The good thing about being an artist, is it’s a legitimate way of looking at things cross-eyed.

Being an artist is dragging your innermost feelings out, giving a piece of yourself, no matter in which art form, in which medium.

Art must be an expression of love or it is nothing.

There’s just some dysfunctionalism with artists. There are good things and bad things about being an artist, and the good thing is, sometimes you get an inside line on what’s really happening. You develop these strange antennae that clue you in to what’s really going on.

Not any particular religion or school of religion, but being an artist, you have to be spiritual, in a way.

Being an artist means belonging to a unique, exciting gang of outlaws.

Being an artist means ceasing to take seriously that very serious person we are when we are not an artist.

Being an artist is a way of saying, I am here, and this is what I stand for.

Over the years I have learned that creating art has made me happy. I used to be a lawyer and I’m much happier being an artist.

artists … all have a need that cannot be met by another human being.

Being an artist is not only what you do, but how you live your life.

If you are wiling to do something that might not work, you are closer to being an artist.

Life is different than it was in the Nineties. I’m a dad, and there are other things I have to get done in an afternoon than just being an artist.

Art is the desire of a man to express himself, to record the reactions of his personality to the world he lives in.

A musician must make music, an artist must paint, a poet must write, if he is to be ultimately at peace with himself.

The words. I love words. I love to write. Being an artist is what I love.

I completely take on the risk, the poker game, which being an artist means, and I’m going to try to make a film which honestly reflects what I have in my head.

One of the beauties of being an artist is that you can create a whole new world, with circumstances that are better in your invented world than they are in the real world.

Practicality continues to be a challenge for me – it’s at odds with being an artist. I actually had a career on stage in New York – not a brilliant career or I’d still be doing it – but I got enough work to keep my agent and my union health insurance.

I am interested in art as a means of living a life; not as a means of making a living.

I hadn’t known anything else, other than being an artist, and I needed to be a person for a while, really get to know myself without that whole thing [of selling music] surrounding me.

It is a mistake for a sculptor or a painter to speak or write very often about his job. It releases tension needed for his work.

I could find faults with all my albums because that’s just a part of being an artist – it’s hard being a human being, isn’t it?

When you have a dream, you don’t even want to tell yourself straight out that this is what you want. You try to hide it. I never told myself I wanted to be a tennis player. But being an artist, yes, this is what I wanted since I first sat down to draw or paint. I knew that . . . I had that vision.

There are great disciplines from being a sportsman that you can transfer into being an artist. The preparation, the sacrifice, the constant desire to improve.

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

Being an artist for my well being and as a living, I live in a place of observance and interest in what I consider to be the most relevant questions.

But I found that being an artist and doing accurate work is very difficult.

Sometimes being an artist means knowing when to let someone see something in you that is there that you can’t hear or see.

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

Lying in bed would be an altogether perfect and supreme experience if only one had a colored pencil long enough to draw on the ceiling.

Maybe being an artist is a kind of detachment. You’re in the cave, you’re isolated, you’re apart from everything and it’s there you can find out what you believe in, or what is – what is the nature of being, as you see it.

My father didn’t think being an artist was a respectable or worthy goal for a man. He hoped I would see my way to more serious work and would find myself turning towards medicine, law, or business.

I think being an artist, or just being creative, or imaginative, or aware, where I think everybody starts out, and by about the age of 10, that’s been pretty effectively whipped out by education.

Being an artist is a lifestyle.

An artist is not paid for his labor but for his vision.

Being an artist is not easy – I have always said that to the students I have taught over the years. It’s a huge sacrifice.

The progress of an artist is a continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality.

Politics is politics; art is art. If you play a political role, you have to stop being an artist.

I am a serious artist in my own right, in the sense that I’ve spent my entire life being an artist and trying to be an artist and making work.

As much as I believe in the capacity for art to create change, and as much as being an artist is physically and emotionally challenging, there is ultimately something a bit comfortable about making art in the comfort of your own home.

I don’t look at myself as a celebrity. People recognize me, but it’s all about my music, my songs. It’s not like I’m a greater being. I take my kids to school, pick them up, go to the grocery store. I’m a mother, and my kids mean more to me than even being an artist.

The main thing that attracts me to Buddhism is probably what attracts every artist to being an artist – that it’s a godlike thing. You are the ultimate authority. There is no other ultimate authority.

