. That requires caring - passionate caring about ultimate things. ~ Freeman Patterson

In China, national priorities are established by the Government and then funded by the state; in India, priorities emerge from seemingly endless discussions and arguments amongst myriad interests, and funds have to be found where they might. ~ Shashi Tharoor

I really believe that every character comes from the well of the artist. ~ Melora Hardin

PARNELL AIR NATIONAL GUARD BASE, TENNESSEE ~ Max Brooks

The sure guaranty of the peace and security of each race is the clear, distinct, unconditional recognition by our governments, national and state, of every right that inheres in civil freedom, and of the equality before the law of all citizens of the United States, without regard to race. State enactments regulating the enjoyment of civil rights upon the basis of race, and cunningly devised to defeat legitimate results of the war, under the pretense of recognizing equality of rights, can have no other result than to render permanent peace impossible, and to keep alive a conflict of races, the continuance of which must do harm to all concerned. ~ John Marshall Harlan

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

Sometimes one has the feeling of an almost supernatural character to the shifts and changes in our national mood. They appear beyond the prose of cause and effect ... ~ Elizabeth Hardwick

As a musician, I have always refrained from criticizing another artist. ~ Jill Sobule

Some people think or expect that you should make the same kinds of art forever because it creates a convenient narrative ... I want my work to embody my inherent contradictions. ~ Kiki Smith

I'm a man of the marketplace as well as an artist. I'm a pawnbroker of myth. ~ Richard Condon