Elizabeth Hardwick Quotes

I don't think you have to earn your income as an artist to be an artist. But if you are an artist, then art is what you do, whether or not you're paid for doing it; it is what you do, not what you are. I regard artist not as a description of temperament but as a category of profession, of vocation.

The galleries are simply corporations in the art world - "Here's a million dollars for this latest piece of crap" - but I'm not about to go along with the gallery system.

Art - I had never thought of that as a career because it was like something I did so naturally, and it was fluid, and it is. And even though I still admire literature as the superior art form, I have to admit that art, for me, that's it; that's what I'm good at, and that's what I should be concentrating on.

I always find it fascinating to ask people, why they've chosen to live their life as an artist? Why be an actor, a singer, an author, a filmmaker? I've heard such inspiring answers to that question.

I wanted to be an artist, because it's a much better scam than being an architect.

I don't think there is room for 'artistic temperament.' Professional artists understand art is a business. If businesses ran their companies like many artists do their careers, they would not stay open a year.

By the time I was a teenager, I knew I wanted to be an artist. I was a born draftsman and liked all forms of art, so I just knew that's what I wanted to do.

The oldest of the arts and the youngest of the professions.

I always wanted to be an artist, but I didn't really know how someone could make a life out it.

I did cartoons for four high school publications and then and there decided I wanted to spend my life at the drawing board.

I was delivering papers when I was, like, 10 or 11, and I'd always daydream about being an artist as a full-time thing.

The arts are not a way to make a living.

As to what I would like to be, it is difficult to say. An artist of some kind. If nothing else I shall always study the Arts.

To be a painter now is to be part of a very small, endangered species.

I didn't know how a working-class girl like me could possibly make a living in the art world

There are lives lived for love, and lives lived for art. We, happy band, have chosen the later persuasion.

I was always an artist. I was a broker to earn a living, but I was always thinking about my art.

Whatever I was writing at the time, I knew there was no market for it and never would be, because there’s never a market for true art, so my main concern was always to have a job that didn’t require me to write or think.

Writing is so hard. Why would you be a writer if you weren't really good at it? If you could be anything else, why would you be a writer?

I hate it when people say, I'm an artist. I think, well, I'll be the judge of that. And I don't think artist is a job description. It's a critique, a favorable critique, that someone else might apply to your work. I guess in the art world I'm not exactly a photographer, but I do use photography.

There's no retirement for an artist,its your way of living so theres no end to it.

Being an artist is a job for life.

I know that the accident of my being a photographer has made my life possible.

I always made stuff but never thought, I'm going to be an artist.

Surely the novel should be a form of art - but art was not enough. It must contain not only the perfection of art, but the imperfection of nature.