Great Artists Quotes

Anybody great, we're all interested in the relics. If you found an unfinished Gauguin, you'd still want to see it.

The thing that's tricky is sometimes the best voices - just because someone hits the big notes and sounds amazing - it doesn't necessarily mean they make the greatest artists.

There are people that I am in love with, totally in love with them. I would die for them. I love Michelangelo. I love Charlie Chaplin with all my heart. I love Walt Disney. These are the people I am nuts over. These are my people. I love the great ones.

Luckily, each generation brings forth great writers, actors, directors, and designers.

The first play I ever did was with Michael Langham, Brian Bedford, and Colm Feore, at Stratford Festival. That was my first professional job, and I got to work with Garland Wright and so many great artists.

I've never been able to understand where great artists come from.

Freddie is great. At a time when everybody around was doing God knows what, Queen was making music.

... the great artists ... do not want security, egoistic or materialistic.

We feel really lucky at Disney to work with a great stable of artists.

Soul music has so many great artists who put their thing down. That's important.

I'm doing what great artists before me did, like Judy Garland, Sammy Davis, Eddie Cantor. I'm doing what they were doing, not at their level yet, but one day I will be. I'm just happy to be in their company.

The works of the great artists are silent books of eternal truths.

I didn't come after Elvis and Dylan, I've been around always. But if I see or meet a great artist, I love 'em.

The so-called 'discoveries' of the Impressionists could not have been unknown to the old masters; and if they made no use of them, it was because all great artists have renounced the use of effects. And in simplifying nature, they made it all the greater.

The quality of our lives is diminished every time we lose a great artist.

I've been influenced by so many great people, like Sam Moore, Wilson Pickett, Otis Redding, John Lee Hooker, B.B. King, so many great blues and soul artists that I completely revere. So it's strange for me, actually, to hear somebody say, 'Oh, I was deeply influenced by your music.'

Great artists are products of their own time: they do not spring forth fully equipped from the head of Jove, but are formed by the circumstances acting upon them since birth. These circumstances include the ambiance created by the other, lesser artists of their own time, who have all done their part in creating the pressure that forces up an exceptional talent. Unjustly, but unavoidably, the very closeness of a great artist to his colleagues and contemporaries leads to their eclipse.

All really great artists, Jackson Pollack, John Cage, Beckett or Joyce - you are never indifferent to them.

A great teacher is a great artist and that there are as few as there are any other great artists. It might even be the greatest of the arts since the medium is the human mind and spirit.

I've had the honor to be in sessions with great artists.

Music is art, art is life, and we are who we are, and all of these aforementioned women, unless they should choose not to, will be performing well into the next many decades because they are great artists.

When one has praised Turgenev, however, for the beauty of his character and the beautiful truth of his art, one remembers that he, too, was human and therefore less than perfect. His chief failing was, perhaps, that of all the great artists, he was the most lacking in exuberance. That is why he began to be scorned in a world which rated exuberance higher than beauty or love or pity.

Roman Polanski is a man who cares deeply about his art and its place in this world. What happened to him on his incredible path is filled with tragedy, and most men would have collapsed. Instead, he became a great artist and continues to make great films.

When I'm dead, I wanna leave a body of work, like authors or great painters do.