An artist is a creature driven by demons. He doesn't know why they choose him and he's usually too busy to wonder why.
William Faulkner

The artist doesn't have time to listen to the critics. The ones who want to be writers read the reviews, the ones who want to write don't have the time to read reviews.
William Faulkner

The best job that was ever offered to me was to become a landlord in a brothel. In my opinion it's the perfect milieu for an artist to work in.
William Faulkner

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

A great artist is a great man in a great child.
Victor Hugo

An artist's career always begins tomorrow.
James Whistler

An artist is not paid for his labor but for his vision.
James Whistler

Whoever wants to know something about me - as an artist which alone is significant - they should look attentively at my pictures and there seek to recognise what I am and what I want.
Gustav Klimt

An artist is an artist only because of his exquisite sense of beauty, a sense which shows him intoxicating pleasures, but which at the same time implies and contains an equally exquisite sense of all deformities and all disproportion.
Charles Baudelaire

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

One travels so as to learn once more how to marvel at life in the way a child does. And blessed be the poet, the artist who knows how to keep alive his sense of wonder.
Ella Maillart

A great artist can paint a great picture on a small canvas.
Charles Dudley Warner

One of the things that makes Wittgenstein a real artist to me is that he realized that no conclusion could be more horrible than solipsism.
David Foster Wallace

It ought to be illegal for an artist to marry. If the artist must marry let him find someone more interested in art, or his art, or the artist part of him, than in him. After which let them take tea together three times a week.
Ezra Pound

If a patron buys from an artist who needs money, the patron then makes himself equal to the artist; he is building art into the world; he creates.
Ezra Pound

The modern artist must live by craft and violence. His gods are violent gods. Those artists, so called, whose work does not show this strife, are uninteresting.
Ezra Pound

Unless artists can remember what it was to be a little boy, they are only half complete as artist and as man.
James Thurber

As no man is born an artist, so no man is born an angler.
Izaak Walton

I always knew that I wanted to be an artist.
Maynard James Keenan