87 Quotes From Famous Artists

Art has the unparalleled ability to inspire, provoke, and transform our perceptions. Throughout history, renowned artists have not only left behind their masterpieces on canvas but also their reflections on creativity, life, and the human experience. In this curated collection of the top 87 quotes from famous artists, we invite you to delve into the minds of those who have shaped the art world. These quotes echo their passions, struggles, and insights, offering a glimpse into the thoughts and emotions that drove their iconic creations. Whether you're seeking motivation or a deeper understanding of the world of art, these quotes promise to ignite your imagination and resonate with the artist within.

1. “An artist should create beautiful things, but should put nothing of his own life into them.” - Oscar Wilde

2. “I don't believe in art. I believe in artists.” - Marcel Duchamp

3. “The individual, man as a man, man as a brain, if you like, interests me more than what he makes, because I've noticed that most artists only repeat themselves. ” - Marcel Duchamp

4. “All true artists, whether they know it or not, create from a place of no-mind, from inner stillness.” - Eckhart Tolle

5. “Writing is the only art form where a good number of the artists make a slice of their living criticizing one another in print, in public. ” - Christian Bauman

6. “It's impossible for a creative artist to be either a Puritan or a Fascist, because both are a negation of the creative urge. The only things a creative artist can be opposed to are ugliness and injustice.” - Liam O'Flaherty

7. “It's freezing up here. What did you use to keep warm?""Indignation," said Michelangelo. "Best fuel I know. Never burns out.” - Irving Stone

8. “He’s a pagan! I’m an artist! We’re naturally sympathetic!” - Sidney Howard

9. “Art – the one achievement of man which has made the long trip up from all fours seem well advised” - James Thurber

10. “The blood of my motherland waters a magic plant that cures all ills. That plant is art, and sometimes art needs corruption as a kind of fertilizer” - Alfred De Musset

11. “At the age of four, you were an artist. And at seven, you were a poet.” - Seth Godin

12. “Bare lists of words are found suggestive to an imaginative and excited mind.” - Ralph Waldo Emerson

13. “The only artists I have ever known who are personally delightful are bad artists. Good artists exist simply in what they make, and consequently are perfectly uninteresting in what they are. A great poet, a really great poet, is the most unpoetical of all creatures. But inferior poets are absolutely fascinating. The worse their rhymes are, the more picturesque they look. The mere fact of having published a book of second-rate sonnets makes a man quite irresistible. He lives the poetry that he cannot write. The others write the poetry that they dare not realize.” - Oscar Wilde

14. “Great art is the outward expression of an inner life in the artist, and this inner life will result in his personal vision of the world.” - Edward Hopper

15. “In this image (watching sensual murder through a peephole) Lorrain embodies the criminal delight of decadent art. The watcher who records the crimes (both the artist and consumer of art) is constructed as marginal, powerless to act, and so exculpated from action, passive subject of a complex pleasure, condemning and yet enjoying suffering imposed on others, and condemning himself for his own enjoyment. In this masochistic celebration of disempowerment, the sharpest pleasure recorded is that of the death of some important part of humanity. The dignity of human life is the ultimate victim of Lorrain's art, thrown away on a welter of delighted self-disgust.” - Jennifer Birkett

16. “All forms of madness, bizarre habits, awkwardness in society, general clumsiness, are justified in the person who creates good art.” - Roman Payne

17. “To create art with all the passion in one's soul is to live art with all the beauty in one's heart.” - Author-Poet Aberjhani

18. “Artists are those who can evade the verbose.” - Haruki Murakami

19. “The artist, like the God of creation, remains within or behind or beyond or above his handiwork, invisible, refined out of existence, indifferent, paring his fingernails” - James Joyce

20. “Although the art world reveres the unconventional, it is rife with conformity. Artists make work that "looks like art" and behave in ways that enhance stereotypes. Curators pander to the expectations of their peers and their museum boards. Collectors run in herds to buy work by a handful of fashionable painters. Critics stick their finger in the air to see which way the wind is blowing so as to "get it right". Originality is not always rewarded, but some people take real risks and innovate, which gives a raison d'être to the rest.” - Sarah Thornton

21. “If you participate in life, you don’t see it clearly: you suffer from it too much or enjoy it too much. The artist, to my way of thinking, is a monstrosity, something outside nature. All the misfortunes Providence inflicts on him come from his stubborness in denying that maxim.” - Gustave Flaubert

