1,307 Quotes About Artists

Detachment and involvement: the artist must have both. The link between them is compassion.

It is exhausting living in a population where people don't speak up if what they witness doesn't directly threaten them.

Few artists thrive in solitude and nothing is more stimulating than the conflict of minds with similar interests.

But if modesty is interpreted not as diffidence or self-effacingness, but as non-overweening, a realistic assessment of the job to be done and one's ability to do it, then you might say the chief virtue of excellent artists is their modesty...But knowing your limits and going to them isn't arrogance. It's greatness of spirit.

An artist has only two options: fail or never begin.

Anyone who understood art knew that it never achieved what its maker dreamed for it. Art always fell short, and the artist, far from rescuing something from the disaster of life, was thereby condemned to be a double failure.

And yet, for my art and for my loved ones, I will gladly endure to the end.

Artist colonies are notorious for breaking up marriages and housing affairs.

Bureaucracy is a huge beast; deeply rooted, it exists even among artists; it’s an almost losing battle against it.