Lee Krasner Quotes

I never paint dreams or nightmares. I paint my own reality.

[When making movies I] set out to be authentic to [myself] and to put it down the way [I] feel it and know it and interpret it. And then others sometimes key into it and get it.

If you are a creative person, you try to create things that are an extension of yourself.

I just wanted to be an artist. I didn't care how or what; I just wanted to express my artistic integrity, and I wanted the world to have a vision of what I was seeing in my mind.

There are different sides to me; I wanted to make a personal film but I would not want to make any film that does not reflect me in it. At least, not right now. I'm just too young to be doing that.

The definition of an artist, for me, is someone who is quite selfish about their creativity.

As a composer, I'm basically trying to represent myself through my music in an honest way.

As an artist, what you do represents who you are. Coming from a genuine, honest place - that's what I'm trying to do.

I just think I want my work to represent me fully.

I'm going to put every aspect of myself out into the world and try to convey it through photography.

The artist must express the summation of his feeling, knowing and believing through the unity of his life and work.

To be an artist is a blessing and a privilege. Artists must never betray their true hearts. Artists must look beneath the surface and show that there is more to this world than what meets the eye.

The artist should paint not only what he sees before him, but also what he sees within him. If, however, he sees nothing within him, then he should also refrain from painting that which he sees before him. Otherwise, his pictures will be like those folding screens behind which one expects to find only the sick or the dead.

As an artist I have always tried to be faithful to my vision of life, and I have frequently been in conflict with those who wanted me to paint not what I saw but what they wished me to see.

Painting myself for others, I have painted my inward self with colors clearer than my original ones. I have no more made my book than my book has made me--a book consubstantial with its author, concerned with my own self, an integral part of my life; not concerned with some third-hand, extraneous purpose, like all other books.

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.

Every artist's strictly illimitable country is himself. An artist who plays that country false has committed suicide; and even a good lawyer cannot kill the dead. But a human being who's true to himself - whoever himself may be - is immortal; and all the atomic bombs of all the antiartists in spacetime will never civilize immortality.

What the really great artists do is they're entirely themselves. They're entirely themselves. They've got their own vision, they have their own way of fracturing reality, and if it's authentic and true, you will feel it in your nerve endings.

The artist is obliged to invent the self who will paint his pictures.

When I'm traveling to promote my book, I feel like an artful impostor. What I really am is when I'm in my (painter's) studio and when I'm writing. With actors, it's the same thing. They're kind of artful impostors in public. When you get to know them, they're different people.

Nothing can come out of an artist that is not in the man.

Paint what you are, paint what you believe, paint what you feel.

My music is the most 'me' thing about me. Everything is in my music.

What's the point if you make something that's not you, and you're successful? You have to perform it the rest of your life.

When I'm writing music, I'm not playing a character. I'm not Alice Cooper or Gene Simmons or someone like that, who has acknowledged that they are writing music for a character.