22. “You don’t make art out of good intentions.” - Gustave Flaubert

23. “It is impossible to see how good work might be accomplished by people who think that our life in this world either signifies nothing or has only a negative significance.If, on the other hand, we believe that we are living souls, God's dust and God's breath, acting our parts among other creatures all made of the same dust and breath as ourselves; and if we understand that we are free, within the obvious limits of moral human life, to do evil or good to ourselves and to the other creatures - then all our acts have a supreme significance. If it is true that we are living souls and morally free, then all of us are artists. All of us are makers, within mortal terms and limits, of our lives, of one another's lives, of things we need and use...If we think of ourselves as living souls, immortal creatures, living in the midst of a Creation that is mostly mysterious, and if we see that everything we make or do cannot help but have an everlasting significance for ourselves, for others, and for the world, then we see why some religious teachers have understood work as a form of prayer...Work connects us both to Creation and to eternity. (pg. 316, Christianity and the Survival of Creation)” - Wendell Berry

24. “We artists are indestructible; even in a prison, or in a concentration camp, I would be almighty in my own world of art, even if I had to paint my pictures with my wet tongue on the dusty floor of my cell.” - Pablo Picasso

25. “Guys don't understand great art. They don't care that sometimes the camera has power beyond the photographer to record emotion that only the heart can see. They're threatened when the camera jumps ahead of me. Todd Kovich was pissed when I brought my Nikon to the prom, but I'd missed too many transcendent shots over the years to ever take a chance of missing one again. A prom, I told him, had a boundless supply of photogenic bozos who could be counted on to do something base.” - Joan Bauer

26. “I do strongly feel that among the greatest pieces of luck for high achievement is ordeal. Certain great artists can make out without it, Titian and others, but mostly you need ordeal. My idea is this: the artist is extremely lucky who is presented with the worst possible ordeal which will not actually kill him. At that point, he's in business: Beethoven's deafness, Goya's deafness, Milton's blindness, that kind of thing.” - John Berryman

27. “In the case of Michel Angelo we have an artist who with brush and chisel portrayed literally thousands of human forms; but with this peculiarity, that while scores and scores of his male figures are obviously suffused and inspired by a romantic sentiment, there is hardly one of his female figures that is so,—the latter being mostly representative of woman in her part as mother, or sufferer, or prophetess or poetess, or in old age, or in any aspect of strength or tenderness, except that which associates itself especially with romantic love. Yet the cleanliness and dignity of Michel Angelo's male figures are incontestable, and bear striking witness to that nobility of the sentiment in him, which we have already seen illustrated in his sonnets.” - Edward Carpenter

28. “Artists can have greater access to reality; they can see patterns and details and connections that other people, distracted by the blur of life, might miss. Just sharing that truth can be a very powerful thing.” - Jay-Z

29. “My own general thesis was somewhat to this effect: that Artists have worried the world by being wantonly, needlessly, and gratuitously progressive. Politicians have to be progressive; that is, they have to live in the future, because they know they have done nothing but evil in the past. But Artists, who have been right from the beginning of the world, who were, perhaps, the only people who were right even in the beginning of the world, decorating pottery or designing rude frescoes on the rock when other people were fighting or offering human sacrifice, they have no right to despise their own past.” - G.K. Chesterton

30. “Women have sat indoors all these millions of years, so that by this time the very walls are permeated by their creative force, which has, indeed, so overcharged the capacity of bricks and mortar that it must needs harness itself to pens and brushes and business and politics.” - Virginia Woolf

31. “...and as far as talent is concerned, there will be such an excess that our artists will become their own audiences, and audiences made up of ordinary people will no longer exist.” - Hermann Hesse

32. “Time and death: It's the ultimate vision of an artist at the end of everything. It's just what's there. It was not something I planned to do.” - Don DeLillo

33. “I will always know the glory of the beautiful and rare, as they will know security from labour and prayer. As they will hear the laughter of the children they gave life, I will know the torments of the song born under knife.” - Roman Payne

34. “Fueled by my inspiration, I ran across the room to steal the cup of coffee the bookshelf had taken prisoner. Lapping the black watery brew like a hyena, I tossed the empty cup aside. I then returned to the chair to continue my divine act of creation. Hot blood swished in my head as my mighty pen stole across the page.” - Roman Payne

