Artistic Mediocrity Quotes

It is an error common to many artists, who strive merely to avoid mistakes, when all our efforts should be to create positive and important work. Better positive and important with mistakes and failures than perfect mediocrity.

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.

An artist would not rise above the mediocrity if he condemns it.

It's not evil that's ruining the earth, but mediocrity. The crime is not that Nero played while Rome burned, but that he played badly.

It is so much worse to be a mediocre artist than to be a mediocre post-office clerk.

A wife, a lover, can perhaps never see what the artist sees. They rarely ever do. Perhaps a really mediocre artist has more chance of success.

It is fatal for art if it is forced into official respectability and condemned to sterile mediocrity.

The only artists I have ever known who are personally delightful are bad artists. Good artists exist simply in what they make, and consequently are perfectly uninteresting in what they are. A great poet, a really great poet, is the most unpoetical of all creatures. But inferior poets are absolutely fascinating. The worse their rhymes are, the more picturesque they look. The mere fact of having published a book of second-rate sonnets makes a man quite irresistible. He lives the poetry that he cannot write. The others write the poetry that they dare not realize.

The world must be filled with unsuccessful musical careers like mine, and it's probably a good thing. We don't need a lot of bad musicians filling the air with unnecessary sounds. Some of the professionals are bad enough.

If you're an artist and you're on Twitter, you are doomed to mediocrity.

In the past I've made movies that were pretty universally liked. You can't really hate them. You can discard them, but you can't really hate them.

The so-called conscientiousness of the majority of painters is only perfection applied to the art of boring.

A disaster where marble has been substituted for imagination.

It is a lazy public which promotes a slothful and irresponsible theater.

Bad artists always admire each others work.

I look at you and you look at me and deep in our hearts know it That you weren't much of a muse, but then I weren't much of a poet

There are certain things in which mediocrity is intolerable: poetry, music, painting, public eloquence. What torture it is to hear a frigid speech being pompously declaimed, or second-rate verse spoken with all a bad poet's bombast!