Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes

I can't cut off an ear everyday. Do the Van Gogh here and the Mozart there. Anyway it's exhausting enough always having to check up on what one is really doing!.

Artists must be sacrificed to their art.

An artist is completely amoral in that he will rob, beg, borrow, or steal from anybody and everybody to get the work done.

Even in a personal sense, after all, art is an intensified life. By art one is more deeply satisfied and more rapidly used up. It engraves on the countenance of its servant the traces of imaginary and intellectual adventures, and even if he has outwardly existed in cloistral tranquility, it leads in the long term to overfastidiousness, over-refinement, nervous fatigue and overstimulation, such as can seldom result from a life of the most extravagant passions and pleasures.

An artist who dedicates his life to art, burdens his art with his life, and his life with his art.

Being an artist doesn’t take much, just everything you got. Which means, of course, that as the process is giving you life, it is also bringing you closer to death. But it’s no big deal. They are one in the same and cannot be avoided or denied. So when I totally embrace this process, this life/death, and abandon myself to it, I transcend all this meaningless gibberish and hang out with the gods. It seems to me that that is worth the price of admission.

I put a hell of a lot of myself into 'Love Never Dies,' and I felt quite drained afterwards.

Abstract work, if one wishes to do it well, must be allowed to destroy one's humanity; one raises a monument which is at the same time a tomb, in which, voluntarily, one slowly inters oneself.

Art without accomplishment becomes a form of faith, sustained more by the intensity of its common practice than by the pleasure it gives to its adherents in private.

For the serious artist does not satisfy needs

All artists are self-sacrificing human beings, and to become an artist is nothing but to devote oneself to the subterranean gods.

The art is more important than the artist. The work is more important than the person who does it. You must be prepared to sacrifice all the you could possibly have, be, or do; you must be willing to go all the way for your art. If it is a question between choosing between your life and a work of art -- any work of art -- your decision is made for you.

A visual experience is vitalizing. Whereas to write great poetry, to draw continuously on one's inner life, is not merely exhausting, it is to keep alight a consuming fire.

Art is a kind of innate drive that seizes a human being and makes him its instrument. To perform this difficult office it is sometimes necessary for him to sacrifice happiness and everything that makes life worth living for the ordinary human being.

I have a life and do a lot of things, and so far my work has been my life. If I was a painter no one would question me about my age. I'm an artist, I hate saying that.

The real artist while he paints does not think of the sale, only of the need to make a beautiful living thing.

An artist might be attracted to hedonism, but of course an artist is not a hedonist. He's a worker, always.

I gave my genius to my life, but my talent to my art.

What experience has shown me is that it takes your life to become an artist.

I'm a fine artist working in a commercial arena, so that's my cross to bear

We are image-makers and image-ridden... We work until we vanish.

I hope to live all my life for my art, without abandoning my principles one iota, without . . . having painted as much as you can cover with your hand, to please somebody or in order to sell the picture more easily.

When you hold a graphic novel in your hands, you're holding artist blood made ink.

What's any artist, but the dregs of his work? the human shambles that follows it around. What's left of the man when the work's done but a shambles of apology.

A good artist's always got his hand in his zipper.