Paul Auster Quotes

Artists are mostly shits of the worst order. You wouldn't want one living next door to you. Think about it: Vincent Van Gogh living next door, coming over to borrow your ear and a cup of sugar every morning-Good God!

I make pictures and someone comes in and calls it art.

All artists are of necessity in some measure contemplative.

I don't think there is room for 'artistic temperament.' Professional artists understand art is a business. If businesses ran their companies like many artists do their careers, they would not stay open a year.

It is our art that has an opportunity to leave a footprint in the sand. They don't wrap fish in our work.

I don't want to be a film-maker. I think painting is far more exciting and profound.

I feel mushy these days when I think about art and artists and the work that lies ahead for us. There's good work to be done and there's joy to be found in it, I think.

The artist begins with a vision - a creative operation requiring an effort.

The frame is the reward of the artist.

Whats a gonzotic frenzy? Well its me in the throes of an ink splattering attempt to capture the feeling I have at that particular time.

A distinction is made between artists who work directly from nature and those who work purely from imagination. Neither if these methods should be preferred to the exclusion of the other. Often both are used in turn by the same man.

I'm a sponge, the more I absorb, the more I am able to articulate my vision, as artists do, like Picasso. I'm an artist in that light. I went from being an artist to an artiste.

Being an artist is a totally godlike thing to do - and I have a god complex.

An artist may visit a museum but only a pedant can live there.

Why do people think artists are special? It's just another job.

The lives great artists live and the books they write are two very different things.

I'm a painter, that's where I started out, at four years old, that was my first love as far as expression. So, I'm not a painter in the sense of, "Please come see my paintings" but, I do understand the value of not looking over the artist's shoulder while the work is in progress.

I know of no substitute whatever for the force and beauty of an artistic process.

What men are among the other formations of the earth, artists are among men.

Anything that had to do with art I been doing all my life. It was a gift. It's nothing I work real hard at doing.

Painting is a nail to which I fasten my ideas.

Art is that which comes to a man, and stands between himself and an implacable witness: the work.

In my previous life, I was an artist. I still paint. I love art.

Well, one always has an instinct to be a painter, and I've done quite a lot of painting at one time or another, though not with any public success.

People see owning a gallery as a way to get rich. I never thought that I could get rich in the art world. I wanted a life in art. I wanted to live with artists. I wanted to make beautiful shows.