Marc Chagall Quotes

I refuse the title of artist to those who owe their reputations to a physical deformity. I regard them as buffoons.

Using creative expression as a means to a professional end makes me curl up a bit.

No artist wants to be perceived as a regurgitator.

An artist worthy of the name should express all the truth of nature, not only the exterior truth, but also, and above all, the inner truth.

The only artist who does not deserve respect is the one who works to please the public, for commercial success or for official success.

For the serious artist does not satisfy needs

The writer concerned more with technique than truth becomes a technician, not an artist.

We need all kinds of artists. We have no need to destroy drawing. We lose so much. This wouldn't happen in music.

My business is to be talented, that is, to be capable of selecting the important moments from the trivial ones. . . . It's about time for writers - particularly those who are genuine artists - to recognize that in this world you cannot figure out everything. Just have a writer who the crowds trust be courageous enough and declare that he does not understand everything, and that alone will represent a major contribution to the way people think, a long leap forward.

All you can do as an artist is do what you think is an extension of you. You put down on paper ... who you are. That's what being an artist is all about. And when it gets done, you don't look back at it and say, Oh, I could have done that better.

Everybody's an artist. Unfortunately we don't treat them as such.

People who make good music aren't necessarily nice people.

Part of the difficulty in trying to be both an artist and a businessperson is this: You make a picture because you have seen something beyond price; then you are to turn and assign to your record of it a cash value. If the selling is not necessarily a contradiction of the truth in the picture, it is so close to being a contradiction—and the truth is always in shades of gray-that you are worn down by the threat.

The movies today are too rich to have any room for genuine artists. They produce a few passable craftsmen, but no artists. Can you imagine a Beethoven making $100, 000 a year?

The artist who is not also a craftsman is no good; but, alas, most of our artists are nothing else.

People are very uncomfortable when you call actors artists because there are a lot of actors out there that aren't artists - there are a lot of actors that are hired for very specific reasons that are shallow and have to do with sexual currency and what the industry thinks sells. Real actors are artists, they're expressionists.

I can go write an absolutely saccharine pop record with a really catchy lyric for another artist that could become a hit without meaning anything to me, but that's more the science laboratory, that's the other thing.

Vulgarity is not as destructive to an artist as snobbery.

Artists deserve to make a living

The real artist, who knew what he was imitating, would be interested in realities and not in imitations; and would desire to leave as memorials of himself works many and fair; and, instead of being the author of encomiums, he would prefer to be the theme of them.

Watteau is no less an artist for having painted a fascia board while Sainsbury's is no less effective a business for producing advertisements which entertain and educate instead of condescending and exploiting.

The measure of artistic merit is the length to which a writer is willing to go in following his own compulsions.

When you're making a movie, you can't think anybody will ever see it. You've just got to make a movie for the values it has. The greatest films were made because someone really wanted to make them. And, hopefully, the audience will show up, too.

While the space for artists and curators has increased enormously, maybe, just maybe, that's left room for too many people calling themselves artists and curators who are simply not up to the term.

The thing that's important for me to focus on is the balancing of the tension between satisfying myself and satisfying an audience, and making something that I think is good and funny, worthwhile, small-"i" important, versus something that's going to do well.