Famous Quotes & Sayings

Roger Ebert

The genius is not in how much Stanley Kubrick does in “2001: A Space Odyssey,'' but in how little. This is the work of an artist so sublimely confident that he doesn't include a single shot simply to keep our attention. He reduces each scene to its essence, and leaves it on screen long enough for us to contemplate it, to inhabit it in our imaginations. Alone among science-fiction movies, “2001'' is not concerned with thrilling us, but with inspiring our awe.

Robin Trower

A certain death of an artist is overconfidence.

Robin Morgan

I am an artist and a political being as well.

William Faulkner

The artist is still a little like the old court jester. He's supposed to speak his vicious paradoxes with some sense in them, but he isn't part of whatever the fabric is that makes a nation.

William Faulkner

In Europe, being an artist is a form of behavior. In America, it's an excuse for a form of behavior.

Willem de Kooning

Watercolors is the first and the last thing an artist does.

Willem de Kooning

The idea of space is given to the artist to change if he can. The subject matter in the abstract is space.

Willem de Kooning

An artist is forced by others to paint out of his own free will.

Willem de Kooning

Whatever an artist's personal feelings are, as soon as an artist fills a certain area on the canvas or circumscribes it, he becomes historical. He acts from or upon other artists.

Witold Gombrowicz

Any artist who respects himself ought to be, and in every sense of the term, an emigre.

Wole Soyinka

There are different kinds of artists and very often, I'll be very frank with you, I wish I were a different kind.

Wiz Khalifa

When you're from the East Coast or you're from the South, people expect you to sound a certain way. So if you don't sound that way, people won't label you as that type of artist. For me, I had a whole new lane to create for myself being from Pittsburgh and being a Midwest artist.

Wiz Khalifa

Every artist picks what they want to put out there, what image they want to portray, and what they want people to know about where they're from.

Wilson Pickett

Berry Gordy believed in owning the artist for life and controlling everything: the money, the station wagons, everything.

William Trevor

The same applies to any artist; we are the tools and instruments of our talent. We are outsiders; we have no place in society because society is what we’re watching, and dealing with.

Wes Borland

I'm always looking at other artists and trying to get inspired by different things.

Will Oldham

Venues are all the same, all feel the same, these generic blank spaces. I like artists like Lightning Bolt-bands that go in and kind of change things every time, play on the floor, set up in the middle of the room. They go in and they reinvent the space every time, which I feel is like the kind of thing that should just be happening.

Zachary Levi

I love being able to be the artist of the whole picture, as opposed to just one of the brushes.

Zac Efron

I've always been singing. Since day one. I started doing musical theater and you have to sing in musical theater and so that's where I got most of my training. So singing on stage, you just inevitably, when you're around other vocal artists, you get better at singing.

Zac Efron

I can draw really well. And I like to paint. I'm a bit of an artist.

Zanele Muholi

Fine artists deal with finery, but I deal with painful material.

Ziggy Marley

My greatest accomplishment is the freedom for doing what I want to do with my music...I love my freedom so I'm happy I am a free artist.

Ziggy Marley

I left Jamaica for a while, because as an artist I need to experience different things, see the world, have different energies. Living in one place is not good for me.

Ziggy Marley

As an artist myself I don't like to be preached. I want to enjoy myself, so I kind of use that perspective to make music.

Zac Posen

There's not one major greatest influence on my career. It would be film and great artists and great imagineers - Jim Henson, Walt Disney, Charlie Chaplin, people who understand the joy of the imagination.

Zac Posen

Be non-trend-driven, and explore, be creative and take risks as an artist and as a cultural communicator.

Yves Klein

The essential of painting is that 'something', that 'ethereal glue,' that 'intermediary product' which the artist exudes with all his creative being and which he has the power to place, to encrust, to impregnate into the pictorial matter of the painting.

Washington Allston

The painter who is content with the praise of the world for what does not satisfy himself, is not an artist, but an artisan; for though his reward be only praise, his pay is that of a mechanic.

Wassily Kandinsky

I value those artists who embody the expression of their life.

Wassily Kandinsky

The artist is the hand that, by touching this or that key, sets the soul vibrating automatically.

William Ernest Henley

It is the artist's function not to copy but to synthesise: to eliminate from that gross confusion of actuality which is his raw material whatever is accidental, idle, irrelevant, and select for perpetuation that only which is appropriate and immortal.

William Ernest Henley

Pointed criticism, if accurate, often gives the artist an inner sense of relief. The criticism that damages is that which disparages, dismisses, ridicules, or condemns.

William Stafford

Keep a journal, and don't assume that your work has to accomplish anything worthy: artists and peace-workers are in it for the long haul, and not to be judged by immediate results.