Max Beckmann Quotes

The real artist has no idea that he is sacrificing himself for art. He does what he does for one reason and one reason only-he can't help doing it.

That's the difference between the serious artist and the craftsman--the craftsman can take material and because of his abilities do a professional job of it. The serious artist, like Proust, is like an object caught by a wave and swept to shore. He's obsessed by his material; it's like a venom working in his blood and the art is the antidote.

I guess art itself is insane. Its actual function is rarely clear, and yet people give their hearts and souls and lives to it, and have for all of history.

I don't paint to live, I live to paint.

An artist is nothing without his or her obsessions, and I have mine.

There are two kinds of artists in this world; those that work because the spirit is in them, and they cannot be silent if they would, and those that speak from a conscientious desire to make apparent to others the beauty that has awakened their own admiration.

Painting constantly appeared to me as the one and only possible achievement.

Every good writer or filmmaker has something eating at them, right? That they can't quite get off their back. And so your job is to make your audience care about your obsessions.

There are times when I've inhaled my work. There are artworks still inside of me.

You have to give every portion of yourself to it. As an artist, that is just what you do - because we love it - we were born to do it.

For me, creation can only come out of a certain kind of unhappiness. They say in Japan, this thing like the hungry spirit - the hungry mind - is what gets you going forward.

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.

The demons you have are what motivate you to make your art. This is what drives the detective, this is what drives the painter, this is what drives the writer: a conflicting urge to forget pain and at the same time remember it and fight for some kind of justice. I know these powerful things are inside of me and everyone in some way or another.

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.

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

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.

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

I have all but killed myself for Photography. My passion for it is greater than ever. It's forty years that I have fought its fight... I am not fighting to make a 'name' for myself. Maybe you have some feeling for what the fight is for. It's a world's fight... All that's born of spirit seems mad in these days of materialism run riot.

I understand wanting to do your craft. I understand wanting to have a passion for your art and for your ability to be an actor, to be a singer, to be a dancer - that I understand. Wanting to be famous - I don't get that. But that's where we're living right now.

The biographies of great artists make it abundantly clear that the creative urge is often so imperious that it battens on their humanity and yokes everything to the service of the work, even at the cost of health and ordinary human happiness. The unborn work in the psyche of the artist is a force of nature that achieves its end either with tyrannical might or with the subtle cunning of nature herself, quite regardless of the personal fate of the man who is its vehicle.

I think that-that anyone, the painter, the musician, the writer works in a-a kind of an-an insane fury. He's demon-driven. He can get up feeling rotten, with a hangover, or with-with actual pain, and-and if he gets to work, the first thing he knows, he don't remember that pain, that hangover-he's too busy.

I would still be reading out loud. I think that if you are any kind of an artist, then validation is just sort of... it can be a result, but you're going to do the work anyway. Because you're just wired that way. It's so engrained, it's such a part of your personality that you don't just stop doing it. Eventually I'll retire on some level, eventually no one will want to buy my books or a ticket to see me read, it's inevitable that's going to happe

Strictly speaking, there are no holidays for art; art pursues you everywhere, and that's just fine with the artist.

The artists must be sacrificed to their art. Like the bees, they must put their lives into the sting they give.

Add to this cruelly delicate organism the overpowering necessity to create, create, create - so that without the creating of music or poetry or books or buildings or something of meaning, his very breath is cut off from him. He must create, must pour out creation. By some strange, unknown, inward urgency he is not really alive unless he is creating.