Being an artist, it’s always tempting to measure success through other people‘s eyes, be they critics, journalists or audiences.

Being an artist is a job for life.

To practice any art, no matter how well or badly, is a way to make your soul grow. So do it.

To be born with a unique instinct, will demand ‘unique duties‘. If you didn’t think about being an artist before 7 years of age you probably don’t have it and you will be able to paint what you want to paint.

To be a qawwal is more than being a performer, more than being an artist. One must be willing to release one’s mind and soul from one’s body to achieve ecstasy through music. Qawwali is enlightenment itself.

There’s a great difference between being popular and being an artist.

Being an artist means seeing things and never having the ability to shut your eyes.

Being an artist is not exactly the most universally respected, or secure thing to do with your life. It can be frightening and you can feel that you’re taking a lot of risks just with your own life, and your family‘s security. But the rewards outweigh those things.

I never stop being a mother and I never stop being an artist. You understand? Which is probably why my kids are so creative, because it’s not separated.

Being an artist, its all a journey, and you learn where the subtle patterns lie.

Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once we grow up.

It was a natural path for me, being an artist. Both my parents were artists. I was surrounded by it and I instinctively was drawn toward it, and received a lot of encouragement.

We all have our insecurity and that’s normal. And you have to learn to accept that about being an artistic person or aspiring to be an artistic person is that fears and insecurity, they don’t go away.

I can’t imagine anybody who ends up being an artist who didn’t pass through a time of geekiness.

This is a very general understanding of art in China, that being an artist can make you money and turn you into a star.

Part of my work is dedicated to artisanship and can only be done by very few people because it requires a specific technique. Being an artist is being at the service of yourself; I am at the service of other people.

So there’s a cloud of rage around me, but being an artist kind of changes that. No matter what you thought coming in, what ignorant thing you believed, you’re in show business for two years, you’re like, “OK, I was wrong.” It’s hard to be mad at any particular group of people when you’re an artist.

Art is the elimination of the unnecessary.

Being an artist is this kind of occupation in which you have to make people care about your obsession.

Arguably, no artist grows up: If he sheds the perceptions of childhood, he ceases being an artist.

I’m terminally dissatisfied. That’s probably part of being an artist.

Once I started reinventing for myself what being an artist was – not going into a studio, but making things on my own terms in response to being out in the world – I started to really enjoy it… I realized that everything else for me was hell.

I think you’re all mad. But that’s part and parcel of being an artistic genius, isn’t it?

In our time there are many artists who do something because it is new; they see their value and their justification in this newness. They are deceiving themselves; novelty is seldom the essential. This has to do with one thing only; making a subject better from its intrinsic nature.

Being an artist is not just about what happens when you are in the studio. The way you live, the people you choose to love and the way you love them, the way you vote, the words that come out of your mouth… will also become the raw material for the art you make.

The past is part of the present, is part of the future, it’s all part of being an artist. You cannot be something that you’re not when you’re not that thing anymore, and if you do that then you’re a liar.

I never decided at all to be an artist; being an artist seems to have happened to me.

I’m interested in storytelling. I love being an artist now and connecting through art.

As much as I love being an artist, I love being a mom even more.

I always thought that it was every performer’s dream. That’s the epitome of being an artist, being able to express song, dance and acting in a live theatre setting and really connecting with an audience on that level.

Women are emotional! And being an artist and a woman is probably more difficult because you have more stuff to overcome.

For me, painting is a way to forget life. It is a cry in the night, a strangled laugh.

That’s just a part of being an artist: you can’t write great stuff all the time, because if you did, then you’d be inhuman. The human side of people is that sometimes they fail.

The best thing about being an artist, instead of a madman or someone who writes letters to the editor, is that you get to engage in satisfying work. Even if you never publish a word, you have something important to pour yourself into.

In the end, I feel that one has to have a bit of neurosis to go on being an artist. A balanced human seldom produces art. It’s that imbalance which impels us… The artist lives with anxiety.

Being an artist is being an isolated individual.

Every portrait that is painted with feeling is a portrait of the artist, not of the sitter.

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

The awesome thing about being an artist? You can’t be fired from your own mind.

Being an artist is supposed to be a scam, not a career.

An artist cannot fail; it is a success to be one.

