Writing for myself and writing for another artist are two very different experiences. When I handle both the story and the art, I have full control. I can endlessly tweak every word and every line.
My favorite artist in the world is Michael Jackson, and he revolutionized the music video aspect of music.
Whether you are sixteen or over sixty, remember, understatement is the rule of a fine makeup artist.
Good taste is the first refuge of the non-creative. It is the last-ditch stand of the artist.
I like to grow and experiment, and as an artist, it's about kicking the bar up a little.
We are in a culture where it's so easy to just turn things off that you don't like. And I think that doesn't make you a well-rounded person or artist. You have to be able to take the good with the bad and have opinions on things!
Frost is the greatest artist in our clime - he paints in nature and describes in rime.
If you really want to be an artist, you search yourself, and you find a lot of it comes from earlier times. I have pretty much built the work around my experiences. When I've moved from one place to another, the work has changed.
The artist finds, that the more he can confine his attention to a particular part of any work, his productions are the more perfect, and grow under his hands in the greater quantities.
I like the word 'artist,' but I don't like the word 'artist' inside my house.
When I signed a record deal, I was always told by execs I needed to be like everybody else, that I had to show my midriff, things that would take away from who I want to be as an artist.
For me, the perfect film has no dialogue at all. It's purely a visual, emotional, visceral kind of experience. And I think one can create wonderful depth and meaning and communication without using words. I started out as an illustrator and a cartoonist and caricature artist, so for me the visual is primary.
There wasn't really a song or artist that made me want to be a singer, I think I was always a fan of country music.
I obviously appreciate all the fans I gained from my band, but there weren't enough of them to make me a very successful artist. To me, being successful is selling a lot of records and selling out big venues on tour, and it's not up to anyone else to decide what success is for me.
When people tell me I'm an artist, I say, 'What?' It's impossible for me to take the idea seriously.
As a kid I quite fancied the romantic, Bohemian idea of being an artist. I expect I thought I could escape from the difficulties of maths and spelling. Maybe I thought I would avoid the judgement of the establishment.
When you have an idea for a work and when you've finished your model for it, for the artist it's almost complete, in a way. But then bringing it to the finish is really something you do for the audience. It is always exciting.
I've learned over the years that the best way to develop as an artist is to make things. So I tell young artists it's not enough to be an actor anymore, you have to be a filmmaker/writer/director. There's no excuse for waiting around for a job. You have to be active and make things.
I'm the Latin artist who has been the most successful in history at representing the Latin culture. The stylings of my words are immodest, but it's the truth.
I wasn't allowed to grow as an artist. My albums were nicer to look at than to listen to.
I've been a solo artist for a year now, and I think I should start thinking about the future now. Every spare time I get, I want to be in the studio and work on music for 2015. It's a lot of work.
One thing I don't understand is how people want you to replicate your past successes. Being an artist should be about freedom and not just becoming one thing, because I think that's terrible and boring.
I don't think any one person, whether artist or not, has been given permission by anyone to put the responsibility of the way things are on anyone else.
Somehow, the French got this idea of the starving artist. Very romantic, except it's not so romantic for the starving artist.
My idea of covers is that you should never cover a song and do it exactly like the artist because everyone's always going to compare it to the way the original artists did it, and they're just going to go, 'Oh I like the original better.'
I think I've grown a lot in the last few years, and I needed to express myself as an artist on this. It wasn't necessarily about going in and making an album chocked full of hit singles... there were a lot of things I did out of the joy and the want to do it.
As an artist, you dream about accumulating enough successful music to someday do just one greatest-hits album, but to reach the point where you're releasing your second collection of hits is beyond belief.
I've always seen myself as sort of this funky, eclectic artist.
I don't know, the artist thing is not me. I love making music, though.
Human life itself may be almost pure chaos, but the work of the artist is to take these handfuls of confusion and disparate things, things that seem to be irreconcilable, and put them together in a frame to give them some kind of shape and meaning.
I've always had the idea that multi-millionaire rock stars should work harder than anyone because they have the ability to do it. Look at an artist like Andy Warhol. He never stopped working, even after he didn't need to work again.
Meeting my wife changed everything; it really, in the long run, made me a much better artist, a much better songwriter, a much better maker of albums.
For many, an album is no longer a considerable feat of an artist but just sounds to be half-listened to while one is halfheartedly engaged in something else.
A successful artist of any kind has to work so hard that she is justified in refusing to lay down her sceptre until she is placed on the bier.
I began as a boy with artistic talent... as a visual artist... I thought that was what I'd become and in my late teens drifted into reading serious literature.
When I was younger I thought I was an artist, and inspiration would just come to me.
