"You might as well ask an artist to explain his art, or ask a poet to explain his poem. It defeats the purpose. The meaning is only clear thorough the search."
— Rick Riordan

"Every artist was first an amateur. "
— Ralph Waldo Emerson

"Always stick to your dreams."
— Ashley Tisdale

"Inside you there’s an artist you don’t know about… say yes quickly, if you know, if you’ve known it from before the beginning of the universe."
— Mawlana Jalal-al-Din Rumi

"To photograph is to hold one's breath, when all faculties converge to capture fleeting reality. It's at that precise moment that mastering an image becomes a great physical and intellectual joy."
— Henri Cartier-Bresson (The Mind's Eye: Writings on Photography and Photographers)

"We who fight for our dream suffer far more when it doesn't work out, because we cannot fall back on the old excuse: 'Oh, well, I didn't really want it anyway.' We do want it and know that we have staked everything on it...Then, we warriors of light must be prepared to have patience in difficult times and to know that the Universe is conspiring in our favor, even though we may not understand how...When we first begin fighting for our dream, we have no experience and make many mistakes. The secret of life, though, is to fall seven times and to get up eight times. So why is it so important to live our personal calling if we are only going to suffer more than other people? Because, once we have overcome the defeats--and we always do--we are filled by a greater sense of euphoria and confidence...If you believe yourself worthy of the thing you fought so hard to get, then you become an instrument of God, you help the Soul of the World, and you understand why you are here."
— Paulo Coelho (The Alchemist)

"The simplest acts of kindness are by far more powerful then a thousand heads bowing in prayer."
— Mahatma Gandhi

"For me, the camera is a sketch book, an instrument of intuition and spontaneity."
— Henri Cartier-Bresson

"Just for the record, being smeared with shit and naked in the wilderness, spattered with pink vomit, this does not necessarily make you a real artist."
— Chuck Palahniuk (Diary)

"Just for the record, waking up on drugs with your pubic hair shaved and something plastic stuck in your vagina doesn't necessarily make you a real artist."
— Chuck Palahniuk (Diary)

"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

"I have Social Disease. I have to go out every night. If I stay home one night I start spreading rumours to my dogs."
— Andy Warhol

"If I create from the heart, nearly everything works; if from the head, almost nothing."
— Marc Chagall (Marc Chagall et les fables de La Fontaine: Musee du pays de Sarrebourg, 15 mai-15 juillet 1992)

"The Artist always has the masters in his eyes."
— Ralph Waldo Emerson

"All in all, the creative act is not performed by the artist alone.. the spectator brings the work in contact with the external world by deciphering and interpreting its inner qualifications and thus adds his contribution to the creative act."
— Marcel Duchamp

"No man is equal to his book. All the best products of his mental activity go into his book, where they come separated from the mass of inferior products with which they are mingled in his daily talk."
— Herbert Spencer (Herbert Spencer: An Autobiography)

"If he could
Describe it at all,
He would be
An artist.

But if he
Were an artist,
There would be deeper wounds,
Which he could not describe. "
— E. L. Masters

"Everyone should eat hashish, but only once."
— Salvador Dali

"Every artist joins a conversation that's been going on for generations, even millennia, before he or she joins the scene."
— John Barth

"A line is a dot that went for a walk.
"
— Paul Klee

"The artist stands on the human being as a statue does on a pedestal. "
— Novalis (Novalis: Philosophical Writings)

"This is the time for every artist in every genre to do what he or she does loudly and consistently. It doesn't matter to me what your position is. You've got to keep asserting the complexity and the originality of life, and the multiplicity of it, and the facets of it. This is about being a complex human being in the world, not about finding a villain. This is no time for anything else than the best that you've got."
— Toni Morrison

"Whatever the source of emotion that drives me to create, I want to give it a form which has some connection with the visible world, even if it is only to wage war on that world....I want my paintings to be able to defend themselves to resist the invader, just as though there were razor blades on all surfaces so no one could touch them without cutting his hands."
— Pablo Picasso

"It is your work in life that is the ultimate seduction."
— Pable Picasso

""An artist is like a woman who can do nothing but love, and who succumbs to every stray male jackass.""
— Heinrich Boll (The Clown)

"The artist of today must work with his face turned toward the dawn, steadfastly believing that his dreams will come true before the setting of the sun. "
— Albert Pinkham Ryder

"It is a wise artist who knows when to cry 'halt' in his composition, but it should be pondered over in his heart and worked out with prayer and fasting."
— Albert Pinkham Ryder

"The artist (I suppose) usually pays for the privilege by some sort of partial insomnia, by the possession of one faculty that will not be controlled nor put to sleep. In a poet this must often be the visual imagination, bringing before his eyes a succession of images which he never summoned, and of which some (it is only too likely) will be ugly or pitiful."
— Mary Lascelles (Jane Austen and Her Art)

"Art is long. The artist must buckle himself with infinite patience. His ears must be deaf to the clamour of his insistent friends who would quicken his pace. His eyes must see naught but the vision beyond. He must await the season of fruitage without haste, without worldly ambitions, without vexation of the spirit. An inspiration is no more than a seed that must be planted and nourished. It gives growth as it grows to the artist, only as he watches and waits with his highest effort. "
— Albert Pinkham Ryder

""But will you not have a house to care for? Meals to cook? Children whining for this or that? Will you have time for the work?" "I'll make time," I promised. "The house will not always be so clean, the cooking may be a little hasty, and the whining children will sit on my lap and I'll sing to them while I work." "
— Gloria Whelan

"The artist is always beginning. Any work of art which is not a beginning, an invention, a discovery is of little worth."
— Ezra Pound

"An artist must be the hammer for the heavy anvil of our souls."
— Parodites

"I recount as this journey begins where I rest to gather the tale from this
same old house resting on the hill, leaving me a view of a carnival once seen from just across the tracks. My pallet is dry now. The colors I see no more. The rain has washed away many of the signs that once stood for a prosper
home and family. My grave is waiting. The dreams once filled my head with
images of world unison, hope and companionship for all. The saga spoken
through my canvas drew darker as the years went on to the bitter cold nights.
All that comes to me now are glimpses of faces that graced my soul.
"
— Kris Courtney

"“There is only one thing left for you to do,” John Sloan advised one artist. “Pull off your socks and try with your feet.”"
— Ross Wetzsteon (Republic of Dreams: Greenwich Village: The American Bohemia, 1910-1960)

"[I]t was [Barnett] Newman who made the famously wry remark, “Aesthetics is for the artist as ornithology is for the birds,”"
— Ross Wetzsteon (Republic of Dreams: Greenwich Village: The American Bohemia, 1910-1960)

"The joy of the artist is always to deepen the mystery"
— Francis Bacon