Joan Rivers Quotes

Art is something in which you are never an expert at any point of time. It's something you hone all the time and something which is elusive all the time.

I am just beginning to understand what it is to paint. A painter should have two lives, one in which to learn, and one in which to practice his art.

What still concerns me the most is: am I on the right track, am I making progress, am I making mistakes in art?

For me becoming a painter was an Everest, in terms of what I thought a painter was. There are many roads to becoming an artist. For me it wasn't art school. I didn't have that go to art school and then get a gallery. It's more like, how deep is your inner library to cull from. It's certainly not about technical prowess, just about depth of investigation. It takes time. I had 15 years of painting under my belt before my first New York show. I was glad to have that. It's a good thing to spend your twenties getting your craft.

We are probably the only artists in the world who have a 2,000-page book on a work of art that doesn't exist. But in this way, these projects reveal their identity through this whole process. When I'm starting, I only have the slightest idea of how the work of art will exist.

Domesticity is the enemy of art. I don't know if that's true. You can write good happy songs. So, I don't think it's necessarily happiness. But I think self-satisfaction is maybe the enemy. It's kind of better to think, "Tomorrow night I'm gonna sing it better." There is this forward effort. It feels to me right, it feels human.

An amateur may not be an artist, though an artist should be an amateur.

Writing, like any art, is a continuing process of discovering the infinite possibilities of Life.

I can't really explain the feeling of acting. It makes you the most insecure you can possibly be.

If you're going to be an artist, all life is your subject. And all your experience is part of your art. A youngster told me recently that he was going to give himself a year to see if he has talent. A year! It takes a lifetime to see if you have it. Painting is total engagement.

I wish to be of service to the artists of our own day, by showing them how a small beginning leads to the highest elevation, and how from so noble a situation it is possible to fall to utmost ruin, and consequently, how these arts resemble nature as shown in our human bodies.

I want to keep - this seems so corny - I want to keep growing as an artist.

I always feel scared and insecure on a film set. I don't know any other way.

I want to paint. That is probably going to sound so pretentious coming from someone who's been a musician.

Fiction, maybe art in general, is a tentative, uncertain enterprise; it's not science, it's an exploration, but you never find much in the way of answers.

As an actor, you have an accumulated knowledge base. But there's also something about it that every time you really feel like you're doing it for the first time; you have no idea whether you're capable of it.

I think, like any artist, those baby songs are not the best things you've ever written, but they count because they're you're first attempts at creating art and expressing yourself.

Any art worth its name requires you to be fundamentally lost for a very long time.

On stage, you have to have incredible confidence, or you would stop doing it. But I don't think I will ever get to the point where I go, 'I know exactly what I am doing,' and I don't think I want to.

I don't think there's any artist of any value who doesn't doubt what they're doing.

I started writing songs, I guess, when I was about 13 or 14, but I didn't know if they were good enough yet or anything.

Get into your own creativity. Sketch and paint with different mediums and follow your heart.

The importance of art is in the process of doing it, in the learning experience where the artist interacts with whatever is being made.

I explored the arts in general; I took painting classes and sketching classes and acting classes and all sorts of different things.

As an artist, I want to explore as much as I can.