35. “It's the only dish I serve my craziness for color in.” - Josef Albers

36. “Writing, music, sculpting, painting, and prayer! These are the three things that are most closely related! Writers, musicians, sculptors, painters, and the faithful are the ones who make things out of nothing. Everybody else, they make things out of something, they have materials! But a written work can be done with nothing, it can begin in the soul! A musical piece begins with a harmony in the soul, a sculpture begins with a formless, useless piece of rock chiseled and formed and molded into the thing that was first conceived in the sculptor's heart! A painting can be carried inside the mind for a lifetime, before ever being put onto paper or canvass! And a prayer! A prayer is a thought, a remembrance, a whisper, a communion, that is from the soul going to what cannot be seen, yet it can move mountains! And so I believe that these five things are interrelated, these five kinds of people are kin.” - C. JoyBell C.

37. “Artists are the serfs of a leisure society.” - Bauvard

38. “It’s a shame how much artists have to bleed for people to enjoy their work.” - Solange nicole

39. “I would rather be an artist than a leader. Ironically, a leader has to follow the rules.” - Criss Jami

40. “I feel as though whenever I create something, my Mr. Hyde wakes up in the middle of the night and starts thrashing it. I sometimes love it the next morning, but other times it is an abomination.” - Criss Jami

41. “To be an artist was to have failure as your constant bedfellow.” - M. Thomas Gammarino

42. “Picasso had a saying - 'good artists copy, great artists steal' - and we have always been shameless about stealing great ideas.” - Walter Isaacson

43. “Art does not reproduce the visible; rather, it makes visible.” - Paul Klee Foundation

44. “I think that cars today are almost the exact equivalent of the great Gothic cathedrals; I mean the supreme creation of an era, conceived with passion by unknown artists, and consumed in image if not in usage by a whole population which appropriates them as a purely magical object.” - Roland Barthes

45. “Every production of an artist should be the expression of an adventure of his soul.” - W. Somerset Maugham

46. “Fantasy, abandoned by reason, produces impossible monsters; united with it, she is the mother of the arts and the origin of marvels.” - Francisco de Goya

47. “The most visible creators are those artists whose medium is life itself. The ones who express the inexpressible ~ without brush, hammer, clay, or guitar. They neither paint nor sculpt. Their medium is simply being. Whatever their presence touches has increased life. They see, but don't have to draw...Because they are the artists of being alive... :) ~ ☆ ~ Donna J. Stone” - Donna J. Stone

48. “Writers and artists build by hand little worlds that they hope might effect change in real minds, in the real world where stories are read. A story can make us cry and laugh, break our hearts, or make us angry enough to change the world.” - Grant Morrison

49. “more to be a human being with” - Gary D. Schmidt

50. “Look, I don't see why bad artists - I mean artists who are obviously incompetent... - why they should be presented hypocritically as good artists just because they're supposed to be advancing the frontiers of freedom of expression or... ...demonstrating that there should be no limit on subject matter.” - Anthony Burgess

51. “A genius doesn't adjust his treatment of a theme to a tyrant's taste” - Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

52. “He had a theory that musicians are incredibly complex, and know far less than other artists what they want and what they are; that they puzzle themselves as well as their friends; that their psychology is a modern development, and has not yet been understood.” - E.M. Forster

53. “...As an artist, you need the naysayers and the nonbelievers to add fuel to your creative fire.” - Ice-T

54. “To write a poem you must have a streak of arrogance-- not in real life I hope. In real life try to be nice. It will save you a hell of a lot of trouble and give you more time to write.” - Richard Hugo

55. “With cold eyes and indifferent mind the spectators regard the work. Connoissers admire the "skill" (as one admires a tightrope walker), enjoy the "quality of painting" (as one enjoys a pasty). But hungry souls go hungry away. The vulgar herd stroll through the rooms and pronounce the pictures "nice" or "splendid." Those who could speak have said nothing, those who could hear have heard nothing.” - Wassily Kandinsky

56. “The task of the artist at any time is uncompromisingly simple — to discover what has not yet been done, and to do it.” - Craig Raine

57. “The motivation of all artists is 'Look at me, Mum'.” - Sebastian Horsley

58. “I love you, Lucien, but I am a muse, you are an artist, I am not here to make you comfortable.” - Christopher Moore

