Edouard Manet Quotes

But where there is no art show, I would still be painting.

I understand wanting to do your craft. I understand wanting to have a passion for your art and for your ability to be an actor, to be a singer, to be a dancer - that I understand. Wanting to be famous - I don't get that. But that's where we're living right now.

I would always be painting and drawing. If I was stuck at home, I was in the basement working on a painting.

That's the difference between the serious artist and the craftsman--the craftsman can take material and because of his abilities do a professional job of it. The serious artist, like Proust, is like an object caught by a wave and swept to shore. He's obsessed by his material; it's like a venom working in his blood and the art is the antidote.

I'm a little bit of an obsessed artist, and I'm not very talented. But isn't Suzanne Somers a bad painter?

I don't paint to live, I live to paint.

When I got into art school, I thought it was paradise. I wanted to be an artist so much that I was really driven and nothing could stop me.

I've never said, 'I live for art.'

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

Most artists work all the time, they do actually, especially good artists, they work all the time, what else is there to do? I mean you do.

I knew from the age of five what I wanted to do. The one thing I could do was draw. I couldn't draw that much better than some of the other kids, but I cared more and I wanted it badly.

I want to see where and how far I can go as an artist. I look back and see what I've done, and I want to do as much as I can in my lifetime. I love doing it. If I didn't have that passion or love for it, I wouldn't do it.

I don't think there will ever be a time I don't write, and I hope there will never be a time I don't act.

I was really serious about painting, so I could never be a Sunday painter. You can't just switch it on and off.

Me wanting to be an artist never really faded away. I knew that no matter what else I tried to pursue, my passion was always that.

It is not from choice that my life is music and nothing more, but when one is an artist what else can he be? When a whole lifetime is too short to attain the heights he wants to reach, how then can he devote any of the little time he has to things outside of his art?

I have seen no men in life loving their profession so much as painters, except, perhaps, actors, who, when not engaged themselves, always go to the play.

Art is jealous, and demands our whole strength ... .

I was always an artist. I was a broker to earn a living, but I was always thinking about my art.

Painting is like having a bad mistress who spends and spends and it's never enough ... I tell myself that even if a tolerable study comes out of it from time to time, it would have been cheaper to buy it from somebody else.

It is not right for painters to think that painting is like prostitution, that 'first you do it for love, then you do it for others, and finally you do it for money.

I've been asked often what is the difference between an amateur and a professional artist, and I will tell you. An amateur artist is one who works all week at something else so he can paint on Saturday and Sunday. A professional artist is one whose wife works so he can paint all the time.

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

I know for sure that I have an instinct for color, and that it will come to me more and more, that painting is in the very marrow of my bones.

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.