Shirley Knight Quotes

I'd rather have people really be able to step back and get their money's worth and look at me as a true artist than somebody who is just regurgitating other material.

Great artists are people who find the way to be themselves in their art. Any sort of pretension induces mediocrity in art and life alike.

That is the way a great master carpenter feels, or an architect or composer or anyone who creates anything - people want to be appreciated for what they have done.

People wish to be poets more than they wish to write poetry, and that's a mistake. One should wish to celebrate more than one wishes to be celebrated.

I knew so many people were coming up to me because they knew who I was, not because they were fans of my music. That bothered me because I don't want to be a celebrity; I want to be an artist.

There's a lot of artists that are celebrities, not really artists.

To be an artist is not about fame; it's about art, which is this intangible thing that has got to have lots of integrity, whereas being famous doesn't really take any integrity. But I think you have to admit that you want to be famous, otherwise you can't be an artist. Art and fame together are like a desire to live forever.

The real artist, who knew what he was imitating, would be interested in realities and not in imitations; and would desire to leave as memorials of himself works many and fair; and, instead of being the author of encomiums, he would prefer to be the theme of them.

The moment you cheat for the sake of beauty, you know you're an artist.

How many new rock stars have come around that have anything to say at all? Guys where you even want to know what they're thinking? Are they thinking? Where did it go astray?

The greatness of art is not to find what is common but what is unique.

Being a cover artist is not like being a real artist. That's just copying what someone else did.

I don't want to record anything unless it can be great and genuinely interesting.

Let authors write for glory and reward. The truth is well paid when she is sung and heard.

When you sing and people want that you sing, then you can hope to be great.

I feel that people really feel they've got a part of me when they listen to my albums and the themes just show themselves.

Putting out commercial pieces and promoting them and trying to sell them to people is not necessarily what it means to be an artist.

The mark of all good art is not that the thing done is done exactly or finely, for machinery may do as much, but that it is worked out with the head and the workman's heart.

When you have celebrity, it's a whole different thing than being an artist.

The artists that I relate to and love the most are the ones where I can listen to the record, and I can know them better, and for me, that's writing it.

I do hip-hop music, and I've gotten famous off of hip-hop music, and I know that I'm successful, and I've created my own definition of success, what success means to me. So the hip-hop world is all just really fake to me.

No artist wants to be perceived as a regurgitator.

When a real artist creates something, it has to be a necessity, the only way he can say something.

You should be able to do you. That's what differentiates an artist from a singer.

As much as I like being part of commercial films that give me visibility with a wide audience, and love being the glamourous girl, at the end of the day, I am an actor, and nothing can be more satisfying than being appreciated for my craft.