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36fadd4
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The trouble is that we have a bad habit, encouraged by pedants and sophisticates, of considering happiness as something rather stupid. Only pain is intellectual, only evil interesting. This is the treason of the artist; a refusal to admit the banality of evil and the terrible boredom of pain.
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artists
pain
happiness
evil
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Ursula K. LeGuin |
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3e54ae9
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What we do see depends mainly on what we look for. ... In the same field the farmer will notice the crop, the geologists the fossils, botanists the flowers, artists the colouring, sportmen the cover for the game. Though we may all look at the same things, it does not all follow that we should see them.
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artists
sportsmen
seeing
inspirational
farmer
botanists
fossils
perspective
geologists
sight
flowers
game
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John Lubbock |
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d2e4bfd
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Art isn't only a painting. Art is anything that's creative, passionate, and personal. And great art resonates with the viewer, not only with the creator. What makes someone an artist? I don't think is has anything to do with a paintbrush. There are painters who follow the numbers, or paint billboards, or work in a small village in China, painting reproductions. These folks, while swell people, aren't artists. On the other hand, Charlie Chaplin was an artist, beyond a doubt. So is Jonathan Ive, who designed the iPod. You can be an artists who works with oil paints or marble, sure. But there are artists who work with numbers, business models, and customer conversations. Art is about intent and communication, not substances. An artists is someone who uses bravery, insight, creativity, and boldness to challenge the status quo. And an artists takes it personally. That's why Bob Dylan is an artist, but an anonymous corporate hack who dreams up Pop 40 hits on the other side of the glass is merely a marketer. That's why Tony Hsieh, founder of Zappos, is an artists, while a boiler room of telemarketers is simply a scam. Tom Peters, corporate gadfly and writer, is an artists, even though his readers are businesspeople. He's an artists because he takes a stand, he takes the work personally, and he doesn't care if someone disagrees. His art is part of him, and he feels compelled to share it with you because it's important, not because he expects you to pay him for it. Art is a personal gift that changes the recipient. The medium doesn't matter. The intent does. Art is a personal act of courage, something one human does that creates change in another.
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artists
passion
courage
meaning
work
change
creativity
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Seth Godin |
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2f2b7bf
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Women have sat indoors all these millions of years, so that by this time the very walls are permeated by their creative force, which has, indeed, so overcharged the capacity of bricks and mortar that it must needs harness itself to pens and brushes and business and politics.
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artists
arts
women
empowerment
restrictions
encroachment
careers
occupation
skills
liberation
women-writers
gender
creativity
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Virginia Woolf |
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b316c07
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Mockingbirds are the true artists of the bird kingdom. Which is to say, although they're born with a song of their own, an innate riff that happens to be one of the most versatile of all ornithological expressions, mocking birds aren't content to merely play the hand that is dealt them. Like all artists, they are out to rearrange reality. Innovative, willful, daring, not bound by the rules to which others may blindly adhere, the mockingbird collects snatches of birdsong from this tree and that field, appropriates them, places them in new and unexpected contexts, recreates the world from the world. For example, a mockingbird in South Carolina was heard to blend the songs of thirty-two different kinds of birds into a ten-minute performance, a virtuoso display that serve no practical purpose, falling, therefore, into the realm of pure art.
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artists
music
mocking-birds
improvisation
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Tom Robbins |
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3ccfc09
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"Who but the artist has the power to open man up, to set free the imagination? The others - priest, teacher, saint, statesman, warrior - hold us to the path of history. They keep us chained to the rock, that the vultures may eat out our hearts. It is the artist who has the courage to go against the crowd; he is the unrecognized "hero of our time" - and of all time."
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artists
freedom
imagination
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Henry Miller |
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3249e06
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Artists are those who can evade the verbose.
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artists
creativity
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Haruki Murakami |
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f3f9f3a
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"It's freezing up here. What did you use to keep warm?" "Indignation," said Michelangelo. "Best fuel I know. Never burns out."
