56 Artistry Quotes

A cartoonist is someone who has to draw the same thing day after day without repeating himself.

When you hear an instrumental song someone is singing over, you know right away it's wrong.

Bertolucci is extraordinary in his ability to perceive, he's a poet...he is very easy to work for.

On one plane, the very great writers and the popular romancers of the lower order always meet. They use all of themselves, helplessly, unselectively. They are above the primness and good taste of declining to give themselves away.

The man who tells the tale if he has a tale worth telling will know exactly what he is about and this business of the artist as a sort of starry-eyed inspired creature, dancing along, with his feet two or three feet above the surface of the earth, not really knowing what sort of prints he's leaving behind him, is nothing like the truth.

If I were a better artist, I'd be a painter, and if I were a better writer, I'd write books-- --but I'm not, so I draw cartoons!

But I do nothing that I don't like, such as 'inventing' up to the arty or 'down' to the corny. I happen to relish a certain type of corn. What I think is the really dangerous approach is the 'let's be artistic' attitude. I know that artistry just happens.

I want to be an artist not an erotic freak. I don't want to be sold to the public as a celluloid aphrodisiac.

When film is not a document, it is dream. That is why Tarkovsky is the greatest of them all. He moves with such naturalness in the room of dreams. He doesn't explain. What should he explain anyhow? He is a spectator, capable of staging his visions in the most unwieldy but, in a way, the most willing of media. All my life I have hammered on the doors of the rooms in which he moves so naturally. Only a few times have I managed to creep inside. Most of my conscious efforts have ended in embarrassing failure...

Please don't make me a joke. End the interview with what I believe. I don't mind making jokes, but I don't want to look like one... I want to be an artist, an actress with integrity... If fame goes by, so long, I've had you, fame. If it goes by, I've always known it was fickle. So at least it's something I experienced, but that's not where I live.

I want to do drawings which touch people...In figure or landscape I should wish to express, not sentimental melancholy, but serious sorrow.

I have often neglected my appearance. I admit it, and I also admit that it is 'shocking.' But look here, lack of money and poverty have something to do with it too, as well as a profound disillusionment, and besides, it is sometimes a good way of ensuring the solitude you need, of concentrating more or less on whatever study you are immersed in.

One strength of Bradley Joseph as an artist has been his keen ability to write inspiring music with appropriately titled songs that express that thought non-verbally. ...There is no doubting that Bradley Joseph holds up the legacy of Solo Journey in fine fashion. There are no diminishing returns here, just attributes of elegance, grace and beauty. That said, The Journey Continues has a wonderfully calming effect that will blissfully wash away your cares and concerns.

Yes, I've done Britney Spears, but don't blame me, okay? I make her up and she just takes everything off and does her own thing.

'I'm not an entertainer anymore. I'm ..an artist.'

'So you were an artist. Big deal! Elvis was an artist. But that didn't stop him from volunteering for the military in time of service. And that's why he's The King, and you're a schmuck.

Astaire really sweat - he toiled. He was a humorless Teutonic man, the opposite of his debonair image in top hat and tails. I liked him because he was an entertainer and an artist. There's a distinction between them. An artist is concerned only with what is acceptable to himself, where an entertainer strives to please the public. Astaire did both. Louis Armstrong was another one.

Once again [with the CD 'Unwrapped'], Gloria's mission is accomplished. As an entertainer, a vocalist and a writer, she has invited the world into her heart. The result is nothing short of incomparable.

In this profession, I always admire people who are going on, who have a sort of idea and, however crazy it is, are putting it through; they are putting people and things together, and they make something. I always admire this. But I can't see his pictures. I sit for perhaps twenty-five or thirty or fifty minutes and then I have to leave, because his pictures make me so nervous. I have the feeling the whole time that he wants to tell me things, but I don't understand what it is, and sometimes I have the feeling that he's bluffing, double-crossing me.

You don't know old Charles as I know him. He's got into a queer set, and there's no knowing what mischief he's up to. He's perfectly capable of starting a revolution in Armenia or somewhere merely to see how it feels like to be a revolutionary. That's the damned thing about the artistic temperament.

