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Quotes by famous people, credited to who said them. Your own quotes must not match any of these. More are added all the time. 1,159,190 quotes Who coined it · How we decide

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Art

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• “The artist may be well advised to keep his work to himself till it is completed, because no one can readily help him or advise him with it...but the scientist is wiser not to withhold a single finding or a single conjecture from publicity.”

  Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832) said by 1832 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “Now a willpower that I have polished with an artist's delight will sustain some shaky legs and some weary lungs. I will do it. Give a thought once in awhile to this little soldier of fortune of the twentieth century.”

  Che Guevara (1928–1967) said by 1967 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “The true wisdom is to be always seasonable, and to change with a good grace in changing circumstances. To love playthings well as a child, to lead an adventurous and honourable youth, and to settle when the time arrives, into a green and smiling age, is to be a good artist in life and deserve well of yourself and your neighbour.”

  Robert Louis Stevenson (1850–1894) said by 1894 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “You might curb your magnanimity, and be more of an artist, and load every rift of your subject with ore.”

  John Keats (1795–1821) first seen 1820 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: To Percy Bysshe Shelley (August 1820)

• “You will hear people say that poverty is the best spur to the artist. They have never felt the iron of it in their flesh. They do not know how mean it makes you. It exposes you to endless humiliation, it cuts your wings, it eats into your soul like a cancer. It is not wealth one asks for, but just enough to preserve one's dignity, to work unhampered, to be generous, frank, and independent.”

  W. Somerset Maugham (1874–1965) said by 1965 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “Self-doubt, which is the artist's bitterest enemy.”

  W. Somerset Maugham (1874–1965) said by 1965 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “The artist produces for the liberation of his soul. It is his nature to create as it is the nature of water to run down the hill.”

  W. Somerset Maugham (1874–1965) said by 1965 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “Every production of an artist should be the expression of an adventure of his soul.”

  W. Somerset Maugham (1874–1965) said by 1965 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “Flaubert spoke true: to succeed a great artist must have both character and fanaticism and few in this country are willing to pay the price. Our writers have either no personality and therefore no style or a false personality and therefore a bad style; they mistake prejudice for energy and accept the sensation of material well-being as a system of thought.”

  Cyril Connolly (1903–1974) said by 1974 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “Always dream and shoot higher than you know you can do. Don't bother just to be better than your contemporaries or predecessors. Try to be better than yourself. An artist is a creature driven by demons. He don't know why they choose him and he's usually too busy to wonder why. He is completely amoral in that he will rob, borrow, beg, or steal from anybody and everybody to get the work done.”

  William Faulkner (1897–1962) said by 1962 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “The artist doesn't have time to listen to the critics. The ones who want to be writers read the reviews, the ones who want to write don't have the time to read reviews.”

  William Faulkner (1897–1962) said by 1962 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “As no man is born an artist, so no man is born an angler.”

  Izaak Walton (1593–1683) said by 1683 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “You’re very good. Are you a professional artist?” “I dabble,” she said. Shadow had spent enough time talking to the English to know that this meant either that she dabbled, or that her work was regularly hung in the National Gallery or the Tate Modern.”

  Neil Gaiman (born 1960) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “Of course I should be very happy to sell a drawing but I am happier still when a real artist like Weissenbruch says about an unsalable??? study or drawing: "That is true to nature, I could work from that myself.”

  Vincent van Gogh (1853–1890) first seen 1882 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: quote in his letter to brother Theo, from The Hague, The Netherlands in Febr. 1882; as quoted in Vincent van Gogh, edited by Alfred H. Barr; Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1935], p. 20 (letter 177)

• “And my aim in my life is to make picture and drawings, as many and as well as I can, then, at the end of my life, I hope to pass away, looking back with love and tender regret, and thinking: "Oh, pictures I might have made!" Theo, I declare I prefer to think how arms, legs, head are attached to the trunk, rather than whether I myself am or am not more or less an artist.”

  Vincent van Gogh (1853–1890) first seen 1883 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Quote in his letter to brother Theo, from Drenthe, The Netherlands, Autumn 1883; as quoted in Vincent van Gogh, edited by Alfred H. Barr; Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1935], (letter 338) p. 21

• “I hope I have just had simply an artist's freak, and then a lot of fever after very considerable loss of blood, as an artery was severed, but my appetite came back at once. My digestion is all right, and so from day to day serenity returns to my brain.”

