83 Inspiring Artist Quotes

Art has the power to move, inspire, and transform our perspectives. It captures the essence of human experience, conveying emotions and ideas that words often fail to express. Whether you're an artist seeking motivation or an admirer of creativity in its many forms, the wisdom of those who have dedicated their lives to art can provide profound insights. In this collection, we've curated 83 inspiring quotes from renowned artists, each one shedding light on the journeys, struggles, and triumphs that define the artistic process. Let their words be a guiding light as you navigate your own creative path.

1. “Every artist was first an amateur.” - Ralph Waldo Emerson

2. “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

3. “The job of the artist is always to deepen the mystery.” - Francis Bacon

4. “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

5. “It costs nothing to dream and everything not to” - Rodney White

6. “If you feel that strongly about something, you have an obligation to try and change my mind.” - Aaron Sorkin

7. “Dogmatism of all kinds--scientific, economic, moral, as well as political--are threatened by the creative freedom of the artist. This is necessarily and inevitably so. We cannot escape our anxiety over the fact that the artists together with creative persons of all sorts, are the possible destroyer of our nicely ordered systems. (p. 76)” - Rollo May

8. “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

9. “The real importance of automatism lay in the fact that it led to a different relation between the artist and the creative act. Where the artist had traditionally been seen as someone who invents a personal world, bringing into being something unique to his own 'genius', the surrealists conceived themselves as explorers and researchers rather than 'artist' in the traditional sense and it was discovery rather than invention that became crucial for them.” - Michael Richardson

10. “All of us,' he said, 'have hopes of being poet, artist, discoverer, philospoher, scientist; of possessing the attributes of all these simultaneously. Few are permitted to achieve any of them in daily life. But in travel we attain them all. Then we have our day of glory, when all our dreams come true, when we can be anything we like, as long as we like, and, when we are tired of it, pull up stakes and move on. Travel -- the solitude of the mountains, the emptiness of the desert, the delicacy of the minaret; eternal change, limitless contrast, unending variety.' (Eric Lang)” - Robert Edison Fulton Jr.

11. “Only by examining our personal biases can we grow as artists; only by cultivating empathy can we grow as people.” - Jen Knox

12. “Does it not occur to people that I might be artificial by nature?” - Maurice Ravel

13. “I have forced myself to contradict myself in order to avoid conforming to my own taste.” - Marcel Duchamp

14. “Where Norman Rockwell is the Artist for the man on the street, O'Henry is his author.” - Sonia Rumzi

15. “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

16. “The advice I like to give young artists, or really anybody who'll listen to me, is not to wait around for inspiration. Inspiration is for amateurs; the rest of us just show up and get to work. If you wait around for the clouds to part and a bolt of lightning to strike you in the brain, you are not going to make an awful lot of work. All the best ideas come out of the process; they come out of the work itself. Things occur to you. If you're sitting around trying to dream up a great art idea, you can sit there a long time before anything happens. But if you just get to work, something will occur to you and something else will occur to you and something else that you reject will push you in another direction. Inspiration is absolutely unnecessary and somehow deceptive. You feel like you need this great idea before you can get down to work, and I find that's almost never the case.” - Chuck Close

17. “It's the movies that have really been running things in America ever since they were invented. They show you what to do, how to do it, when to do it, how to feel about it, and how to look how you feel about it."Andy Warhol” - Andy Warhol

18. “[I]t was [Barnett] Newman who made the famously wry remark, “Aesthetics is for the artist as ornithology is for the birds,” - Ross Wetzsteon

19. “An artist without ideas is a mendicant; barren, he goes begging among the hours.” - Irving Stone

20. “The notion of making money by popular work, and then retiring to do good work on the proceeds, is the most familiar of all the devil's traps for artists.” - Logan Pearsall Smith

21. “The great artists are those who impose their personal vision upon humanity.” - Guy de Maupassant

