Artistic Life Quotes

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  It is art that makes life, makes interest, makes importance, for our consideration and application of these things, and I know of no substitute whatever for the force and beauty of its process.

  Henry James

  Art, Consideration, Process

  Letter to H. G. Wells, 10 July 1915

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• It is art that makes life, makes interest, makes importance.

  Henry James

  Art, Substitutes, Importance

  Letter to H. G. Wells, 10 July 1915

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• The artistic life is a long, lovely suicide.

  Oscar Wilde

  Suicide, Long, Lovely

  Oscar Wilde (1962). “Letters”

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• If you have used colour throughout most of your artistic life, try just black and white... it will take your painting to another dimension where tone and form in all its permutations reign supreme.

  David Luiz

  Black And White, Trying, Reign

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• Love trumps everything. Love's decision will not always be kind to your artistic life.

  Vinita Hampton Wright

  Decision, Be Kind, Trump

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• I feel blessed. To live an artistic life, it's a blessing.

  Elias Koteas

  Blessed, Blessing, Feels

  Interview with Sean O'Neal, film.avclub.com. March 29, 2011.

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• In the 'west' success is defined in purely material terms. He with the most money wins... We should question, speak out and work for a better society with a whole different definition of what is deemed a successful artistic life.

  Mark A. Brennan

  Success, Winning, Speaks Out

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• You know, I must really work hard. I'm in the last stage of my artistic life. But I'm so busy that I can't even think of dying. I fly all over the world, drive everywhere, and when I get home, I find interviewers and photographers and TV shows waiting for me. No wonder I'm so busy.

  Yayoi Kusama

  Hard Work, Home, Thinking

  Source: theendofcollection.wordpress.com

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• There's been no nepotism in my acting artistic life, but I think it's been pretty clear in my writing life. I knew what a pantoum was at age 11 - I knew form - therefore I would win the poetry contest. But I also realized that I would never be a great writer.

  Aya Cash

  Writing, Thinking, Winning

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

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• I don't know that I had a sense that there was such a thing as "the poetry world" in the 1960s and early 70s. Maybe poets did, but for me as an onlooker and reader of poetry, poetry felt like it was part of a larger literary world. I mean, even the phrase "the poetry world" reflects a sort of balkanization of American literary and artistic life that has to some extent happened since then.

  Robert Hass

  Mean, World, Phrases

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• Writing is both the excursion into and the excursion out of one's life. That is the queasy paradox of the artistic life. It is the thing that, like love, removes one both painfully and deliciously from the ordinary shape of existence. It joins another queasy paradox: that life is an amazing, hilarious, blessed gift and that it is also intolerable.

  Lorrie Moore

  Art, Blessed, Writing

  "See What Can Be Done by Lorrie Moore - wit without malice" by Claire Messud, www.theguardian.com. June 2, 2018.

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• The first part of my name, Khalil Gibran, seems to be paying huge dividends in terms of the artistic life of the poet from whom my name was inspired.

  Khalil Gibran Muhammad

  Names, Firsts, Inspired

  Source: www.pbs.org

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• The first sight of Degas' pictures was the turning point of my artistic life.

  Mary Cassatt

  Sight, Degas, Firsts

  Mary Cassatt, Nancy Mowll Mathews (1984). “Cassatt and her circle: selected letters”, Abbeville Pr

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• I think for anyone who follows the 'artistic life,' a certain amount of selfishness and self-involvement is part of the package. You're probably already disregarding a certain material life you could have.

  David Chase

  Thinking, Self, Certain

  "Q&A: David Chase Beyond The Sopranos". Interview with Simon Abrams, www.esquire.com. October 9, 2012.

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• My whole artistic life has been devoted to battling myself and my ability to externalize my deepest emotions. As I have gotten older, the work has become more direct, perhaps reflecting the fact that for the first time in my life I feel really free. I have been fascinated with wings all my life. I have had an obsession with transcendence, the need to push forward and metaphorically fly.

  Joyce Tenneson

  Photography, Wings, Needs

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• 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

  Artist, Talent, Bohemian

  Philip K. Dick (2011). “The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch”, p.170, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• How could anybody think of Bach as 'cold' when these [cello] suites seem to shine with the most glittering kind of poetry," Casals said. "As I got on with the study I discovered a new world of space and beauty... the feelings I experienced were among the purest and most intense in my artistic life!

  Pablo Casals

  Thinking, Space, Shining

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• If you want to be a grocer, or a general, or a politician, or a judge, you will invariably become it; that is your punishment. If you never know what you want to be, if you live what some might call the dynamic life but what I will call the artistic life, if each day you are unsure of who you are and what you know you will never become anything, and that is your reward.

  Oscar Wilde

  Punishment, Judging, Each Day

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• There is no such thing as being done with an artistic life. Frustrations and rewards exist at all levels on the path.

  Julia Cameron

  Frustration, Done, Levels

  Julia Cameron (2012). “The Artist's Way: A Spiritual Path to Higher Creativity”, p.21, Souvenir Press

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• Chicago still remains a Mecca of the Midwest - people from both coasts are kind of amazed how good life is in Chicago, and what a good culture we've got. You can have a pretty wonderful artistic life and never leave Chicago.

  Harold Ramis

  Good Life, People, Chicago

  "Biography/Personal Quotes". www.imdb.com.

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• My whole artistic life has always been about change, change, change, move on, move on. It's the only thing I find interesting.

  Paul Simon

  Change, Moving, Interesting

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• It is fatal to one's artistic life to talk about something that is in process.

  Denise Levertov

  Artistic, Process

  "Conversations with Denise Levertov".

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• I've put in as many as 40 weeks a year on stage. It is lonely and restricted, as all artistic life must necessarily be.

  Lillie Langtry

  Lonely, Years, Week

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• In the fullness of artistic life there is, and remains, and will always come back at times, that homesick longing for the truly ideal life that can never come true.

  Vincent Van Gogh

  Homesick, Longing, Ideal Life

  Vincent van Gogh (1971). “Van Gogh's "diary"; the artist's life in his own words and art”

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• Even this artistic life, which we know is not real life, appears to me to be so alive and so vital that it would be a form ingratitude not to be content with it.

  Vincent Van Gogh

  Real, Would Be, Alive

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