  Vincent van Gogh (1853–1890) first seen 1889 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Quote in his letter to brother Theo, from Arles, France, Jan. 1889; as quoted in Vincent van Gogh, edited by Alfred H. Barr; Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1935, (letter 569), p 24

• “You don't necessarily have to write to be a poet. Some people work in gas stations and they're poets. I don't call myself a poet because I don't like the word. I'm a trapeze artist.”

  Bob Dylan (born 1941) first seen 1965 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Bob Dylan Interview by Nora Ephron & Susan Edmiston (1965)

• “An artist has gotta be careful never really to arrive at a place where he thinks he's at somewhere. You always have to realize that you're constantly in a state of becoming.”

  Bob Dylan (born 1941) first seen 2005 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: No Direction Home (2005)

• “She's got everything she needs, she's an artist, she don't look back.”

  Bob Dylan (born 1941) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “This abdiction of life demanded of the artist is to be achieved only relatively. Most artists have retired too absolutely; they grow rusty, inflexible to the flow of currents.”

  Anaïs Nin (1903–1977) first seen 1932 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: November 26, 1932

• “I suppose you are a fool to do it [express a political view as an artist], but if you happen to be more interested in the political question, than the size of your audience, then it doesn't matter.”

  Orson Welles (1915–1985) said by 1985 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “Marlon Brando is not a gangster-actor, he's an actor. Axl Rose and them are not gangster rock-and-rollers, they're rock-and-rollers right. So I'm a rapper, this is what I do. I'm an artist.”

  Tupac Shakur (1971–1996) said by 1996 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “That is the artist's job: take mineral rock from dark silent earth, transform it into shining light-reflecting form from sky.”

  Philip K. Dick (1928–1982) said by 1982 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “Loss is not without its curious advantages for the artist. Major traumatic breaks are pretty common in the biographies of artists I respect.”

  William Gibson (born 1948) first seen 2007 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Interview in The New York Times Magazine (19 August 2007)

• “It is the nature of the artist to mind excessively what is said about him. Literature is strewn with the wreckage of men who have minded beyond reason the opinions of others.”

  Virginia Woolf (1882–1941) said by 1941 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “The artist after all is a solitary being.”

  Virginia Woolf (1882–1941) said by 1941 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “Morgan has the artist's mind; he says the simple things that clever people don't say; I find him the best of critics for that reason. Suddenly out comes the obvious thing that one has overlooked.”

  Virginia Woolf (1882–1941) first seen 1919 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: 6 November 1919

• “Everywhere these inventions of science by ignorant misuse of a new technique were wiping out the artist.”

  Frank Lloyd Wright (1867–1959) said by 1959 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “A man who works with his hands is a laborer; a man who works with his hands and his brain is a craftsman; but a man who works with his hands and his brain and his heart is an artist.”

  Louis Nizer (1902–1994) first seen 1948 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Between You and Me, Beechurst Press, 1948.

• “How terribly hard and almost impossible it is to tell the truth. More than anything else, the artist in us prevents us from telling aught as it really happened. We deal with the truth as the cook deals with meat and vegetables.”

  Eric Hoffer (1902–1983) first seen 1954 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Entry (1954)

• “What the rest of us see only under the influence of mescalin, the artist is congenitally equipped to see all the time. His perception is not limited to what is biologically or socially useful.”

  Aldous Huxley (1894–1963) said by 1963 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “A good traveler has no fixed plans and is not intent upon arriving. A good artist lets his intuition lead him wherever it wants. A good scientist has freed himself of concepts and keeps his mind open to what is. Thus the Master is available to all people and doesn't reject anyone. He is ready to use all situations and doesn't waste anything. This is called embodying the light.”

  Laozi (580–501 BC) said by 501 BC at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: interpreted by Stephen Mitchell (1992)

• “There are definitely people I respect and I love their music, but there was never really an artist that I said, "I want to be just like them, I love the way their career is going. I love their music." It wasn't really like that. I wanted to be like myself.”

  Hilary Duff (born 1987) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “I say that the true artist-seer, the heavenly fool who can and does produce beauty, is mainly dazzled to death by his own scruples, the blinding shapes and colors of his own sacred human conscience.”