I think that the whole experience of living, breathing, thinking, and being lost in wonderment is, for me, that of being an artist. And the idea of identifying as someone who is just living and existing and making objects or paintings-somehow I moved away from that years and years ago.

As a kid, I wanted to be an inventor and realizing that being an artist is like being an inventor because you create problems for yourself and you solve them and you create things that weren’t there before. That’s awfully simplified, but that’s how it is.

Being an artist is nothing, or at least, not enough; what you want is to be a poet.

Why do we make records? Because we want to say something. Why are you in art? Because you want to say something. The second you don’t have anything to say, you stop making art – you might start making product. And I’m interested in being an artist.

Art washes away from the soul the dust of everyday life.

Sometimes being an artist is a real drag. It can be incredibly bureaucratic.

A work of art which did not begin in emotion is not art.

Being an artist is more of a mindset, a way of seeing things; it is no longer so much about producing something.

I often joke that I straddle psychosis and neurosis, and that being an artist keeps me in the middle, so I can work between the two.

I never considered myself an artist. I aspire to be an artist, but I never thought I had the depth or substance or gift to be an artist. I do think I have some talent, but it doesn’t go as far as being an artist.

Being an artist and being a teacher are two conflicting things. When I paint, my work manifests the unexpected… In teaching it’s just the opposite. I must account for every line, shape and colour and I am forced to give an explanation of the inexplicable and account for the variety of styles the students present.

The main thing is to be moved, to love, to hope, to tremble, to live. Be a man before being an artist!

It became like a symbolic thing, to be “an artist.” After Duchamp, I realized that being an artist is more about a lifestyle and attitude than producing some product.

There’s such a freedom about being an artist… You’re not accountable – you’re this renegade thing.

Being an artist and having to be responsible for the art that you make is really quite challenging, and as you get older it becomes more and more difficult.

An artist is someone who produces things that people don’t need to have but that he – for some reason – thinks it would be a good idea to give them.

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 part of being an artist is having the ability to define your own responsibilities. I certainly wouldn’t prescribe any. As far as I’m concerned, my biggest responsibility is to my own imagination. We’re all conduits. Art preceded me, and it’ll be here long after I’m gone.

The teacher is of course an artist, but being an artist does not mean that he or she can make the profile, can shape the students. What the educator does in teaching is to make it possible for the students to become themselves.

The one thing about being a creator, about being an artist, is that you get to explore your ideas. We’re fortunate that we’re in the position to do that, and I don’t take it for granted.

The thing about being an artist today is you get to develop right in front of people’s eyes before you even put out an album.

It is a widely accepted notion among painters that it does not matter what one paints as long as it is well painted. This is the essence of academicism.

I think about that “empty” space a lot. That emptiness is what allows for something to actually evolve in a natural way. I’ve had to learn that over the years – because one of the traps of being an artist is to always want to be creating, always wanting to produce.

Being an artist isn’t a genetic disposition or a specific talent. It’s an attitude we can all adopt. It’s a hunger to seize new ground, make connections, and work without a map. If you do those things, you’re an artist.

Being an artist is a totally godlike thing to do – and I have a god complex.

I guess I’ve always liked the idea of being an artist.

Being an artist is a very long game. It is not a 10-year game. I hope I’ll be around making art when I’m 80

There is nothing more difficult for a truly creative painter than to paint a rose, because before he can do so he has first to forget all the roses that were ever painted.

No great artist ever sees things as they really are. If he did, he would cease to be an artist.

I think being an artist and taking on those challenges is just how it is for me. Because I was always a foreigner, I was always the outsider.

I’m a sponge, the more I absorb, the more I am able to articulate my vision, as artists do, like Picasso. I’m an artist in that light. I went from being an artist to an artiste.

The artist is not a different kind of person, but every person is a different kind of artist.

All you can do as an artist is do what you think is an extension of you. You put down on paper … who you are. That’s what being an artist is all about. And when it gets done, you don’t look back at it and say, Oh, I could have done that better.

My older sister achieved her dream of being an artist. She’s an illustrator living in Manhattan.

I was at one point thinking about being an art historian, when I was in school. And not being an artist, but I decided I was going to be an artist but I’m really mad for art history and the masters mostly.

The story that I wanna tell is pretty much about the way I grew up. Being bi-racial, growing up in a big city and being an artist.