Real Artists Quotes

Real artists, it seems to me, are those who don't repeat themselves.

I like kids' work more than work by real artists any day.

The real artist has no idea that he is sacrificing himself for art. He does “what he does for one reason and one reason only-he can't help doing it”

I think it's really important for real artists to make sure they're honest.

I think Damien Hirst is hilarious. And I think he's a true artist. He's not hilarious first; I think he is a real artist, and I also think he's got an amazing sense of humor.

The real artist's work is a surprise to himself.

Yet a real artist, I've noticed, will survive anything. (Even praise, I happily suspect.)

I would say that for the younger musicians, technical proficiency is necessary and a given these days. But the study and the way you function in society, your beliefs and the way you live, that is where you will find a real musician, a real artist.

Real artists take the misery and sadness of life and translate it into art.

The real artist has no pride. Unfortunately he sees that his art has no limits. He feels obscurely how far he is from the goal. While he is perhaps being admired by others, he mourns the fact that he has not yet reached the point to which his better genius, like a distant sun, ever beckons to him.

A lot of people relate my success now with The Voice, and it has nothing to do with that. I've definitely worked my ass off for a year afterwards trying to get that off of my forehead. If anything, it's actually harder to get labels to look at you when you come off a show like that, and it's harder for people to look at you like a real artist.

You know, real artists, we expose our flaws. We long for intimacy.

The real artist, who knew what he was imitating, would be interested in realities and not in imitations; and would desire to leave as memorials of himself works many and fair; and, instead of being the author of encomiums, he would prefer to be the theme of them.

This longing for knowledge makes the real artist brave. He never adheres to the first image that appears to him, because he knows that this is not necessarily the richest and more correct. He sacrifices one images for another more intense and expressive, and he does this repeatedly until new and unknown visions strike him with their revealing spell.

A real artist is the one who has learned to recognize and to render... the 'radiance' of all things as an epiphany or showing forth of the truth.

Many of us believe that 'real artists' do not experience self-doubt. In truth, artists are people who have learned to live with doubt and do the work anyway.

I don't believe any real artists have ever been non-political. They may have been insensitive to this particular plight or insensitive to that, but they were political, because that's what an artist is-a politician.

I think that fame only goes to your head if you are not a real artist. If you are a real artist and a good person who loves what they are doing, you are going to be the same person.

Why is it every other person you meet says they're an artist? A real artist doesn't need to gas on about it, he doesn't have time. He does his work and sweats it out in silence, and no one can help him at all.

He who is discouraged after a failure is not a real artist.

I was working with real artists [in the Rum Diary], and that's difficult to do and very rare, in this industry, ironically.

Nirvana's amazing, but they're just never going to find another one, there's no artist development anymore, you're never going to have a U2, you're never going to have a Bruce Springsteen, those guys didn't make it off of their first single and real artists probably won't make it off of their first singles.

This is the other secret that real artists know and wannabe writers don’t. When we sit down each day and do our work, power concentrates around us. The Muse takes note of our dedication. She approves. We have earned favor in her sight. When we sit down and work, we become like a magnetized rod that attracts iron filings. Ideas come. Insights accrete.

As soon as I got into music, I tried to be a working, real artist who gets paid for what he does, who doesn't have a day job.

I feel like I am a real artist and I want to be able to feel what I am singing about. So when I sing, 'Leave (Get Out),' I have been through that. I think it is just a new generation, whether people are ready for it or not. Teenagers are dating.

I want to be a real artist to consumers. I want to be the real thing for them.

Unlearning is the choice, conscious or unconscious, of any real artist. And it is the true sign of maturity.

One of the things that makes Wittgenstein a real artist to me is that he realized that no conclusion could be more horrible than solipsism.

The real artist while he paints does not think of the sale, only of the need to make a beautiful living thing.

Think it's so unfair when people think that you're not a "real artist" unless you're getting paid for it....I personally know so many poets that work a 9 to 5 in a cubicle and come home and write poetry. Their poetry is just as powerful and moving as anything that I've ever written, if not more.

