How can people think that artists seek a name? There is no such thing as an artist - only the world, lit or unlit, as the world allows.
The artist, like the God of the creation, remains within or behind or beyond or above his handiwork, invisible, refined out of existence, indifferent, paring his fingernails.
The music is the thing. I am not writing for critics; I don't want to become a personality.
I want to get to the stage where nobody can tell how a picture of mine is done. What's the point of that? Simply that I want nothing but emotion given off by it.
For the life of me, I'll never understand how you can be an artist but not want people to understand who you are as a person.
I wanted to be as invisible as possible as an artist. I wanted to differentiate between myself and who I'm writing about.
I've done films over the years that basically no one saw. And I'm thankful that some of them haven't been seen.
I fight for the debunking of the artist and an end to individual pictures.
The artist must be in his work as God is in creation, invisible and all-powerful; one must sense him everywhere but never see him.
To be perfectly honest, if it was up to me, I would be invisible as an artist.
Even Andy never hung his own paintings. He'd sell them or put them in a box.
The artist is the creator of beautiful things. To reveal art and conceal the artist is art's aim.
The very first music I recorded by myself, when I was 17, I said it was by King Tuff.
As a painter, it seemed easier to sort of disappear.
The author of haiku should be absent, and only the haiku present.
People shout out for songs and I don't even remember writing them.
I decided to sell my drawings. However, I didn't want people to buy my drawings because the professor of physics isn't supposed to be able to draw - isn't that wonderful - so I made up a false name.
Writing poetry is talking to oneself; yet it is a mode of talking to oneself in which the self disappears; and the product's something that, though it may not be for everybody, is about everybody.
I don't want my writing to be recognized.
There is the cult of the actor and of the director, and there's even been the cult of the celebrity chef and gardener, but there has never been a cult of the screenwriter. But I'm happy about that because what I crave - in a completely venal way - is creative opportunities, not recognition.
And hence the poet must seek to be essentially anonymous, He must die a little death each morning, He must swallow his toad and study his vomit as Baudelaire studied la charogne of Jeanne Duval.
If you recognize a photograph by me, I'm a failure.
A work of art has an author and yet, when it is perfect, it has something which is anonymous about it.
Gregorian chant, Romanesque architecture, the Iliad , the invention of geometry were not, for the people through whom they were brought into being and made available to us, occasions for the manifestation of personality.
There are thousands of very, very talented artists who will never be known, even after they are dead.
