Marina Abramovic Quotes

Just as the bird sings or the butterfly soars, because it is his natural characteristic, so the artist works.

It's hard to predict and to say what goes on inside the minds of an artist, but that's what makes them an artist. That sense of creativity. That thing that makes them tick is probably the very thing that pushes them to the extremes that sometimes can cause, you know, fatalities and things that, you know, that end up not being good.

There's always hunger to create because I believe that's what I do. I believe that's what I'm supposed to be doing.

I don't think that writers or painters or filmmakers function because they have something they particularly want to say. They have something that they feel. And they like the art form; they like words, or the smell of paint, or celluloid and photographic images and working with actors. I don't think that any genuine artist has ever been oriented by some didactic point of view, even if he thought he was.

I want to communicate. I do; every artist does. That's why you're an artist.

I always wonder what drives us as Artists.

Art is a kind of innate drive that seizes a human being and makes him its instrument.

How certain human beings are able to create works of art is a mystery, and why they should wish to do so, at a great cost to themselves usually, is another mystery. Works are not created by one's life; every life is rich in material.

Not that painting would have been a release. The reason for doing it is the desire to create. I've got to do it! I've seen that, I can still remember it, I've got to paint it.

Batty as it sounds, subject and style may choose artists, through some unfathomable cosmic means. How else to explain that even artists who enjoy what they do can be perplexed or even horrified that they're doing it?

Art is something you can't teach, but you can inspire it.

If you are a writer or any kind of artist, if you change something as fundamental as where you live - the way you live - then I think you change the very instrument that is trying to make the art.

I don't paint to live, I live to paint.

I think with anything where you delve into the back story of an artist, it kind of explains their work more intimately.

Really it was the first time in my life that I recognised that acting is, I'm just going to say it, I am an artist, I have to do this, I have to do this.

I can obviously relate to a character who is an artist, because the creative process is a big part of my life.

Art and works of art do not make an artist; sense and enthusiasm and instinct do.

It has taken a great deal of energy, which has not been so difficult to summon as the necessary patience to wait, simply wait much of the time - until my instincts assured me that I had assembled my materials in proper order for a final welding into their natural form.

To me that's what art is about - when you don't really have any control over your desires to do it.

A secondhand wardrobe hand clothes doesn't make one an artist. Neither do a hair-trigger temper, melancholic nature, propensity for tears, hating your parents, or HIV. I hate to say it - none of these make one an artist. They can help, but just as being gay doesn't make one witty... the only thing that makes one an artist is making art.

In my experience a painting is not made with colors and paint at all. I don't know what a painting is; who knows what sets off even the desire to paint?

Why do we make records? Because we want to say something. Why are you in art? Because you want to say something. The second you don't have anything to say, you stop making art - you might start making product. And I'm interested in being an artist.

There are times when I've inhaled my work. There are artworks still inside of me.

People always ask what my inspiration is, and it's never something that's easily explained.

I consider myself first of all an artist. My work is about my creativity - why I create and not for whom.