I’m a trained fine artist. I went to art school from the time I was 5 years old. I was, like, a prodigy out of Chicago. I’d been in national competitions from the age of 14.

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.

No great artist ever sees things as they really are. If he did, he would cease to be an artist.

People still think of me as a cartoonist, but the only thing I lift a pen or pencil for these days is to sign a contract, a check, or an autograph.

I think that every artist – or anybody that’s in business – could benefit from a direct-to-consumer strategy, so I think that that applies to us as artists and content creators, too.

A record deal doesn’t make you an artist; you make yourself an artist.

Perhaps it’s good for one to suffer. Can an artist do anything if he’s happy? Would he ever want to do anything? What is art, after all, but a protest against the horrible inclemency of life?

Don’t you love it that Prince doesn’t use Twitter? Don’t you think he’s somewhere on a unicorn?

As an artist, as a brand, as a rapper, as a musician, you know you got a window and a lot of people, even an athlete; they don’t have no exit strategy. It’s just living in the false reality that it’s going to be like this forever.

It’s wonderful to be here in the great state of Chicago.

Fans are my favorite thing in the world. I’ve never been the type of artist who has that line drawn between their friends and their fans. The line’s always been really blurred for me. I’ll hang out with them after the show. I’ll hang out with them before the show. If I see them in the mall, I’ll stand there and talk to them for 10 minutes.

True art is characterized by an irresistible urge in the creative artist.

The artist part of me always wants to be appreciated. I read every review. But I never wanted to seek validation by awards or anything controlled by politics.

Being an artist doesn’t just mean you have a song. That doesn’t make you an artist. The word ‚artist‘ means so many different things, and I feel like to be a real one, you really have to do it all. The people that I think of as artists – Tyler the Creator, Childish Gambino, Kanye West – are doing the most.

I subscribe to the myth that an artist’s creativity comes from torment. Once that’s fixed, what do you draw on?

An artist has no home in Europe except in Paris.

I decided to sell my drawings. However, I didn’t want people to buy my drawings because the professor of physics isn’t supposed to be able to draw – isn’t that wonderful – so I made up a false name.

A true artist is expected to be all that is noble-minded, and this is not altogether a mistake; on the other hand, however, in what a mean way are critics allowed to pounce upon us.

In the 1960s when the recording studio suddenly really took off as a tool, it was the kids from art school who knew how to use it, not the kids from music school. Music students were all stuck in the notion of music as performance, ephemeral. Whereas for art students, music as painting? They knew how to do that.

Technique is really personality. That is the reason why the artist cannot teach it, why the pupil cannot learn it, and why the aesthetic critic can understand it.

If you are born an artist, you have no choice but to fight to stay an artist.

Here in England, everyone’s a pop star, innit, whereas in America they believe in the term artist.

I’m the king of the anthems.

My role in society, or any artist’s or poet’s role, is to try and express what we all feel. Not to tell people how to feel. Not as a preacher, not as a leader, but as a reflection of us all.

The highest art is always the most religious, and the greatest artist is always a devout person.

The only really committed artist is he who, without refusing to take part in the combat, at least refuses to join the regular armies and remains a freelance.

I performed in a bowling alley before while people were still bowling. Cut the check, and I will perform anywhere.

I think I first realized I wanted to be in country music and be an artist when I was 10. And I started dragging my parents to festivals, and fairs, and karaoke contests, and I did that for about a year before I came to Nashville for the first time. I was 11 and I had this demo CD of me singing Dixie Chicks and Leanne Rimes songs.

Well, in order for me to be successful… In order to be a great artist – musician, actor, painter, whatever – you must be able to be private in public at all times.

Every album, I make big records. I’m going to always make an anthem. That’s what I do.

Great art is the contempt of a great man for small art.

Paintings have a life of their own that derives from the painter’s soul.

I think it is perfectly natural for any artist to admire intensely and love a young man. It is an incident in the life of almost every artist.

I love Wiz Khalifa.

I want to be an artist, an actress with integrity, and that includes all kinds of parts.

I don’t care if people think I am an overactor, as long as they enjoy what I do. People who think that would call Van Gogh an overpainter.

My days, my years, my life has seen up and downs, lights and darknesses. If I wrote only and continually of the ‚light‘ and never mentioned the other, then as an artist, I would be a liar.

I don’t really have a gimmick or a ‚thing.‘ I’m one of the few artists who gets to be himself every day.

The primary distinction of the artist is that he must actively cultivate that state which most men, necessarily, must avoid; the state of being alone.

If you only believe that you’re an artist when you have a big advance in your pocket and a single coming out, I would say that’s quite soulless. You have to have a sense of your own greatness and your own ability from a very deep place inside you. I am the one with the litmus test in my hands of what people need to hear next.

As an entrepreneur, as an investor, I’m trying to be as educated as I can to where the progression of technological capability is going and what it does to these different categories that, me as an artist and an influencer, I can get involved and bring value.

Art is man’s expression of his joy in labor.

I just genuinely feel that that’s what you do when you’re an artist: You stick up for the people around you.

If art is to nourish the roots of our culture, society must set the artist free to follow his vision wherever it takes him.

The critic has to educate the public; the artist has to educate the critic.

From my standpoint, being an artist, I want to see what the new construction is between artist and audience.

I want to be an artist, not… a celluloid aphrodisiac.

I think it’s important as an artist to never forget where you’re from.

My work as an artist is completely separate from my work as a philanthropist.

Art is making something out of nothing and selling it.

Every man, and for stronger reasons, every artist, wants to be recognized. So do I.

I’m no hillbilly singer.

An intellectual says a simple thing in a hard way. An artist says a hard thing in a simple way.

You start to become successful, and everybody starts to drive your money train to the bank, and they’re not thinking anymore about what you want as an artist or if any of that even matters to you. It genuinely upsets people in my life that I don’t care about money, and that’s not my problem.

Every artist was first an amateur.

A solution built by an artist serves the artist more than the solution the capitalist comes up with.

I first met Bev Shea while in Chicago when he was on Moody Radio. As a young man starting my ministry, I asked Bev if he would join me. He said yes, and for over 60 years we had the privilege of ministering together across the country and around the world.

I am an artist, and I have the ability and the free will to choose the way the world will envision me.

What makes a song last is real content from a mind that is thinking a little bit harder about certain things. A lot of artists don’t really think that hard.

Every artist wants something different out the game.

What I’ve discovered is that in art, as in music, there’s a lot of truth-and then there’s a lie. The artist is essentially creating his work to make this lie a truth, but he slides it in amongst all the others. The tiny little lie is the moment I live for, my moment. It’s the moment that the audience falls in love.