For the longest time, I didn't know the name of anyone in Led Zeppelin. I didn't care about what they looked like or ate. I wanted to listen, not read about them. I've always had that philosophy. I never started playing drums to get chicks or money or anything else. Long before I had concepts of those things, I wanted to be a drummer. That's the basic concept of what I do. I'm a drummer. I play drums. We are artists as drummers, and people should realize that. Not everyone can sit down and use all four of your limbs simultaneously to create something out of wood and plastic. We're creating something beautiful, and it may not sound pretty, but if you listen with the right ear, it sounds very pretty. If you try and listen to a song without drums, you haven't got anything.

I'd rather have a show that a hundred people need to see than a thousand people like to see.

A Sky of Honey is, in a sense, a lyric poem set to music. Full of lush, fecund melodies which swing from jazz to rock, it is threaded through with bird song and chatter and feels distinctly organic and earthy.... Side two is the album Pink Floyd might have made if Kate Bush had been their lead singer and lyricist in 1979.

Kate will never be an academic artist, drily applying intellectual music theory to the delight of a handful of peers, forging into new areas for the sake of 'progress'. Her style is personal, individual, impressionistic. Like Delius, her music will always flow from poetic necessity, breaking from the confines of tradition because expression demands it. I just hope that she will have the confidence to follow her instincts and not be discouraged by the music press, who in the main are baffled and annoyed by her uniqueness. Unable to pigeon-hole her music, they turn instead to ridicule and condescension to fill the pages. Which is a disservice to the British public who, to their undying credit, have made Kate Bush such a popular success.

Every speech, for Olivier, is like a mass of marble at which the sculptor chips away until its essential form and meaning are revealed. No matter how ignoble the character he plays, the result is always noble as a work of art. (p. 208)

I feel like a soul mother in my prime, even if Columbia doesn't.

I feel about Keaton the way an organist thinks of Bach.

He luxuriated in the sound of high language well spoken.

Bad is not sleazy. Bad has its own term to every individual and in my case it just means I've gotten a little rebellious on the album, broken out of my shell and I'm taking risks... Michael Jackson 'bad' kind of way. (about her Good Girl Gone Bad album)

Before they made S J Perelman they broke the mold.

With Moondance, I wrote the melody first. I played the melody on a soprano sax and I knew I had a song so I wrote lyrics to go with the melody. That's the way I wrote that one. I don't really have any words to particularly describe the song, sophisticated is probably the word I'm looking for. For me, Moondance is a sophisticated song. Frank Sinatra wouldn't be out of place singing that.

I've never been comfortable working live, and I'm still not. I was always more music-oriented and less star-oriented, which is why I've never been comfortable on big stages in big halls.

s a guitarist, I would always look for whatever felt right, something tasteful - and I guess I still do. [I'm] more interested in finding what fits the piece musically as opposed to how many notes I can play quickly. I was never one of those 'look at me' players. (2004)

Pavarotti is not vain, but conscious of being unique.

But to go deeper, beneath what people said (and these judgements, how superficial, how fragmentary they are!) in her own mind now, what did it mean to her, this thing she called life? Oh, it was very queer. Here was So-and-so in South Kensington; some one up in Bayswater; and somebody else, say, in Mayfair. And she felt quiet continuously a sense of their existence and she felt what a waste; and she felt what a pity; and she felt if only they could be brought together; so she did it. And it was an offering; to combine, to create; but to whom? An offering for the sake of offering, perhaps. Anyhow, it was her gift. Nothing else had she of the slightest importance; could not think, write, even play the piano. She muddled Armenians and Turks; loved success; hated discomfort; must be liked; talked oceans of nonsense: and to this day, ask her what the Equator was, and she did not know. All the same, that one day should follow another; Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday; that one should wake up in the morning; see the sky; walk in the park; meet Hugh Whitbread; then suddenly in came Peter; then these roses; it was enough. After that, how unbelievable death was! - that it must end; and no one in the whole world would know how she had loved it all.

It is a real pleasure to see music so bright and spontaneous expressed with corresponding ease and grace. ~ Johannes Brahms