Great Artist Quotes

A great artist is not one who merely fits into a genre but one who defines the genre.

To be a great artist, you need to know yourself as best as you possibly can. I live my life and delve into my own psyche. Its more about exploring how I feel rather than making pale imitations of something that came before. We are unique beings, and the way we look at things is our own.

I didn't come after Elvis and Dylan, I've been around always. But if I see or meet a great artist, I love 'em.

If you subtracted all of the great artists who never drank, who never went to excess, you wouldn't have any more art left. What kind of poem are you gonna get out of a glass of iced tea?

What if Van Gogh had taken medication for his mental illness? Would the world have been deprived of a great artist?

If sometimes our great artists have been the most critical of our society, it is because their sensitivity and their concern for justice, which must motivate any true artist, makes him aware that our nation falls short of its highest potential. I see little of more importance to the future of our country and our civilization than full recognition of the place of the artist.

Only the brave should teach....Teaching is a vocation. It is as sacred as priesthood; as innate a desire, as inescapable as the genius which compels a great artist. If he has not the concern for humanity, the love of living creatures, the vision of the priest and the artist, he must not teach.

Michael Jackson did something that no one else in history has managed - he connected with people on every level imaginable, all over the world. He seemed to speak to people at their very core and achieved the impossible. He reached people on a deep emotional level. And that is what any great artist or showman dreams of doing. That is why Michael Jackson was so special to me.

Bad artists always admire each other's work. They call it being large-minded and free from prejudice. But a truly great artist cannot conceive of life being shown, or beauty fashioned, under any conditions other than those he has selected.

I was an artist, but not a self-proclaimed great artist, just a common man who was working in a form of art which is universal.

great artists can be uncertain. Of course they are while strugggling to find solutions. Tolstoi's scripts are almost indecipherable. Emily Dickinson provided four or more alternates for every word; Beethoven wrestled with endings to the point of exhaustion; in our day Jerome Robbins and his lack of decision are a byword in the dance profession. But all of these knew very well what they did not want, and what they did not want was the current coin, the well-worn usage. What they wanted was something newly experienced, and therefore unknown and hard to attain.

I said to Mr. Pavarotti once ... a marvelous man and a great artist ... I said to him ... "Maestro, I'm having trouble closing out a note so that it's almost as thin as a butter knife ... finish it out quietly like that." I said, "I have trouble doing that. What do you think I should do?" He said, "Justa close up your mouth." That's all he said, and I fell on the floor. I thought he was gonna give me a dissertation.

I steal from every single movie ever made. I love it - if my work has anything it's that I'm taking this from this and that from that and mixing them together. If people don't like that, then tough titty, don't go and see it, all right? I steal from everything. Great artists steal; they don't do homages.

True poets, like great artists, have scarcely any childhood, and no old age.

Bad artists ignore the darkness of human existence. Good artists often get stuck there. Great artists embrace the full catastrophe of our condition and find beyond it an even deeper truth of peace, healing, and redemption.

The artist's business is to take sorrow when it comes. The depth and capacity of his reception is the measure of his art; and when he turns his back on his own suffering, he denies the very laws of his being and closes the door on everything that can ever make him great.

You can't get anywhere without incredible passion, because if you're an entrepreneur, there's gonna be a lot of bumps in the road. A great artist has to do their art. There's nothing that can stop them from doing it. They just have to get it out there. It's the same thing for an entrepreneur. If you don't feel that way, then you're probably not really an entrepreneur.

To be quite blunt, I make pictures for money, to pay the rent.There are some great artists in the business. I am not one of them.

Great artists treasure their time with a bitter and snarling miserliness.

The need to be a great artist makes it hard to be an artist. The need to produce a great work of art makes it hard to produce any art at all.

The need to be a great artist makes it hard to be an artist.  The need to produce a great work of art makes it hard to produce any art at all. . .  Fear is what blocks an artist.  The fear of not being good enough.  The fear of not finishing.  The fear of failure and of success.  The fear of beginning at all.

Great artists are a little too gifted to be bound by boxes and labels, and in saying that, the label 'artist' is to be used lightly.

All kids draw and write poetry and everything, and some of us last until we're about eighteen, but most drop off at about twelve when some guy comes up and says, "You're no good." That's all we get told all our lives. "You haven't got the ability. You're a cobbler." It happened to all of us, but if somebody had told me all my life, "Yeah, you're a great artist," I would have been a more secure person.