Nobody makes art for an elite, not if they're a real artist. You try and reach as many people as possible with whatever it is that you make. If a chef is making an omelette, he wants everyone to think that it tastes great because he did it. And if it does, then that's a success because everyone eats it.

I love music that has good catchy choruses and fits into many different genres. ... I like real artists, that write their own material and are great performers.

The real artist is striving to depict his subject's character and to stress the caricature, but at least it is art which is alive.

There’s no “correct path” to becoming a real artist. You might think you’ll gain legitimacy by going to university, getting published, getting signed to a record label. But it’s all bullshit, and it’s all in your head. You’re an artist when you say you are. And you’re a good artist when you make somebody else experience or feel something deep or unexpected.

Norman Rockwell spent his career painting pictures that helped people understand their own feelings...pictures that enriched their own experiences and celebrated their own lives. But the art establishment branded him an 'illustrator', a sentimental one at that. Real artists, they said were doing art for art's sake, not for the sake of the bourgeois public. Real artists were putting swiggles, smears or daubs of paint on the canvas. They were doing 'innovative' and 'creative' work. If they were hideous and grotesque; we know that's what life really is!

The art of invective resembles the art of boxing. Very few fights are won with the straight left. It is too obvious, and it can betoo easily countered. The best punches, like the best pieces of invective in this style, are either short-arm jabs, unexpectedly rapid and deadly; or else one-two blows, where you prepare your opponent with the first hit, and then, as his face comes forward, connect with your other fist: one, two. Both are effective; but they can be administered only by a real artist, with a real wish to knock his enemy out.

The artist is a strange being. I think it's safe to say that a real artist is conscious of having a personal singularity that is partly a blessing and partly a curse. An artist enjoys and suffers from isolation. As solitude, isolation can nurture. It can also destroy.

To the real artist in humanity, what are called bad manners are often the most picturesque and significant of all.

Being a cover artist is not like being a real artist. That's just copying what someone else did.

Real artists find answers. The knowledge of the artisan is within the confines of his skills. For example, I know a lot about lenses, about the editing room. I know what the different buttons on the camera are for. I know more or less how to use a microphone. I know all that, but that's not real knowledge. Real knowledge is knowing how to live, why we live, things like that.

When one is young, one venerates and despises without that art of nuances which constitutes the best gain of life, and it is only fair that one has to pay dearly for having assaulted men and things in this manner with Yes and No. Everything is arranged so that the worst of tastes, the taste for the unconditional, should be cruelly fooled and abused until a man learns to put a little art into his feelings and rather to risk trying even what is artificial — as the real artists of life do.

Everything you can imagine is real.

It is important to express oneself...provided the feelings are real and are taken from you own experience.

God is really only another artist. He invented the giraffe, the elephant and the cat. He has no real style, He just goes on trying other things.

Any magazine-cover hack can splash paint around wildly and call it a nightmare, or a witches sabbath or a portrait of the devil; but only a great painter can make such a thing really scare or ring true. That's because only a real artist knows the anatomy of the terrible, or the physiology of fear.

That's because only a real artist knows the actual anatomy of the terrible or the physiology of fear - the exact sort of lines and proportions that connect up with latent instincts or hereditary memories of fright, and the proper colour contrasts and lighting effects to stir the dormant sense of strangeness.

Art is a vocation, as much as anything in this world. For the real artist, it is the most natural thing in the world, not as necessary as air and water, perhaps, but as food and water. But we really do lead almost a monastic life, you know; to follow it you very often have to give up something.

A real artist may create his picture in a lonely desert... gods look over his shoulder; he creates in their company. What does he care whether or not anybody admires his picture?

In every human being there is the artist, and whatever his activity, he has an equal chance with any to express the result of his growth and his contact with life. I don't believe any real artist cares whether what he does is 'art' or not. Who, after all, knows what art is?