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artists
indignation
art
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Irving Stone |
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e061160
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An artist should create beautiful things, but should put nothing of his own life into them.
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artists
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Oscar Wilde |
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49f2bf8
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...hanging out does not make one an artist. A secondhand wardrobe does not make one an artist. Neither do a hair-trigger temper, melancholic nature, propensity for tears, hating your parents, nor even HIV - I hate to say it - none of these make one an artist. They can help, but just as being gay does not make one witty (you can suck a mile of cock, as my friend Sarah Thyre puts it, it still won't make you Oscar Wilde, believe me), the only thing that makes one an artist is making art. And that requires the precise opposite of hanging out; a deeply lonely and unglamorous task of tolerating oneself long enough to push something out.
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artists
writing
humor
wilde
rent
writers
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David Rakoff |
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47e303f
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Well, Daddy, I used to believe that artists went crazy in the process of creating the beautiful works of art that kept society sane. Nowadays, though, artists make intentionally ugly art that's only supposed to reflect society rather than inspire it. So I guess we're all loony together now, loony rats in the shithouse of commercialism.
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|
artists
sanity
craziness
society
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Tom Robbins |
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ac0abfb
|
Every production of an artist should be the expression of an adventure of his soul.
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|
artists
inspiration
imagination
art-and-life
soul
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W. Somerset Maugham |
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8f63832
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Look, I don't see why bad artists - I mean artists who are obviously incompetent... - why they should be presented hypocritically as good artists just because they're supposed to be advancing the frontiers of freedom of expression or... ...demonstrating that there should be no limit on subject matter.
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artists
freedom-of-expression
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Anthony Burgess |
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71bca76
|
Innocence was gone from all our acts. Our habitual state of rebellion became a serious political crime.
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rebellion
artists
jay
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Anaïs Nin |
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acf376c
|
I love you, Lucien, but I am a muse, you are an artist, I am here to make you comfortable.
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artists
suffering
passion
muses
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Christopher Moore |
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1b4e3ec
|
Just as no monkey is as good-looking as the ugliest of humans, no academic is worthier than the worst of the creators
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artists
arts
criticism
academics
critics
art-history
art
creativity
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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7c60126
|
I've been told my old city possesses a 'thriving arts scene,' whatever that is; personally, I think artists should lie low and stick to their work, not line-dance through the parks.
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artists
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Walter Kirn |
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f62aa0e
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The universe constantly and obediently answers to our conceptions; whether we travel fast or slow, the track is laid for us. Let us spend our lives in conceiving then. The poet or the artist never yet had so fair and noble a design but some of his posterity at least could accomplish it.
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artists
poets
reality
life
walden
ideas
|
Henry David Thoreau |
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62fdb99
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You'll find that great artists don't love, live, fuck or even die like ordinary people. Because they always have their art. It nourishes them more than any connection to people. Whatever human tragedy befalls them, they're never too gutted, because they need only to pour the tragedy into their vat, stir in the other lurid ingredients, blast it over a fire. What emerges will be even more magnificent than if the tragedy had never occurred.
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artists
tragedy
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Marisha Pessl |
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4b7ee97
|
If I could talk about it, I would not have to do it. I make art.
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artists
communication
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Neil Gaiman |
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2897393
|
He said, one has to learn that painting well - in the academic and technical sense - comes right at the bottom of the list. I mean, you've got that ability. So have thousands.
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artists
painting
skill
creativity
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John Fowles |
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309372d
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The working artist will not tolerate trouble in her life because she knows trouble prevents her from doing her work. The working artist banishes from her world all sources of trouble. She harnesses the urge for trouble and transforms it in her work.
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artists
trouble
creativity
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Steven Pressfield |
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fb1b8ff
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"... I find myself most drawn to: art that has arisen from a deeply personal conversation between the artist and the work at hand. It is art that walks perilously close to the Edge, that crosses the river of blood into Faerie, that flies so high it is scorched by the sun, and then returns to tell the tale to us. It is art that
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|
creating
artists
creative
inspirational
making
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Terri Windling |
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ea0a113
|
How many artists have created while drunk, high on laudanum, opium, chloral or amphetamines? What have antidepressants ever done for culture?
