Richard Price Quotes

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!

I never consciously said, 'I want to be an actor.' It sounds stupid, but it's kind of like being a painter or something. You don't say, 'From today on I'm going to be a painter.' It's not something conscious - you've just been painting pictures all your life.

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.

I could never even entertain the notion that it's an option, to not be an artist.

I think it all comes from the same source, really, the writing of music, the writing of words, the playing of music. It's what drives anyone to be interested in the arts. I think it's a poetic gene; it's a wanting to go beyond.

When you receive a script and it leaps out at you and it's breathing with its own heartbeat - I suppose when you read something like that it's not a choice of whether you do it or don't. It feels like it chooses you, so you just do it.

People often want the big dramatic works, not the smaller quieter ones, but I don't worry about how it fits together anymore; I just have to do it. I feel compelled to make a work: it's like an itch I have to scratch, and once it's been scratched, it goes away.

In matters like writing and painting, a man does what he has to do - if he has to write, why then, he writes; and if he doesn't feel the urgent need of writing, there are dozens of professions in which it is easier to earn a comfortable living.

The peculiar need to write is increased, it seems, rather than allayed with practice.

To me that's what art is about - when you don't really have any control over your desires to do it.

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

I just create, that's what I do.

A musician must make music, an artist must paint, a poet must write, if he is to be ultimately at peace with himself.

I do believe I was put here to tell stories and be creative in that way. It's given my life so much purpose and meaning, and it's ultimately what I live for.

The urge to write poetry is like having an itch. When the itch becomes annoying enough, you scratch it.

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.

I'm the kind of person who lives my art. It's not that I want to necessarily do it: it's that I have to. It's always been that way. That's how I write songs, and it's always been this way.

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.

When I get an artistic itch, I have to scratch it.

I have to write. I have to be an artist.

There's always hunger to create because I believe that's what I do. I believe that's what I'm supposed to be doing.

The idea - or, if you like, the need - to write and record 'Lash Out' was born of a feeling within me.

I do it for myself and for like-minded people. Half the time I don't know why I make what I do. I'd do this if no one was listening. I'm stuck. I've got the curse.

I am an artist through to my marrow, which might be a curse and not necessarily a good thing.