A masterpiece only comes into being when the artist is totally sincere in his treatment of his material…An artist can not be partially sincere any more than art can be an approximation of beauty. Art is the absolute form of the beautiful, of the perfected.
- Andrei Tarkovsky
“Build a good name.” Keep your name clean. Don’t make compromises. Don’t worry about making a bunch of money or being successful. Be concerned with doing good work, and make the right choices, and protect your work. And if you build a good name, eventually that name will be its own currency.
- Patti Smith
Vigor comes from precision. Precision is vigorous. When I am working poorly, I am imprecise. Precision is another form of poetry.
- Robert Bresson
Do what deep in your heart you know nobody else can do except for you.
- Edwin Adrian Nieves
I like to show things in an original way, I like to push the forms of visual expression to their limit. It is probably because I don’t like doing the same things twice. I like to put myself at risk, try things, and learn from these experiences.
- Lynne Ramsay
By giving it shape, the artist translates it into the language of the present, and so makes it possible for us to find our way back to the deepest springs of life.
- Carl Gustav Jung
If people knew how hard I worked to get my mastery, it wouldn’t seem so wonderful at all.
- Michelangelo
The artist, and particularly the poet, is always an anarchist in the best sense of the word. He must heed only the call that arises within him from three strong voices: the voice of death, with all its foreboding, the voice of love, and the voice of art.
- Federico García Lorca
You can’t use up creativity. The more you use, the more you have.
- Maya Angelou
If you hear a voice within you say, “You can not paint,” then by all means paint, and that voice will be silenced.
- Vincent van Gogh
It is not art in the professionalized sense about which I care, but that which is created sacredly, as a result of a deep inner experience, with all of oneself, and that becomes “art” in time.
- Alfred Stieglitz
There is nothing to ask permission for, don’t ask for permission…When I just decided I’m just going to work with what I’ve got and give myself permission, then it really started…You just got to start, you just got to begin…That’s the biggest tip: is to start. It may not be the dream project, it may not be perfect. Begin.
- Ava DuVernay
How do you know you’re an artist? That is the main question. To know you’re an artist or not is like breathing. You don’t question breathing. You have to breathe otherwise you just die so you breathe.
- Marina Abramović
The artist is a receptacle for emotions that come from all over the place: from the sky, from the earth, from a scrap of paper, from a passing shape, from a spider’s web.
- Pablo Picasso
The artist is one who makes a concentrated statement about the world in which he lives and that statement tends to become impersonal—it tends to become universal and enduring because it comes out of something very particular.
- Paul Strand
I always hope that if I do things the way I like, I will end up having respected the audience.
- Claire Denis
Creativity takes courage.
- Henri Matisse
I always work better when I do not reason, when no question of right or wrong enter in, when my pulse quickens to the form before me without hesitation nor calculation.
- Edward Weston