22. “The need to be a great artist makes it hard to be an artist. The need to produce a great work of art makes it hard to produce any art at all.” - Julia Cameron

23. “The light of artistic creation is also blinding.The artist can’t see the suffering he causesto those around him. And the’ll neverunderstand the purity of his goal, how the heatof his invention won’t melt the ice in his heart.He must be ruthless!No religion, no purpose except this:Make something perfect before you die.Life is short, art is for all time” - Ian McEwan

24. “Weirdism is definitely the cornerstone of many an artist's career.” - E.A. Bucchianeri

25. “The philosophers write about things as they are and as they appear to be, but as an artist I find that appearance is everything.” - Gary Inbinder

26. “In his creative work the artist is dependent on sources and resources deriving from the spiritual unconscious.” - Viktor E. Frankl

27. “[...] I've come to the conclusion that the artist can not justify life or come up with a cogent reason as to why life is meaningful, but the artist can provide you with a cold glass of water on a hot day.” - Woody Allen

28. “I am an artist you know ... it is my right to be odd.” - E.A. Bucchianeri

29. “The cruelest thing you can do to an artist is tell them their work is flawless when it isn't” - Yahtzee Croshaw

30. “El Sueno de la razon produce monstrous. (The sleep of reason breeds monsters)” - Francisco Goya

31. “One does not have to be a philosopher to be a successful artist, but he does have to be an artist to be a successful philosopher. His nature is to view the world in an unpredictable albeit useful light.” - Criss Jami

32. “Authors can write stories without people assuming that they are autobiographies, but songwriters and poets are often considered to be the characters in their works. I like Michelangelo's vision, 'I saw the angel in the marble and carved until I set him free.” - Criss Jami

33. “What we must think about is an agriculture with a human face. We must give standing to the new pioneers, the homecomers bent on the most important work for the next century - a massive salvage operation to save the vulnerable but necessary pieces of nature and culture and to keep the good and artful examples before us. It is time for a new breed of artists to enter front and center, for the point of art, after all, is to connect. This is the homecomer I have in mind: the scientist, the accountant who converses with nature, a true artist devoted to the building of agriculture and culture to match the scenery presented to those first European eyes.” - Wes Jackson

34. “It is a matter of artistic instinct. In his own thoughts and feelings and way of doing things an actor is worth nothing or he is worth something. If he is worth something then he will try to be worth something more as is only normal in anyone who wants to get on. I can think of no other way to explain artistic development.” - Maurice Chevalier

35. “This assumption of the intrinsically repressive nature of collective experience and redemptive power of individuation is a staple of contemporary art theory and criticism. I would argue that a closer analysis of collaborative and collective art practices can reveal a more complex model of social change and identity, one in which the binary oppositions of divided vs. coherent subjectivity, desiring singularity vs. totalizing collective, liberating distanciation vs. stultifying interdependence, are challenged and complicated.” - Grant H. Kester

36. “Where there is a true art and genuine virtuosity the artist can paint an incomparable masterpiece without leaving even a trace of his identity.” - Orhan Pamuk

37. “Miss, I'd gladly pay you to remove your clothes.” - David Scheier

38. “The mystery of esthetic like that of material creation is accomplished. The artist, like the god of the creation, remains within or behind or beyond or above his handiwork, invisible, refined out of existence, indifferent, paring his fingernails.” - James Joyce

39. “Every true artist is at war with the world.” - Anthony Kiedis

40. “If there’s a thing, a scene, maybe, an image that you want to see real bad, that you need to see but it doesn’t exist in the world around you, at least not in the form that you envision, then you create it so that you can look at it and have it around, or show it to other people who wouldn’t have imagined it because they perceive reality in a more narrow, predictable way. And that’s it. That’s all an artist does.” - Tom Robbins

41. “None can sense more deeply than you artists, ingenious creators of beauty that you are, something of the pathos with which God at the dawn of creation looked upon the work of his hands.” - Pope John Paul II