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artists
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Hanif Kureishi |
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d89e77e
|
But if modesty is interpreted not as diffidence or self-effacingness, but as non-overweening, a realistic assessment of the job to be done and one's ability to do it, then you might say the chief virtue of excellent artists is their modesty...But knowing your limits and going to them isn't arrogance. It's greatness of spirit.
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artists
greatness
modesty
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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eaf023a
|
There are a good many people of the same kind as Harry. Many artists are of his kind. These persons all have two souls, two beings within them. Thee is God and the devil in them; the mother's blood and the father's; the capacity for happiness and the capacity for suffering; and in just such a state of enmity and entanglement towards and within each other as were the wolf and man in Harry. And these men, for whom life has no repose, live at times in their rare moments of happiness with such strength and indescribable beauty, the spray of their moment's happiness is flung so high and so dazzlingly over the wide sea of suffering, that the light of it, spreading its radiance, touches others too with its enchantment. Thus, like a precious, fleeting foam over the sea of suffering arise all those works of art, in which a single individual lifts himself for an hour so high above his personal destiny that his happiness shines like a star and appears to all who see it as something eternal and as a happiness of their own.
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artists
happiness
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Hermann Hesse |
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699e431
|
Detachment and involvement: the artist must have both. The link between them is compassion.
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|
artists
compassion
involvement
detachment
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Madeleine L'Engle |
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59a4b0b
|
One should not become an artist because he can, but because he must. It is only for those who would be miserable without it.
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|
artists
artists-life
sculpture
artist
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Irving Stone |
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f88b974
|
Imagination without skill gives us contemporary art.
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|
artists
imagination
contemporary-art
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Tom Stoppard |
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65d4f15
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"An artist is a sort of emotional or spiritual historian. His role is to make you realize the doom and glory of knowing who you are and what you are. He has to tell, because nobody else in the world
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|
artists
emotion
writing
spirituality
life
growth
revelation
writers
|
James Baldwin |
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2f939f6
|
For the novelist or poet, for the scientist or artist, the question is not do ideas come from, the question is how they come. The is the mystery. The how is fragile.
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|
artists
poets
poems
books
inspiration
science
scientists
ideas
novelists
creativity
|
E.L. Konigsburg |
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80d5ac8
|
But we artists have to be selfish you know, after all, with each painting, we die a little.
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artists
death
life
selfish
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Irving Stone |
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401f35b
|
She puts away four small plastic cups of red wine and then stares at a painting of a topless girl with a large silver sword for a half hour and then she begins to think: You call this art? This isn't art! This is a joke! All of you are a joke! Fuck you and fuck Jeff Koons and the rest of those '80s art-star wannabes. Where's the art that makes people weep? Where's the art that makes people want to go to church? None of this is the least bit interesting. All of this stuff, all of this is so self-aware. It's for ironic art snobs. I want something brilliant. I want something stunning. I want something that makes me look in wonder...
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|
artists
artist-quote
art-quote
artist
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Joe Meno |
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f7b4a6e
|
Those around me persist in not understanding that I have never been able to live in a real world of people and things. And that is why I have this irrefutable need to escape and become involved in adventures which seem inexplicable because they involve a man no one recognizes. And perhaps that is what is best in me! Besides, an artist by definition is a man accustomed to dreams and who lives among phantoms. . . . How could it be expected that this same person would be able to follow in his daily life the strict observance of traditions-- laws and other barriers erected by a hypocritical and cowardly world. (Letter from Claude Debussy to Jacques Durand)
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|
artists
music
artistic-temperament
debussy
composition
creativity
|
Eric Frederick Jensen |
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30a9349
|
Art both expresses and gratifies the lowest part of the soul, and feeds and enlivens base emotions which ought to be left to wither.
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|
artists
|
Iris Murdoch |