59. “Stop teasing you two,” Suzy jumped in, “not all of Kathy’s ideas are wacky.”“Gee thanks. Was that supposed to be a compliment?” - E.A. Bucchianeri

60. “Innocence was gone from all our acts. Our habitual state of rebellion became a serious political crime.” - Anais Nin

61. “In America, we know to ignore artists if they're serious in any way.” - Steven Colbert

62. “That's what dreams are really like, you know? They're not full of melting clocks or floating roses or people made out of rocks. Most of the time, dreams look just like the normal world. It's your feelings that tell you something's off. Not your mind, not your intellect, not something as obvious as that. The only part of you that really knows what's going on is the part of you that's most a mystery. If that's not Surrealism, I don't know what is.” - Amy Reed

63. “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

64. “Now, as I understand it, the bards were feared. They were respected, but more than that they were feared. If you were just some magician, if you'd pissed off some witch, then what's she gonna do, she's gonna put a curse on you, and what's gonna happen? Your hens are gonna lay funny, your milk's gonna go sour, maybe one of your kids is gonna get a hare-lip or something like that — no big deal. You piss off a bard, and forget about putting a curse on you, he might put a satire on you. And if he was a skilful bard, he puts a satire on you, it destroys you in the eyes of your community, it shows you up as ridiculous, lame, pathetic, worthless, in the eyes of your community, in the eyes of your family, in the eyes of your children, in the eyes of yourself, and if it's a particularly good bard, and he's written a particularly good satire, then three hundred years after you're dead, people are still gonna be laughing, at what a twat you were.” - Alan Moore

65. “He was the most astonishing contradiction of components I’d ever encountered. Shy yet fiercely communicative when putting an idea into your head. Vocally astringent regarding his own abilities but not to the point that he couldn’t produce—he was as prolific an artist (yes, an artist, and I never use the term, especially regarding people I like) I’ve ever seen. But I could feel it. Everything he sketched, penciled, inked, made—was a payment, one he could scarcely afford; as if it physically hurt him to put pencil to paper. Yet that only seemed to spur him on, to live far beyond his means. He was unable not to. For Sketch, to draw was to breath, and so the air became lead—silvery in the right light, dark soot in the wrong; heavy, slick and malleable—into shapes he brought together in glorious orchestration, with a child’s eye and a rocket scientist’s precision, all fortified by a furious melancholy, a quiet engine of sourceless shame and humility.When it came to another’s work, he longed to praise it but then couldn’t resist critiquing it all within an inch of its life, analyzing deficiencies with uncontrollable abandon and laser accuracy. He was sharp as his Radio 914 pen nibs, and as pointed.And then he’d apologize. Oh, he would apologize: Oh my GOD, forgive me, please don’t hate me, I’m SORRY, don’t listen to me, why am I saying things, what do I know, I don’t know anything, why do you listen to me you should just tell me to shut UP, I’m awful, forgive me, you hate me, don’t you? Tell the truth. Please don’t hate me. Please don’t. Please.” - Chip Kidd

66. “With the manipulation of abstract symbols, an artist can send you information without sound, change your feelings and,sometimes, even beliefs. Artists convey the unspeakable. Artists inspire.” - Jonathan Culver

67. “It is the artist who tries to gradually accustom people to the possibilities of a better state of things.” - C.A. Dawson Scott

68. “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

69. “i want to never settle for anything less than my soul on paper.” - Jonathan Culver

70. “So, really," continued Jacob as if this were perfectly normal to expound on art in these circumstances, "when you think about it, the artists who make people stop and think, who push the form, who make you uncomfortable, who are laughable, well, they're the ones who get remembered." Idly, Jacob dug a hole in the snow with his shovel and then another one next to it. "So why wouldn't you want to join the ranks of the ridiculed?” - Justina Chen Headley

71. “Speed is not always a constituent to great work, the process of creation should be given time and thought.” - E.A. Bucchianeri

72. “Artists are dishonest creatures really. They foist their version of reality upon us while making it all up. Writers, painters, musicians, auteurs—they’re all the same.” - Tom Gething from "Sabotage"

73. “For most people, art is only valuable if other people say it is; and artists are only worthwhile if they are either rich and famous, or dead.” - Wayne Gerard Trotman

74. “The noise around us determines how we speak. And how we listen. Just as a conversation suffers in a war zone, art suffers in a culture built on noise. So does our enjoyment of it.” - Michael Gungor

