Jerry Saltz Quotes

When I taught art, I was always asked, 'How do you know you're an artist? What makes you an artist?' And to me, it's like breathing. You don't question if you breathe; you have to breathe. So if you wake up in the morning, and you have to realize an idea, and there's another idea, and another, maybe you are really an artist.

If there is no mystery, for the artist, to solve inside of his art, then there's no point in it....for me, every act of the art of solving a mystery.

If you're an artist, you're an artist; that's the only way I can explain it.

But where there is no art show, I would still be painting.

People who are artists professionally are not artists because they want to be artists; they have to be artists. They're compelled to get that creativity out and to share that with others.

Only be an artist if you have no choice!

My passions drive me to the typewriter every day of my life, and they have driven me there since I was twelve. So I never have to worry about schedules. Some new thing is always exploding in me, and it schedules me, I don’t schedule it. It says: Get to the typewriter right now and finish this.

I gave myself over to music and art a long time ago, so I don't get to relax and I don't get to sit still. The best I can do is constantly create my own environment so it benefits what I need to accomplish in the next step.

... a canvas that I have covered is worth more than a blank canvas. My pretensions go no further; that is my right to paint, my reason for painting.

It is not the how of painting but the why. To imitate a style would be a little like teaching a tone of voice or a personality.

An artist earns the right to call himself a creator only when he admits to himself that he is but an instrument.

The true work of art is born from the 'artist': a mysterious, enigmatic, and mystical creation. It detaches itself from him, it acquires an autonomous life, becomes a personality, an independent subject, animated with a spiritual breath, the living subject of a real existence of being.

I want to communicate. I do; every artist does. That's why you're an artist.

I always wonder what drives us as Artists.

Art is a kind of innate drive that seizes a human being and makes him its instrument.

How certain human beings are able to create works of art is a mystery, and why they should wish to do so, at a great cost to themselves usually, is another mystery. Works are not created by one's life; every life is rich in material.

Those same forces that drive a genius to create the things or ideas that entertain or enlighten us often gobble so much of his personality that he has none left for the social graces.

In art, truth and reality begin when one no longer understands what one is doing or what one knows, and when there remains an energy that is all the stronger for being constrained, controlled and compressed.

I aint choose to rhyme, Rhyming chose me.

There is at the back of every artist’s mind something like a pattern and a type of architecture. The original quality in any man of imagination is imagery. It is a thing like the landscape of his dreams; the sort of world he would like to make or in which he would like to wander, the strange flora and fauna, his own secret planet, the sort of thing he likes to think about. This general atmosphere, and pattern or a structure of growth, governs all his creations, however varied.

And every good artist knows that the gift comes from somewhere else, and it's there for a reason, and that's to make the world a better place.

The writer who possesses the creative gift owns something of which he is not always master - something that, at times, strangely wills and works for itself.

I'd hate to be a writer forever and never perform, and I'd hate to perform and not write. I get sad if time has passed and I haven't written or made anything. I'm an artist.

I feel I have a responsibility to myself, a responsibility to explain where we're coming from. Because a song or the performance of a song is a lot like a work of art.

A man climbs a mountain because it is there. An artist makes a work of art because it is not there.