Patti Smith Quotes

Me being able to be acting and doing other things has opened me as an artist, and I think even more from a visual standpoint.

How can you say one style is better than another? You ought to be able to be an Abstract Expressionist next week, or a Pop artist, or a realist, without feeling you've given up something.. I think that would be so great, to be able to change styles. And I think that's what's is going to happen, that's going to be the whole new scene.

Painting cannot be the only activity of a mature artist.

When you are an artist you can turn your hand to anything, in any style. Once you have the tools then all the artforms are the same in the end.

I'd love to be an artist that's multifaceted.

I'm sort of like Jean-Paul Goude, the graphic designer who used to style Grace Jones and shoot all her visuals, just meaning that I use all mediums in one - music, fashion, and art. I'm hitting it from all angles.

It's like Willie Nelson. You're an artist and you have different styles inside of you.

I love dabbling in various genres and languages.

People will always have the desire to make rock and roll records, and they'll always have the desire to sell rock and roll records. Most of the people making these records do it because it is a business, and if someone says, "You can't do this", they won't complain. They'll just keep making records, but they'll get blander and blander. There'll still be rock and roll, but compared to what it really could be or ought to be, I don't think it'll be all that terrific.

All rappers predominantly sound the same and want you to think their meanest person in the world, and that they're all gangster and all that. My acting allowed me to be playful and crazy, and it helps me tell stories and all that. I think it's a good time; rap needs that kind of stuff.

I think as a mature artist, you're probably always trying to undo the compromises of one's self [in general]. It's not necessarily to do with youth.

I think, as an artist I done conquered every way that you can go, as far as with creativeness, and directions and love, and you pissed off or, your happy.

Some people think or expect that you should make the same kinds of art forever because it creates a convenient narrative... I want my work to embody my inherent contradictions.

In the Renaissance there wasn't a distinction. Bernini was an artist and he made architecture, and Michelangelo also did some great architecture.

It's much more liberating as a artist to feel like you can approach each page and each panel with the way that inspires you the most. I think the thing that bogs down a lot of artists is that you're kind of stuck drawing in a style you've developed.

Leonard [Nimoy] was such a teacher for me. He was one of the most fully realized human beings I have ever known on every level - in his personal life with his personal relationships and his love for his wife and his evolution with his family. Then as an artist, as an actor, as a writer, as a poet, and as a photographer. He never stopped.

For an artist to think in terms of success is like a priest trying to think in terms of success.

I think basically I'm a painter, but I would use anything to make my point.

It's how you tell the story that makes it new. That's what artists do. They let us look at the world from a different perspective. They let us look at birds in a way that makes us never see birds again in the same way. That's why I don't think computers are healthy for kids. They're too literal. You pop a button and a bluebird comes out. You pop another button and you can take the color blue and shove it into the outline of the bluebird.

I kind of like the way that I came up as an artist. I like experimenting.

There's a lot of other artists doing things outside of that depth that I enjoy - that music that I can actually have fun to, and not be in depth and think about, then I appreciate that.

Regardless of any feedback. I love being a solo artist and having creative control. But it can be very nourishing and informative and flex very different creative muscles to work for someone else. You are essentially employed by the director. I love the challenge of that.

No one who looks at my paintings can see whether a painting is upside down or not anymore. I've made or developed so many image models that some people have given up trying to keep track of me. But others have only one or two ways of doing things and are successful with that.

People ask me if I'm an artist or an architect. But I think they're the same.

I don't want to just be an actor my whole life. I mean I do want to be an actor my whole life but not only an actor, I want to be an artist.