Artistic Vocation Quotes

Being the son of a filmmaker, you are aware of a career as a director. You don't think of it as just movies, but as a life.

An artist is born like a priest is born. If they are born an artist, I would tell them art is not a game: it is something very serious which completely requires everything you have to give.

I always knew I wanted to be a performance artist.

It seemed like a very small possibility for me to become an artist. I didn't have the need to be on the stage; I didn't feel the need to be heard. I just needed to write.

I am a great artist and I know it. It's because of what I am that I have endured so much suffering, so as to pursue my vocation, otherwise I would consider myself a rogue - which is what many people think I am, for that matter.

I knew that I wanted to be a writer even before I knew exactly what being a writer entailed.

Why do writers, say, give up a job in economics and decide to write poetry? Or, why do they give up a job in a bank and decide to paint, like Krishan Khanna? They want to convey something.

I was born to be on the stage.

Writing is a fearsome but grand vocation—potentially healing but likewise deadly. I wouldn’t trade my life for the world.

For me photography has been a profession, an avocation. Now it has become a way of life.

I always knew I was gonna be an artist. I was very confident in that.

I was born out of due time in the sense that by temperament and talent I should have been more suited for the life of a small Bach, living in anonymity and composing regularly for an established service and for God.

Really it was the first time in my life that I recognised that acting is, I'm just going to say it, I am an artist, I have to do this, I have to do this.

A poet has to adapt himself, more or less consciously,to the demands of his vocation, and hence the peculiarities of poets and the condition of inspiration which many people have said is near to madness... The problem of creative writing is essentially one of concentration... a focusing of the attention in a special way.

It is not from choice that my life is music and nothing more, but when one is an artist what else can he be? When a whole lifetime is too short to attain the heights he wants to reach, how then can he devote any of the little time he has to things outside of his art?

I could never even entertain the notion that it's an option, to not be an artist.

To be a painter now is to be part of a very small, endangered species.

I always find it fascinating to ask people, why they've chosen to live their life as an artist? Why be an actor, a singer, an author, a filmmaker? I've heard such inspiring answers to that question.

I did not choose to be a dancer. I was chosen.

For me, music is in no way ornamental or decorative, it's constitutive of who I am. And that's why, when I say I'm a blues man, that's a very serious vocation - to muster the courage to find your own unique voice, to forge your distinctive style in the world, to leave your imprint in the sands of time in such a way that your singularity, your individuality, remains something that people have to come to terms with.

Me and my father went through a war period where we wasn't talking. He wanted me to go to theology school - I didn't want to go. I wanted to do music. I told him I was a minister through music.

Art is not a career - it's a life.

I was always an artist. I was a broker to earn a living, but I was always thinking about my art.

I remember, when I was young, to have a literary or artistic vocation was really dramatic because you were so isolated from the common world. You felt that you were marginal, and if you dared to try to organise your life around your vocation, you knew you'd be completely segregated.

The life of an artist is like the life of a monk, a lewd monk if you like, very Rabelaisian. It is an ordination.