Artist Quotes and Sayings

Artists can color the sky red because they know it’s blue. Those of us who aren’t artists must color things the way they really are or people might think we’re stupid.
Jules Feiffer

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.
Pablo Picasso

Remember I’m an artist. And you know what that means in a court of law. Next worst to an actress.
Joyce Cary

To send light into the darkness of men’s hearts - such is the duty of the artist.
Schumann

Beware of the artist who’s an intellectual also. The artist who doesn’t fit.
F. Scott Fitzgerald

Poets do not go mad; but chess-players do. Mathematicians go mad, and cashiers; but creative artists very seldom.
Gilbert Keith Chesterton

The aim of every artist is to arrest motion, which is life, by artificial means and hold it fixed so that a hundred years later, when a stranger looks at it, it moves again since it is life.
William Faulkner

Art is a collaboration between God and the artist, and the less the artist does the better.
Andre Gide

One of the reasons why medieval and renaissance architecture is so much better than our own is that the architects were artists. Bernini, one of the great artists of seventeenth-century Rome, was a sculptor.
Kenneth Clark

No I ask it for the knowledge of a lifetime.
James Whistler

But that’s what being an artist is - feeling crummy before everyone else feels crummy.
The New Yorker

I don’t advise any one to take it up as a business proposition, unless they really have talent, and are crippled so as to deprive them of physical labor.
Grandma Moses

If Botticelli were alive today he’d be working for Vogue.
Peter Ustinov

A living is made, Mr Kemper, by selling something that everybody needs at least once a year. Yes, sir! And a million is made by producing something that everybody needs every day. You artists produce something that nobody needs at any time.
Thornton Wilder

His subjects are softened and sentimentalised too much. It is not simple unaffected nature that we see, but nature sitting for her picture.
William Hazlitt

If people dug up the remains of this civilization a thousand years hence, and found Epstein’s statues and that man Ellis, they would think we were just savages.
Doris Lessing

We all know that Art is not truth. Art is a lie that makes us realize truth, at least the truth that is given us to understand. The artist must know the manner whereby to convince others of the truthfulness of his lies.
Pablo Picasso

I marry? Oh, I could never bring myself to do it. I would have been in mortal misery all my life for fear my wife might say, ‘That’s a pretty little thing,’ after I had finished a picture.
Edgar Degas

Nobody cares much at heart about Titian, only there is a strange undercurrent of everlasting murmur about his name, which means the deep consent of all great men that he is greater than they.
John Ruskin

It is comparatively easy to achieve a certain unity in a picture by allowing one colour to dominate, or by muting all the colours. Matisse did neither. He clashed his colours together like cymbals and the effect was like a lullaby.
John Berger

I should desire that the last words which I should pronounce in this Academy, and from this place, might be the name of - Michael Angelo.
Joshua Reynolds

The Epstein makes me feel physically sick. The wretched woman has two sets of breasts and a hip joint like a merry thought.
John Galsworthy

When Sir Joshua Reynolds died
All Nature was degraded;
The King dropped a tear in the Queen’s ear,
And all his pictures faded.
William Blake

The artist is the opposite of the politically minded individual, the opposite of the reformer, the opposite of the idealist. The artist does not tinker with the universe, he recreates it out of his own experience and understanding of life.
Henry Miller

Artistic growth is, more than it is anything else, a refining of the sense of truthfulness. The stupid believe that to be truthful is easy; only the artist, the great artist, knows how difficult it is.
Willa Cather

The big artist…keeps an eye on nature and steals her tools.
Thomas Eakins

Artists who seek perfection in everything are those who cannot attain it in anything.
Eugene Delacroix

The job of the artist is always to deepen the mystery.
Francis Bacon