Libba Bray Quotes

I hope to live all my life for my art, without abandoning my principles one iota.

That is how America gets her art: Contracting firms get the contract and the honor. Starving artists do the work. The government pays for sculpturing thousands of dollars, of which the sculptor gets a hundred or so.

The true professional makes art when he is not feeling good, if the studio is too cold or too warm or the walls are falling down. We are painters and we paint. If I were a sculptor, I'd sculpt.

When you put a tremendous amount of love into your work, as in any relationship, you can't know - you can only hope - that what you're offering will in some way be received. You shape your love to artistic demands, to the rigors of your genre. But still, it's a labor of love, and it's the nature of love that you must give it freely.

For the essential thing about the work of art is that it is work, and very hard work too.

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.

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

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.

I'm not the type to turn to drugs and alcohol, but I do have a profound devotion to art and music - and children.

Artists must be sacrificed to their art.

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.

I consider chess an art, and accept all those responsibilities which art places upon its devotees.

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

Art is a jealous mistress.

I gave my genius to my life, but my talent to my art.

The person who practices an art is an artist, not a samurai, and one should have the intention of being called a samurai.

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.

The theater has to impose itself on the public, and not the public on the theater... The word "Art" should be written everywhere, in the auditorium and in the dressing rooms, before the word "Business" gets written there.

The truth is, anyone who puts so much of herself and her life into art as you do must naturally fear any failure in that art as a potential threat to your life. And so you protect your art more than you protect your health or the common forms of happiness the rest of us have. And you probably have this in common with every artist you admire.

Art is a jealous mistress; and if a man have a genius for painting, poetry, music, architecture or philosophy, he makes a bad husband and an ill provider.

An artist who dedicates his life to art, burdens his art with his life, and his life with his art.

To labor in the arts for any reason other than love is prostitution.

I have spent all my life with dance and being a dancer. It's permitting life to use you in a very intense way. Sometimes it is not pleasant. Sometimes it is fearful. But nevertheless it is inevitable.