Making social comment is an artificial place for an artist to start from. If an artist is touched by some social condition, what the artist creates will reflect that, but you can't force it.
Susan Sontag

I had rather be called a journalist than an artist.
H. G. Wells

An artist's only concern is to shoot for some kind of perfection, and on his own terms, not anyone else's.
Jonas Salk

Some people have been kind enough to call me a fine artist. I've always called myself an illustrator. I'm not sure what the difference is. All I know is that whatever type of work I do, I try to give it my very best. Art has been my life.
Norman Rockwell

Nobody, I think, ought to read poetry, or look at pictures or statues, who cannot find a great deal more in them than the poet or artist has actually expressed. Their highest merit is suggestiveness.
Nathaniel Hawthorne

Luxury is the wolf at the door and its fangs are the vanities and conceits germinated by success. When an artist learns this, he knows where the danger is.
Tennessee Williams

Good taste is the first refuge of the non-creative. It is the last-ditch stand of the artist.
Marshall McLuhan

I don't really count myself as a very sophisticated businessperson. I'm a creative artist. All I know from business I've picked up along the way.
Mick Jagger

Glorious bouquets and storms of applause are the trimmings which every artist naturally enjoys.
Golda Meir

An artist is a dreamer consenting to dream of the actual world.
George Santayana

Nature is garrulous to the point of confusion, let the artist be truly taciturn.
Paul Klee

All works of art are commissioned in the sense that no artist can create one by a simple act of will but must wait until what he believes to be a good idea for a work comes to him.
W. H. Auden

Of all possible subjects, travel is the most difficult for an artist, as it is the easiest for a journalist.
W. H. Auden

He is the greatest artist who has embodied, in the sum of his works, the greatest number of the greatest ideas.
John Ruskin

The artist, like the God of the creation, remains within or behind or beyond or above his handiwork, invisible, refined out of existence, indifferent, paring his fingernails.
James Joyce

In order for the artist to have a world to express he must first be situated in this world, oppressed or oppressing, resigned or rebellious, a man among men.
Charles Baudelaire

The study of beauty is a duel in which the artist cries with terror before being defeated.
Charles Baudelaire

The history of modern art is also the history of the progressive loss of art's audience. Art has increasingly become the concern of the artist and the bafflement of the public.
Paul Gauguin

I think it all comes back to being very selfish as an artist. I mean, I really do just write and record what interests me and I do approach the stage shows in much the same way.
David Bowie

I am not a painter, nor an artist. Therefore I can see straight, and that may be my undoing.
Alfred Stieglitz