Bob Colacello Quotes

I'm not saying I'm the best. There are many painters in the world. But there is only one Picasso.

You see, my ambition was not to confound the engineering world but simply to create a beautiful piece of art.

I want to be a prime creator - as every self-regarding artist should do.

When I was setting out to be an artist, I said: If I can just produce one work that some people think is good, if I can become an obscure cult artist, that's all I want. Well, I attained that. I'm an obscure cult artist, and I think now, Why didn't I say I want to be another Picasso or something? What other options were open to me? But I was convinced I couldn't achieve great things because I don't have a steady-state mind.

You know, Hitler wanted to be an artist. At eighteen he took his inheritance, seven hundred kronen, and moved to Vienna to live and study... Ever see one of his paintings? Neither have I. Resistance beat him. Call it overstatement but I'll say it anyway: it was easier for Hitler to start World War II than it was for him to face a blank square of canvas.

My sole ambition as a composer is to hurl my javelin into the infinite space of the future.

Most artists create foundations where they put their own work. Here I'm not putting my own work. I'm just creating the chambers.

My goal, if I was going to do art, fine art, would have been to become Picasso or greater. That always sounds so funny to people, comparing yourself to someone in the past that has done so much, and in your life you’re not even allowed to think that you can do as much. That’s a mentality that suppresses humanity.

Certain dressmakers desire to pass for an artist. I have one ambition: that is to have good taste.

Although most of us know Vincent van Gogh in Arles and Paul Gauguin in Tahiti as if they were neighbors -- somewhat disreputable but endlessly fascinating -- none of us can name two French generals or department store owners of that period. I take enormous pride in considering myself an artist, one of the necessaries.

I wanted to be an artist, even at the age of 15, and people used to laugh at me. It was the late '90s, the time of pop stars and navel-dancing, where you were showing your midriff. I wanted to be a real singer.

I'm doing what great artists before me did, like Judy Garland, Sammy Davis, Eddie Cantor. I'm doing what they were doing, not at their level yet, but one day I will be. I'm just happy to be in their company.

I want to be great, or nothing. I won't be a commonplace dauber, so I don't intend to try any more.

Lots of ambitious work by young artists ends up in a dumpster after its warehouse debut. So an unknown artist's big glass vitrine holding a rotting cow's head covered by maggots and swarms of buzzing flies may be pretty unsellable. Until the artist becomes a star. Then he can sell anything he touches .

I just feel like I'm an artist that still has set a standard for artists that come up to follow and be like...So, yeah, I guess I'm a legend somewhat, I guess in my own right, but I still got a long ways to go.

A small artist is content with art; a great artist is content with nothing except everything.

I like charcoal drawing a lot. I'm not very good, but I always find myself buying canvases and paints whenever I'm on location, because I always have this ambition to fill the hotel room I'm in and turn it into an art studio.

I think that if I have one hope, 1 ambition, 1 aspiration for the next 4 or 5 years it would be that I can improve as a writer and just be able to say more of what I want to say throught the music.

He's one of those smart, drifty young people who, after certain deliberations, decides he wants to do Something in the Arts but won't, possibly can't, think in terms of an actual job; who seems to imagine that youth and brains and willingness will simply summon an occupation, the precise and perfect nature of which will reveal itself in its own time.

If the artist is necessarily sensitive, does that sensitiveness form in its essence a state constantly liable to shade off into the morbid? Does this liability, moreover, increase in proportion as the effort is great and the ambition intense?

If modern painters feel qualms about applying the term "masterpiece" to describe a work of capital importance, this is because it has come to convey a notion of perfection: a notion that leads to much confusion when applied to artists other than those who made perfection their ideal.

Michael Jackson did something that no one else in history has managed - he connected with people on every level imaginable, all over the world. He seemed to speak to people at their very core and achieved the impossible. He reached people on a deep emotional level. And that is what any great artist or showman dreams of doing. That is why Michael Jackson was so special to me.

I just want to be the biggest artist that I can be, and I want to make a difference. I feel like Michael (Jackson) made a difference with everything that he did. He was so charitable and just always on-point. I just want to be where he is, as an artist.

I had always drawn, every day as long as I had held a pencil, and just assumed everyone else had too…Art had saved me and helped me fit in…Art was always my saving grace…Comedy didn’t come until much later for me. I’ve always tried to combine the two things, art and comedy, and couldn’t make a choice between the two. It was always my ambition to make comedy with an art-school slant, and art that could be funny instead of po-faced.

I'd like to be remembered as someone who wasn't satisfied with just one level of musicianship ... as someone who was a pioneer.