Kanye West Quotes

I put everything I can into a record. That's what art is for. I take a risk every time I do one with my whole being.

There's obviously always danger in making music or art for art's sake. Even as Christians we can be guilty of that, being more about the art than the Artist who gave us this gift.

I hope to live all my life for my art, without abandoning my principles one iota, without . . . having painted as much as you can cover with your hand, to please somebody or in order to sell the picture more easily.

I have the loftiest idea, and the most passionate one, of art. Much too lofty to agree to subject it to anything. Much too passionate to want to divorce it from anything.

To express what is the most moral, healthful and beautiful in art this is the mission of the dancer, and to this I dedicate my life.

The art is more important than the artist. The work is more important than the person who does it. You must be prepared to sacrifice all the you could possibly have, be, or do; you must be willing to go all the way for your art. If it is a question between choosing between your life and a work of art -- any work of art -- your decision is made for you.

You stand your ground and you perform your art. That's what the artist does. The artist is about perfection.

It is fatal for art if it is forced into official respectability and condemned to sterile mediocrity.

Art is a concrete and personal and rather childish thing after all - no matter what people do to graft it into science and make it sociological and psychological; it is no good at all unless it is let alone to be itself - a game of make-believe, or re-production, very exciting and delightful to people who have an ear for it or an eye for it.

There is no purity with regards to the marketplace and art, I believe.

Don't be dismayed by the opinions of editors, or critics. They are only the traffic cops of the arts.

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

I don't believe that artists really are interested in money. That's not the motivation for art.

Art is something to be proud of. Art is no compromise.

I'm convinced that no one can amount to a damn in the arts if he becomes sweetly reasonable, seeing all sides of a picture, forgiving all sins.

There are all kinds of pretensions about art, but I'm just a guy who sings for his supper.

An artiste can only be happy when he is true to his art.

The market kills more artistic passion than anything else.

The saying "the business of art is different than the purpose of art" makes sense, and what are you going to do about that? You have some obligation to get the work out there, you believe in it enough that it should be out in the public, but of course it goes through a system that takes it pretty far away from the reasons you made them.

Art is a vocation, as much as anything in this world. For the real artist, it is the most natural thing in the world, not as necessary as air and water, perhaps, but as food and water. But we really do lead almost a monastic life, you know; to follow it you very often have to give up something.

Because many of the films I've made have had an intellectualedge, it's harder for me to lie. It's harder for me to go to peoplewith money and say I don't care about art, all I care about iscommerce; all I really want to do is make money.

Art without accomplishment becomes a form of faith, sustained more by the intensity of its common practice than by the pleasure it gives to its adherents in private.

For the serious artist does not satisfy needs

Art is a jealous thing; it requires the whole and entire man.

I think the mystery of art lies in this, that artists’ relationship is essentially with their work — not with power, not with profit, not with themselves, not even with their audience.