  J. D. Salinger (1919–2010) said by 2010 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “An artist reveals his naked soul in his work - and so, gentle reader, do you when you respond to it.”

  Ayn Rand (1905–1982) said by 1982 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “Just as the creative artist is not allowed to choose, neither is he permitted to turn his back on anything: a single refusal, and he is cast out of the state of grace and becomes sinful all the way through.”

  Rainer Maria Rilke (1875–1926) first seen 1907 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Letter to his wife, reprinted in Rilke’s Letters on Cézanne (1952, trans. 1985). (October 23, 1907)

• “Pay attention only to the form; emotion will come spontaneously to inhabit it. A perfect dwelling always finds an inhabitant. The artist's business is to build the dwelling; as for the inhabitant, it is up to the reader to provide him.”

  André Gide (1869–1951) said by 1951 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “Respect is one of the greatest expressions of love. If other people try to write your story, it means they don't respect you. They consider that you're not a good artist who can write your own story, even though you were born to write your own story.”

  Miguel Ángel Ruiz (born 1952) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “Every artist makes himself born. It is very much harder than the other time, and longer.”

  Willa Cather (1873–1947) said by 1947 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “To note an artist's limitations is but to define his talent. A reporter can write equally well about everything that is presented to his view, but a creative writer can do his best only with what lies within the range and character of his deepest sympathies.”

  Willa Cather (1873–1947) first seen 1925 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Miss Jewett"; originally published as the Preface to The Best Stories of Sarah Orne Jewett (1925)

• “One has a nose. The nose scents and it chooses. An artist is simply a kind of pig snouting truffles.”

  Igor Stravinsky (1882–1971) first seen 1962 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: 1962, quoted in Andriessen and Schoenberger, The Apollonian Clockwork (1989). Oxford: Oxford University Press.

• “I don’t have to be a gentleman,” said Balzac. “I am an artist.”

  Orson Scott Card (born 1951) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “If the artist is necessarily sensitive, does that sensitiveness form in its essence a state constantly liable to shade off into the morbid? Does this liability, moreover, increase in proportion as the effort is great and the ambition intense?”

  Henry James (1843–1916) first seen 1888 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: The Journal of the Brothers de Goncourt," Fortnightly Review (October 1888)

• “Really, universally, relations stop nowhere, and the exquisite problem of the artist is eternally but to draw, by a geometry of his own, the circle within which they shall happily appear to do so.”

  Henry James (1843–1916) said by 1916 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “To see deep difficulty braved is at any time, for the really addicted artist, to feel almost even as a pang the beautiful incentive, and to feel it verily in such sort as to wish the danger intensified. The difficulty most worth tackling can only be for him, in these conditions, the greatest the case permits of.”

  Henry James (1843–1916) said by 1916 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “During the Vietnam War, which lasted longer than any war we've ever been in -- and which we lost -- every respectable artist in this country was against the war. It was like a laser beam. We were all aimed in the same direction. The power of this weapon turns out to be that of a custard pie dropped from a stepladder six feet high.”

  Kurt Vonnegut (1922–2007) first seen 2003 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Vonnegut at 80" Interview with David Hoppe Alternet (2003)

• “Leon’s, I’ll tell you what, Elon, Elon, is not going to buy Twitter. … He’s got himself a mess. He said the other day, ‘Oh, I’ve never voted for a Republican.’ I said, ‘I didn’t know that. He told me he voted for me.’ So, he’s another bullshit artist. But he’s not going to be buying it.”

  Donald Trump (born 1946) first seen 2022 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Claimed about Elon Musk, who later bought Twitter. Quoted in "Trump Bashes Elon Musk as ‘Bullshit Artist’ at Alaska Rally", Rolling Stone (July 9, 2022)

• “Fiction is based on reality unless you're a fairy-tale artist, you have to get your knowledge of life from somewhere. You have to know the material you're writing about before you alter it.”

  Hunter S. Thompson (1937–2005) first seen 2003 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Associated Press interview (2003)

• “It's rare that you see an artist in his 30s or 40s able to really contribute something amazing.”

  Steve Jobs (1955–2011) said by 2011 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “Only he is an artist who can make a riddle out of a solution.”

  Karl Kraus (writer) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

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