Helen Hayes Quotes

An amateur may not be an artist, though an artist should be an amateur.

If artists do have ideas, they're often not great.

My sister-in-law is a painter, and I'll say, how long did it take you to paint that painting. She'll say, It took me maybe three days, but it took me all my life to get the skills to paint that painting.

There are two men inside the artist, the poet and the craftsman. One is born a poet. One becomes a craftsman.

I think that an artist should be a skilled craftsman.

If you wanna be an artist carry sketch pad with you, and sketch everything you see. Get so you can draw anything and it looks like what it's supposed to be. It's a lot of work, but if you really have it in you, it's not like work. It becomes fun.

In abandoning the vagueness of the sketch the artist shows more of his personality by revealing the range but also the limitations of his talent.

My weakness has always been to prefer the large intention of an unskilful artist to the trivial intention of an accomplished one: in other words, I am more interested in the high ideas of a feeble executant than in the high execution of a feeble thinker.

Only talent interests me in paintings and books. Not general ideas, but the individual contribution.

It is very bad for (an artist) to talk about how he (creates). It is not the (artist's) province to explain or to run guided tours through the more difficult country of his work. It's none of their business that you had to learn. Let them think you were born that way.

An opened mind will eventually lead to a more well rounded artist and this will thus heightenen his or her level of professionalism.

I was probably born with the ability to draw, but that does not make you an artist.

An artist is a man who says a difficult thing in a simple way

It is perfectly possible to be a professional director or a professional writer and not to be an artist: merely a sort of executor of other people's ideas.

The idea is that what an artist lives through should broaden his notion of what it is possible for a human being to live through, and that new understanding should then get into and expand the work.

I'm definitely obsessed about artists and the type of music and the playing and the tone and all that kind of thing - I'm not obsessed about what the best Beatles album is. I just think if The Beatles are great, they're great.

The Academies of Art are nothing but great painting factories - those with talent are fed in at one end, and they come out as mechanical painting machines.

I don't think people are born artists; I think it comes from a mixture of your surroundings, the people you meet, and luck.

I kind of like the way that I came up as an artist. I like experimenting.

Every master knows that the material teaches the artist.

because talent alone doesn't make an artist

An artist should be taking risks. That's the whole idea of being an artist.

My son's a painter. All through school his teachers tell him he's a genius. I tell him to paint me an apple that looks like an apple before he paints me one that doesn't. Go where you can go, but start from someplace recognizable.

It takes only one man to make an artist, but forty to make an Academician.

It does take a long time and a lot of paint to become our own artist.