Artistic Resilience Quotes

I'm sure with a production that's not particularly well received or mediocrely received, it must be incredibly challenging to get up and keep doing it.

An artist needs to live to create, and to live means to suffer.

I called the album 'The Chemo' because it seems like the industry and music overall is dying slowly.

Every artist will one day face the moment when he or she is doing what he or she does after the style has passed and the art-world heat-seeking machine has moved on.

I've experienced tons of failure. I've been making music for 30 years, and I'd say failure and success have happened in equal measure.

For every poet it is always morning in the world; history a forgotten, insomniac night. The fate of poetry is to fall in love with the world in spite of history.

The notion that artists flourish upon adversity and misunderstanding, that they are able to function to the utmost in an atmosphere of indifference or hostility - this notion is nine-tenths nonsense.

No matter how corrupt, greedy, and heartless our government, our corporations, our media, and our religious & charitable institutions may become, the music will still be wonderful.

Video artists being at the low end of the totem pole economically, one of the ways we survive is to go around showing work and giving these talks.

History has proven that it's impossible to crush the artist. There's always gonna be a need for somebody to write a poem or sing a song about something, about life - that makes it real. There's the word that goes beyond the word.

A great artist has to be ready to fail.

I think it's important as artists to always keep creating and always have stuff in the archive because you never know when you will need them. I'm that kind of artist. I always plan.

I think people like listening to what I call trippy music but maybe next year it will be something else. I still have gangster tracks and real-life stories and situations in my music. I’ve been blessed because over 20 year, I never stopped doing what I was doing. It’s pretty much the same thing and I’ve never really changed anything up.

When things get tough, this is what you should do: Make good art. I'm serious. Husband runs off with a politician -- make good art. Leg crushed and then eaten by a mutated boa constrictor -- make good art. IRS on your trail -- make good art. Cat exploded -- make good art. Someone on the Internet thinks what you're doing is stupid or evil or it's all been done before -- make good art.

I was thinking of writers living in East Europe before the Berlin Wall came down. They wrote fantastic stuff but were dealing with a situation that was almost impossible to deal with, but they found a way.

I've lost, but I also gained a lot. I'm a creative person, and no one can take that away from me. I've been told I committed professional suicide because it was the only escape from the terrible pressures I was facing. What do you think?

When I was 20, I wrote a film on spec and sent it to the BBC. They wrote back, 'Usually, when we reject submissions, we like to offer some encouragement, but in your case, we don't see any point in you continuing.' I took it as encouragement anyway, thinking that only people who write terrible things are capable of writing great things.

I'm perpetually interested by living in places as an artist confronting challenges I've never confronted before and approaching them with as much craft and humanity as I can.

'A collected poems' is either a gravestone or a testimonial to survival.

Being a good artist is the toughest job you could pick, and you have to be a little nuts to take it on.

I've been around a long time and I've found that these forms, whether it's the cartoon, or whether it's a play, or all these dying forms refuse to die. Something happens to rejuvenate them and it will certainly happen to the political cartoon. It will come back. But whether it's on the internet, or whether it's in some other form, however that works, whether it looks the way it looks now, or entirely different, I have no idea. And thank God I don't have to worry about it.

A lot of the vibe in London is being sucked dry because of the economic situation. It's very expensive, and it gives you nothing back. New York still feels like there's stuff going on. People are struggling to create art. There's still a vibe.

The art always wins. Anything can happen to me, but the art will stay.

I think you just have to cross your fingers that there's enough artists out there that keep producing interesting work, and eventually it will form a kind of wave that will force people to pay attention to it.

I am constantly amazed at the musicians that are able to do the same thing over and over for 20 or more years. That would drive me absolutely insane.