Most artists lose their voice, their hair, and their bands. That's not going to happen to me.
How can anybody learn anything from an artwork when the piece of art only reflects the vanity of the artist and not reality?
I'm a horrible producer when it comes to me, but for other artists, I don't know what it is, but something happens, and I'm just really good at it.
If the newspapers cut me up so much that I shall not venture before the world again, I have resolved to become a house painter; that would be as easy as anything else, and I should, at any rate, still be an artist!
The musician is perhaps the most modest of animals, but he is also the proudest.
Everybody who I ever cared about has told me that they like my music: Bob Dylan, Paul McCartney, Al Green, The Spinners, Smokey Robinson. Everybody that matters.
The only happy artist is a dead artist, because only then you can't change. After I die, I'll probably come back as a paintbrush.
There's only one passion in most artists more violent than their desire for admiration: their fear of identifying the nature of such admiration as they do receive.
I've been in grocery stores, and if they're playing my music, I'll yell, 'Hey! I wrote that!' I've been next to cars and have done that!
The artist who imagines that he puts his best into a portrait in order to produce something good, which will be a pleasure to the sitter and to himself, will have some bitter experiences.
People who don't know you, you don't know their motives. They smile at you all day, "Oh, that's great. You've done it again! You're the greatest!" And that's not good for an artist.
The artist makes art not to save mankind but to save himself. Every benevolent comment by an artist is a fog to cover his tracks, the bloody trail of his assault against reality and others.
An artist must believe in himself - Possibly not so passionately as Lawrence - but passionately. Your belief is contagious. Others say - He is vain - but they are affected.
I've been touring for so long, I've kind of honed into exactly what I am, I'm an artist so if you like it, you like it, if you don't you don't, you know?
