Artistic Survival Quotes

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.

Politics in any country in the world is dangerous. For the poet, politics in any country had better be disguised as poetry. Politics can be the graveyard of the poet. And only poetry can be his resurrection.

For the artist to attach himself to his work, or identify himself with it, is suicidal.

Writing makes you feel that there is a reason to go on living. If I couldn't write, I would stop breathing.

You can have integrity with your art, but worrying about integrity doesn't pay the bills.

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

That’s one of the nice things about writing, or any art; if the thing’s real, it just lives. All the attendant hoopla about it, the success over it or the critical rejection—none of that really matters. In the end, the thing will survive or not on its own merits. Not that immortality via art is any big deal. Truffaut died, and we all felt awful about it, and there were the appropriate eulogies, and his wonderful films live on. But it’s not much help to Truffaut.

Writing poetry, we live among the wild beasts, and when we touch a man, the stuff of someone in whom we believed, and he goes to pieces like a rotten pie, you... gather together whatever can be salvaged, while I cup my hands around the live coal of life.

great writers are indecent people they live unfairly saving the best part for paper. good human beings save the world so that bastards like me can keep creating art, become immortal. if you read this after I am dead it means I made it.

Better a live doggerel than a dead sonnet.

I wish that the arts were better supported, and you can't say that enough times, but I also believe that whatever happens, artists will keep going.

I feel the only way I can survive is to spend a lot of time writing songs. I have to have incredible, killer songs that also are hits, or I just don't have a chance.

But I think that the spirit of protectionism would be the grave of European cinema. You cannot protect something by building a fence around it and thinking that this will help it survive.

Why I talk so seriously about art is that art is the only thing that helps people stay alive, and it is the only thing that has allowed people to create joy in this insane, suppressive universe. And art is the only thing that they can't get rid of. They've tried, but ultimately they can't stamp it out.

Not to write, for many of us, is to die.

Art is a way of survival.

I'm very honest about the things I struggle with and I need to work on to survive as a solo artist.

To see itself through, music must have idea or magic. ... Music with neither dies young though rich.

For years, I survived as an artist on grants and touring as a dancer with dance companies, and I was living underground like so many artists, hand-to-mouth and so forth. And I never had the power to make decisions.

I think anybody who is writing finds he puts a little bit of himself in all of the characters, at least in this kind of a strip. It's the only way that you can survive when you have to do something every day. You have to put yourself, all of your thoughts, all of your observations and everything you know into the strip.

They have written volumes out of which a couplet of verse, a period in prose, may cling to the rock of ages, as a shell that survives a deluge.

It breaks my heart to hear of our theatres struggling to survive. As well as playing a vital role in community life, they're guardians of our heritage and should be cherished.

My career has been very strange. My career is like a heart monitor. I get involved in a good project now and then to keep things going. And then I make things that I work on that I hope are going to be good so I can make a living and keep a roof over the heads of those little monsters I have in my house.

Art and money are closely related. Try sitting down with a group of artists and ask them what's on their mind. Very quickly the topic shifts to money. And it can be very hard to get them off that subject.

If I stop writing I am dead. And that's the only way I'll stop: dead.