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

The genuine artist is never "true to life." He sees what is real, but not as we are normally aware of it. We do not go storming through life like actors in a play. Art is never real life.
Wallace Stevens

I don't care who's playing. Even if it's my favorite artist, I'm probably not gonna go and see him.
Etta James

There were a lot of choices to make and I always picked artist. I never once picked doctor, lawyer, firemen or something like that. It was always artist.
Maynard James Keenan

A musician must make music, an artist must paint, a poet must write, if he is to be ultimately at peace with himself.
Abraham Maslow

The crucial discovery was made that, in order to become painting, the universe seen by the artist had to become a private one created by himself.
Andre Malraux

Do you want to be an artist and a writer, or a wife and a lover? With kids, your focus changes. I don't want to go to PTA meetings.
Stevie Nicks

The job of the artist is always to deepen the mystery.
Francis Bacon

The artist must be in his work as God is in creation, invisible and all-powerful; one must sense him everywhere but never see him.
Gustave Flaubert

Caught up in life, you see it badly. You suffer from it or enjoy it too much. The artist, in my opinion, is a monstrosity, something outside of nature.
Gustave Flaubert

Let not a man do what his sense of right bids him not to do, nor desire what it forbids him to desire. This is sufficient. The skillful artist will not alter his measures for the sake of a stupid workman.
Mencius

In our life there is a single color, as on an artist's palette, which provides the meaning of life and art. It is the color of love.
Marc Chagall

The dignity of the artist lies in his duty of keeping awake the sense of wonder in the world. In this long vigil he often has to vary his methods of stimulation; but in this long vigil he is also himself striving against a continual tendency to sleep.
Marc Chagall

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

Winners have the ability to step back from the canvas of their lives like an artist gaining perspective. They make their lives a work of art - an individual masterpiece.
Denis Waitley

The house has to please everyone, contrary to the work of art which does not. The work is a private matter for the artist. The house is not.
Adolf Loos

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

The moment you cheat for the sake of beauty, you know you're an artist.
David Hockney

It is very good advice to believe only what an artist does, rather than what he says about his work.
David Hockney

We live in an age where the artist is forgotten. He is a researcher. I see myself that way.
David Hockney