Artistic Rejection Quotes

No one is ahead of his time, it is only that the particular variety of creating his time is the one that his contemporaries who are also creating their own time refuse to accept. For a very long time everybody refuses and then almost without a pause almost everybody accepts. In the history of the refused in the arts and literature the rapidity of the change is always startling.

Obviously we had to study Shakespeare at school, but to be honest, I was not a fan. I found the language very difficult, and I didn't enjoy watching it or studying it. I auditioned five times for the Royal Shakespeare Company early on in my career, and I didn't even get past the first rounds.

Art is subjective and, as an artiste, if our artistic work is not appreciated by the majority, it hurts.

I gave everything I ever wrote to Johnny Cash. I think he said later in some interview that he would take them home and throw them in the lake with all the other demos. I'm sure he got a million of them.

The art world was not initially really accepting my kind of work. I was ahead of my time.

Bejart is almost never performed in New York City; critically, he just gets attacked here.

The U.S. museums weren't looking at my paintings at all - they hated them, irredeemably. People metaphorically threw up when they saw my work! They thought I was enlarging comics, or just copying them.

'Love Tattoo' I recorded without a record company. I'd gotten turned down by the record companies - they said they didn't get me, which is fine, I suppose.

I hate negativity in general. We, as artists, we pour so much into our music and put out something we believe in... it sucks that people tear you down.

Rejection slips, or form letters, however tactfully phrased, are lacerations of the soul, if not quite inventions of the devil-but there is no way around them.

I'd always enjoyed the comics more, and felt that as long as I was unemployed it would be a good chance to pursue that and see what response I could get from asyndicate, as I didn't have anything to lose at that point. So I drew up a comic strip - this was in 1980 - and sent it off and got rejected. I continued that for five years with different comic strip examples 'til finally Calvin and Hobbes came together. But it's been a long road.

I've given up trying to understand what people think about me. It seems like a lot of people don't like the music we make and don't know me, or something.

Despite the fact that I had a writing background, they didn't want to accept whatever ideas I had as a writer.

I believe Picasso's success is just one small part of the broader modern phenomenon of artists themselves rejecting serious art- perhaps partly because serious art takes so much time and energy and talent to produce-in favor of what I call 'impulse art': art work that is quick and easy, at least by comparison.

I am not an artist. I am not a painter.

I was once called a hack, and when you put as much emotion into a piece of work as I do, to be called a hack is really heartbreaking.

I stand between two worlds. I am at home in neither, and I suffer in consequence. You artists call me a bourgeois, and the bourgeois try to arrest me...I don't know which makes me feel worse.

I wanted to paint in a folk-artist-y way. My heroes were Van Gogh, Gauguin, Matisse, and Rembrandt. I think Picasso is about as a modern as I got. But I incorporated things that they rejected as well as movements that happened later.

When you're an artist, you're working, literally, for the sole purpose of art, and when people discredit you, it's probably the most disrespectful thing you can do.

My rejection at the Salon brought an end to my hesitation [to settle in Paris] since after this failure I can no longer claim to cope... alas, that fatal rejection has virtually taken the bread out of my mouth.

I think, in any profession, what you fear most is not being able to perform, about not being able to meet new challenges. The fear of non-acceptance, particularly if in creative art. What happens if the audiences do not like you anymore!

It's just hard when you've spent so much time on something, writing and recording, laying the vocals, getting the hook right, getting the beat right, making everything sound right - you spent a freaking week trying to make it sound perfect, and someone comes along and shoots it down.

A lot of designers, they did tell me no. They didn't really wanna work with me.

Accursed who brings to light of day the writings I have cast away.

Kinkade estimated that one of his paintings hung in every twenty homes in America. Yet the art world unanimously ignores or reviles him. Me included.