Cindy Sherman Quotes

When I paint, I never think of selling. People simply fail to understand that we paint in order to experiment and to develop ourselves as we strive for greater heights.

It's been so much a part of my life the thinking that I go through is crucial. I found that if I don't paint for around a week, I get practically suicidal. It took a long time to figure out why I had these mood swings, and I finally figured out it's because I haven't painted.

I sit, I think, I make some drawings. As a designer, you cannot retire totally.

Every artist makes himself born. It is very much harder than the other time, and longer.

I was trying to be a writer, and I was kind of getting sidetracked, so I started doing cartoons as a form of expression.

My process is messy and non-linear, full of false starts, fidgets, and errands that I suddenly need to run now; it is a battle to get something - anything - down on paper. I doodle in sketchbooks: bits of ideas, fragments of sentences, character names, single lines of dialogue with no context.

There's no way to really mock up or simulate what I'm doing until I'm there. An exhibition for me is not a statement but an experiment.

I think it's natural for an artist to explore as they evolve.

Music is the doorway that has led me to drawing, photography, and writing.

I can't cut off an ear everyday. Do the Van Gogh here and the Mozart there. Anyway it's exhausting enough always having to check up on what one is really doing!.

Generally, I move in the direction of art.

Rule of art: Cant kills creativity!

People say if you're doing an art project, that's different from a book, but I honestly don't see it. I try and try, and I just don't.

I think you always, as an artist, feel like you would like to be more and more specific about your intent and your interests.

Artists today think of everything they do as a work of art. It is important to forget about what you are doing - then a work of art may happen.

Painting, music, photography, and visual art have been creative forms of expression for me for decades.

For me, working on original material is very important.

I can't just go into the studio with one idea and be all in on that, 100 percent. It takes me a while to arrive at something that feels like it's finished.

Marvin Gaye said there's a song inside of me and I can't get it out. And I know it's in there, and I can feel that it's in there, and I can't get it out. There's so much that I want to say, and I haven't been able to figure out how to say it in my art. I can only say it in ham-fisted, clumsy, nonpoetic ways, and I'm trying to figure out how to talk about life and talk about love and talk about pain and trials and tribulation in an artistic form.

I find it painful when I'm without anything. But I work in multiple fields. If I can't write, I find myself taking photographs. I can go on the road and perform. But the most important thing for me is writing, and when I hit those walls, it's painful.

I'm pretty self-conscious, so I tend to work in a way where I say what I need to say and get out rather than revisit things. It's kind of a collage style. I realized that it had more emotional weight that way. I'll always be in the developmental stages as far as being a songwriter.

I've spent so long on some paintings that I no longer know what to think of them, and I am definitely getting harder to please; nothing satisfies me.

All art is a kind of exploring. To discover and reveal is the way every artist sets about his business.

I have a very, very secret drive to become a dilettante, without the pejorative overtones or the obligation to produce myself. There's so much to examine, so much to contemplate. I have enormous enthusiasm when I start a new project but then there's the meetings and the counter-meetings, the rehearsals, the struggles. You have to keep pushing and pushing and pushing to get your dreams realised.

When you start to engage with your creative processes, it shakes up all your impulses, and they all kind of inform one another.