Studs Terkel Quotes

You know, real artists, we expose our flaws. We long for intimacy.

I'm such an emotional and sensitive person, so it only makes sense that my songs are as well.

All you can do as an artist is do what you think is an extension of you. You put down on paper ... who you are. That's what being an artist is all about. And when it gets done, you don't look back at it and say, Oh, I could have done that better.

I feel like songwriting is an experiment in empathy.

If you meet me, you might not get to know me. If you hear my music? You'll get to know me.

If I were a writer and not a singer in 10 years, I don't know how I'd feel about writing really personal songs and getting someone else to sing them.

I think when you're telling a story from inside of you that's genuine, people connect with it.

I won't get into it any more than to say that there are parts of me in all the songs that I write.

'Beautiful' was something that I kept really close to my heart, that I kept from a lot of people for years and years. It's my story. And I think that was the first impression I needed to give to people as a solo artist. This is who I am; this is what I'm about.

When someone gives you a piece of music, they are really giving you a piece of themselves.

I don't write anything down - it comes from my head and my soul and my heart and my pain. That allows me to make the best music I can make.

I need my 'art work' or 'entertainment work' or whatever to have empathy for or connection to the way I experience the world as a person.

As a filmmaker, if your personality is not reflected in your movies, then what are you doing, why are you making films?

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.

Do not strive to be a modern artist: it's the one thing, unfortunately, you can't help being.

Your best as an artist is to create something that resonates for you.

In a portrait, you always leave part of yourself behind.

An artist is the only thing I want to be. I only want my freedom and my creativity. It's all that I live for. I reject the idea that I have to take all the costumes and makeup off to be f - king authentic.

An artist reveals his naked soul in his work.

We all know that the theater and every play that comes to Broadway have within themselves, like the human being, the seed of self-destruction and the certainty of death. The thing is to see how long the theater, the play, and the human being can last in spite of themselves.

Words in the mind are like colors on the palette of the artist. The more colors we have access to, the easier it is to create a captivating picture on the canvas, and the more practice we give to using those many colors appropriately and uniquely, the more likely we will be to create a masterpiece of self expression.

When the artist is alive in any person, whatever his kind of work may be, he becomes an inventive, searching, daring, self-expressing creature.

I am most alive when I let myself be touched by the fingers of life.

I am a New Yorker, one; I'm an artist, two; I'm a woman, three.

I've really come into my own as an artist. I'm much more sure of my identity and understand it much better, and have accepted the fact that I like to jump around a lot in terms of who I am and what kind of music I create, and that it is okay - in fact, that is my main identity, the fact that I do that.