75. “I have always been jealous of artists. The smell of the studio, the names of the various tools, the look of a half-finished canvas all shout of creation. What do writers have in comparison? Only the flat paper, the clacketing of the typewriter or the scrape of a pen across a yellow page. And then, when the finished piece is presented, there is a small wonder on one hand, a manuscript smudged with erasures or crossed out lines on the other. The impact of the painting is immediate, the manuscript must unfold slowly through time.” - Jane Yolen

76. “Lucien, women are wondrous, mysterious, and magical creatures, who should be treated not only with respect but with reverence, perhaps even awe. Now go sweep the steps.” - Christopher Moore

77. “I do believe most curators - maybe I'm only speaking for myself here - want to be artists on some level. Curators must have an innate interest in what an artist makes. And they certainly have their opinions and criticisms, and the always ask, "How would I have made this, or how would another artist make this?” - Stroud Marion Boulton

78. “I do believe most curators - maybe I'm only speaking for myself here - want to be artists on some level. Curators must have an innate interest in what an artist makes. And they certainly have their opinions and criticisms, and the always ask, "How would I have made this, or how would another artist make this?” - Marion Boulton Stroud

79. “Few artists thrive in solitude and nothing is more stimulating than the conflict of minds with similar interests.” - Arthur C. Clarke

80. “The role of the artist is exactly the same as the role of the lover. If I love you, I have to make you conscious of the things you don’t see.” - James Baldwin

81. “Real artist cannot be blackmailed. I suspect they've been confessing shit all their life.” - Darnell Lamont Walker

82. “I think we should throw money at artists, not at girls who take their clothes off because they made a bad choice in life.” - Darnell Lamont Walker

83. “Pregnancy had seemed a reasonable excuse for letting her metal-smithing tools languish, but that accounted for only eighteen months of the last twenty-six years. Motherhood wasn't the real problem, though it took him a long time to figure out what was. She needed resistance, the very quality that metal most demonstrably offered up. Suddenly Glynis had no difficulty to overcome, no hard artisan's life with galleries filching half the too-small price of a mokume brooch that had taken three weeks to forge. No, her husband made a good living, and if she slept late and dawdled the afternoon away reading Lustre, American Craft Magazine and Lapidary Journal, the phone bill would still get paid. For that matter, she needed need itself. She could overcome her anguish about embarking on an object that, once completed, might not meet her exacting standards only if she had no choice. In this sense, his helping had hurt her. By providing the financial cushion that should have facilitated making all the metal whathaveyou she liked, he had ruined her life. Wrapped in a slackening bow, ease was a poisonous present.” - Lionel Shriver

84. “The first thousand are the hardest.” - Herbert Gute

85. “Orpheus never liked words. He had his music. He would get a funny look on his face and I would say what are you thinking about and he would always be thinking about music.If we were in a restaurant sometimes Orpheus would look sullen and wouldn't talk to me and I thought people felt sorry for me. I should have realized that women envied me. Their husbands talked too much.But I wanted to talk to him about my notions. I was working on a new philosophical system. It involved hats.This is what it is to love an artist: The moon is always rising above your house. The houses of your neighbors look dull and lacking in moonlight. But he is always going away from you. Inside his head there is always something more beautiful.Orpheus said the mind is a slide ruler. It can fit around anything. Show me your body, he said. It only means one thing.” - sarah ruhl

86. “I believe art prefers rules. For some artists, the worst thing you can do is say 'Do whatever you want.' Such permission can be terrifying. I know it is for me. Often it's better if you impose rules or restrictions on a project. Requirements can force you to be creative in unusual ways.” - Mangum Lisa

87. “For some young artists, it can take a bit of time to discover which tools (which medium, or genre, or career pathway) will truly suit them best. For me, although many different art forms attract me, the tools that I find most natural and comfortable are language and oil paint; I've also learned that as someone with a limited number of spoons it's best to keep my toolbox clean and simple. My husband, by contrast, thrives with a toolbox absolutely crowded to bursting, working with language, voice, musical instruments, puppets, masks animated on a theater stage, computer and video imagery, and half a dozen other things besides, no one of these tools more important than the others, and all somehow working together. For other artists, the tools at hand might be needles and thread; or a jeweller's torch; or a rack of cooking spices; or the time to shape a young child's day....To me, it's all art, inside the studio and out. At least it is if we approach our lives that way.” - Terri Windling