42. “You have a lot to learn, young man. Philosophy. Theology. Literature. Poetry. Drama. History. Archeology. Anthropology. Mythology. Music. These are your tools as much as brush and pigment. You cannot be an artist until you are civilized. You cannot be civilized until you learn. To be civilized is to know where you belong in the continuum of our art and your world. To surmount the past, you must know the past.” - John Logan

43. “The best incentive for an artist are the harshest criticism” - Miguel Ángel Sáez Gutiérrez

44. “But an artist, he realized. Or rather so-called artist. Bohemian. That's closer to it. The artistic life without the talent.” - Philip K. Dick

45. “When a mad man found some certain way to express his insanity in original way, he would get promoted to be called an Artist.... Wait, are you talking about me?” - Hiroko Sakai

46. “In every motions to put colors on my canvas, I feel like I am screaming, "I AM HERE"... To whom?.. To where?... Where am I going to...?” - Hiroko Sakai

47. “Wherever I wander off to, when I draw, when I paint, I get my life back. I am lucky that I am an Artist.” - Hiroko Sakai

48. “When you paint late at night, drinking beer or wine or both, you gotta be very careful to watch what you are doing...” - Hiroko Sakai

49. “The art does not always mimic the artist. You never know the real person until you slide beneath their surface” - Lisa Renee Jones

50. “I've always liked the minds of criminals, they seem similar to artists.” - Richard Linklater

51. “She, however, attentively watched my looks, and her artist's pride was gratified, no doubt, to read my heartfelt admiration in my eyes.” - Anne Brontë

52. “Restoration is a skilled profession. You might even call it an art in its own right, except that it is frowned on to be original. First rule of restoration: follow the intention of the artist. Never try to improve on him.” - J.M. Coetzee

53. “During the act of making something, I experience a kind of blissful absence of the self and a loss of time. When I am done, I return to both feeling as restored as if I had been on a trip. I almost never get this feeling any other way. I once spent sixteen hours making 150 wedding invitations by hand and was not for one instance of that time tempted to eat or look at my watch. By contrast, if seated at the computer, I check my email conservatively 30,000 times a day. When I am writing, I must have a snack, call a friend, or abuse myself every ten minutes. I used to think that this was nothing more than the difference between those things we do for love and those we do for money. But that can't be the whole story. I didn't always write for a living, and even back when it was my most fondly held dream to one day be able to do so, writing was always difficult. Writing is like pulling teeth. From my dick.” - David Rakoff

54. “‎"But when I fell in love with black, it contained all color. It wasn’t a negation of color. It was an acceptance. Because black encompasses all colors. Black is the most aristocratic color of all.... You can be quiet and it contains the whole thing." Happy birthday to Louise Nevelson (1899-1988)!” - Louise Nevelson. Sky Cathedral. 1958.

55. “Growing up, I'd already decided I wanted to be a beatnik. A Bohemian poet, I thought. Or a musician. Maybe an artist. I'd dress in black turtlenecks and smoke Gitanes. I'd listen to cool jazz in clubs, getting up to read devastating truths from my notebook, leaning against the microphone, cigarette dangling from my hand.” - Charles de Lint

56. “An artist must have imagination. An artist who does not use his imagination is a mechanic.” - Robert Henri

57. “It is the poet and philosopher who provide the community of objectives in which the artist participates. Their chief preoccupation, like the artist, is the expression in concrete form of their notions of reality. Like him, they deal with the verities of time and space, life and death, and the heights of exaltation as well as the depths of despair. The preoccupation with these eternal problems creates a common ground which transcends the disparity in the means used to achieve them.” - Mark Rothko

58. “A record deal doesn't make you an artist; you make yourself an artist” - Lady Gaga

59. “Every person who is really an artist desires to create inside of himself another, deeper, more interesting life than the one that actually surrounds him.” - Constantin Stanislavski

60. “The creative strength is good enough and deep enough to bring itself to flower and to grow in spite of this sickness.” - Joanne Greenberg