The integrity of being an artist for Frank Stella means going into the unknown.A great artist is somebody who's not scared to reinvent themselves and to start all over again. And some artists do it once, twice, three times in their career. He's done it probably a dozen times or more.

I think being an artist is having the courage to be original. Many great artists, including Picasso, have all been influenced by the great master paintings... And then finally, they leap, they take off... they become themselves. Then it looks like they just came out of nowhere. Just like 'Pow!'

As nearly as possible in the spirit of Matthew Salinger, age one, urging a luncheon companion to accept a cool lima bean, I urge my editor, mentor and (heaven help him) closest friend, William Shawn, genius domus of The New Yorker, lover of the long shot, protector of the unprolific, defender of the hopelessly flamboyant, most unreasonably modest of born great artist-editors to accept this pretty skimpy-looking book.

Good artists copy, great artists steal.

I studied Hitchcock and Josef von Sternberg under Richard Dillard at Hollins, and that year under his tutelage just completely rewired my brain. Both directors combine moral seriousness with great artistry and, certainly in Hitchcock's case, an enormous respect for plot, for its power to enthrall and delight.

Nowadays, if you're a great artist, you don't have to leave the house, which is a really big difference. You're closer to the artist. And the artist can be closer to their artistry without having to always worry about branding themselves or building something image-wise.

One can be a great artist without being a great technician. There have been many famous ballet stars who did not have the ideal body or total mastery of all aspects of the art form, but on the stage they possessed magnetism-true artistry, by which I mean a charismatic quality. You can work with a coach to try and develop it, but a true artist has the ability to express his inner feelings naturally.

As a writer, I always tend to take the liberty and the great artistic luxury of a composite form of writing.

When trees mature, it is fair and moral that they are cut for man's use, as they would soon decay and return to the earth. Trees have a yearning to live again, perhaps to provide the beauty, strength and utility to serve man, even to become an object of great artistic worth.

It feels like my job is to support people. I support great artists. When I worked with a symphony, I sat in the third chair, not the first chair.

I've never been able to understand where great artists come from.

What distinguishes a great artist from a weak one is first their sensibility and tenderness; second, their imagination, and third, their industry.

The great artist is the simplifier.

Everything you can imagine is real.

Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal.

Art is like a border of flowers along the course of civilization.

I have great artistry, I can spin well, I have good footwork, and I can jump. I can do the quad jump, and I've done it multiple times in competition. It's definitely a jump that I have in my arsenal. I like to think of myself as the complete skater.

A great artist can look at an old woman, portray her exactly as she is ... and force the viewer to see the pretty girl she used to be ... more than that, he can make anyone with the sensitivity of an armadillo see that this lovely young girl is still alive

Art enables us to find ourselves and lose ourselves at the same time.

Art is the only way to run away without leaving home.

But Zarathustra made it clear in which direction the answer lay; it is towards the artist-psychologist, the intuitional thinker. There are very few such men in the world's literature; the great artists are not thinkers, the great thinkers are seldom artists.

Human nature is not amenable to prediction based on the trends or tendencies prevailing at the time. It is amenable to startling creativity of the kind practiced by great artists, directors, writers, musicians, actors, who know how to touch a chord in humans everywhere.

Pablo Casals is a very great artist. What I admire is the firm stand he has taken not only against the oppressors of his countrymen, but also against those opportunists who are always ready to compromise with the Devil. He perceives clearly that the world is in greater peril from those who tolerate or encourage evil than from those who actually commit it.

But the great artists like Michelangelo and Blake and Tolstoi--like Christ whom Blake called an artist because he had one of the most creative imaginations that ever was on earth--do not want security, egoistic or materialistic. Why, it never occurs to them. "Be not anxious for the morrow," and "which of you being anxious can add one cubit to his stature?" So they dare to be idle, i.e. not to be pressed and duty-driven all the time. They dare to love people even when they are very bad, and they dare not to try and dominate others to show them what they must do for their own good.

If that one is already a great artist, who knows how to educe from a small piece of wood the face of a king or of a queen, an ant or a camel, how great then is the mastery which can form as actuality everything which is in all potentiality? Therefore, God, who is able to produce from the most minute piece of matter the similitude of all forms which can be in this world and in infinitely many worlds, is of admirable subtlety.

For great things do not done just happen by impulse but are a succession of small things linked together.

The great artist when he comes, uses everything that has been discovered or known about his art up to that point, being able to accept or reject in a time so short it seems that the knowledge was born with him, rather than that he takes instantly what it takes the ordinary man a lifetime to know, and then the great artist goes beyond what has been done or known and makes something of his own.