61. “Ordinary persons, he said, smiling, found no differences between men. The artist found them all.” - Alexander Theroux

62. “My main task as an artist is to show you either what you have never seen before -- or to show you what you have seen countless times, in a way you've never seen it.” - Mike Duron

63. “She preferred the quiet solitary atmosphere, to create in her own world of paint and colour, the thrill of anticipating how her works would turn out as she eyed the blank sheets of paper or canvas before starting her next masterpiece. How satisfying it was to mess around in paint gear, without having to worry about spills, starch or frills, that was the life!” - E.A. Bucchianeri

64. “When you're socially awkward, you're isolated more than usual, and when you're isolated more than usual, your creativity is less compromised by what has already been said and done. All your hope in life starts to depend on your craft, so you try to perfect it. One reason I stay isolated more than the average person is to keep my creativity as fierce as possible. Being the odd one out may have its temporary disadvantages, but more importantly, it has its permanent advantages.” - Criss Jami

65. “A poet is simply an artist whose medium is human emotions.  A poet chisels away at our own sensibilities, shaping our vision while molding our hearts.  A poet wraps words around our own feelings and presents them as fresh gifts to humanity.” - Richelle E. Goodrich

66. “As an artist, my talents are not mine alone to just keep. My creations have to touch lives, spread love and let my skills be used only in good things but should be selfless not through selfish motives. In this manner, I am giving the gift back to my Master Creator." - Elizabeth's Quotes” - Elizabeth E. Castillo

67. “The prevarication and white lies which a mind that keeps itself ambitiously pure is as uneasy under as a great artist under the false touches that no eye detects but his own, are worn as lightly as mere trimming when once the actions have become a lie.” - George Eliot

68. “At moments of great enthusiasm it seems to me that no one in the world has ever made something this beautiful and important.” - M.C. Escher

69. “Art is a passion or it is nothing” - Robert Fry

70. “A good artist should laugh often!” - François Place

71. “The hardest thing is to do something which is close to nothing because it is demanding all of you.” - Marina Abramović

72. “A true artist creates art because they have a passion and desire to do so.” - Anne-Rae Vasquez

73. “Žene su me privlačile, ali sam smatrao da ja kao umetnik ne treba da imam išta s njima, jer to može samo da šteti mojoj umetnosti.” - Slobodan Tišma

74. “How are his poems?""He's not as good as he thinks he is, but then most of us feel that way.” - Charles Bukowski

75. “In such a person, sadness breeds purpose; finding inspiration in the darkness and often times, I believe, they will impress a hell onto their own lives in order to re-create it, that others might suffer the experience from the comfort of their armchairs. - Quote from Her Past's Present.” - Michael Poeltl

76. “Of an artistic temperament, I deny that I am; yet I must possess something of the artist's faculty of making the most of present pleasure.” - Charlotte Brontë

77. “People listening to songs are like people reading novels: for a few minutes, for a few hours, someone else gets to come in and hijack that part of your brain that's always thinking. A good book or song kidnaps your interior voice and does all the driving. With the artist in charge you're free for a little while to leave your body and be someone else.” - Douglas Coupland

78. “I didn't do music to live; I lived so that I could do music.” - Charlotte Eriksson

79. “There is nothing more lonely than a true artist.” - Tom Spanbauer

80. “My first thought, as a child, was that the artist brings something into the world that didn't exist before, and that he does it without destroying something else. A kind of refutation of the conservation of matter. That still seems to me its central magic, its core of joy.” - John Updike

81. “The working artist will not tolerate trouble in her life because she knows trouble prevents her from doing her work.” - Steven Pressfield

82. “...she (the artist, the writer) doesn't wait for inspiration, she acts in the anticipation of its apparition.” - Steven Pressfield

83. “The artist must be like that Marine. He has to know how to be miserable. He has to love being miserable.” - Steven Pressfield