“Every artist was first an amateur.”
“Remember it all, every insult, every tear. Tattoo it on the inside of your mind. In life, knowledge of poisons is essential. I ve told you, nobody becomes an artist unless they have to.”
“Inside you there’s an artist you don’t know about… say yes quickly, if you know, if you’ve known it from before the beginning of the universe.”
“For me, the camera is a sketch book, an instrument of intuition and spontaneity.”
“I see myself forever and ever as the ridiculous [person], the lonely soul, the wanderer, the restless frustrated artist, the [person] in love with love, always in search of the absolute, always seeking the unattainable.”
“The aim of every artist is to arrest motion, which is life, by artificial means and hold it fixed so that a hundred years later, when a stranger looks at it, it moves again since it is life.”
“The job of the artist is always to deepen the mystery.”
“I have Social Disease. I have to go out every night. If I stay home one night I start spreading rumours to my dogs.”
“I would like to paint the way a bird sings.”
“Did you just use juxtaposition in a sentence? Yes, Sage he said patiently. We use it all the time with art, ... That, and I know how to use a dictionary”
“Everyone should eat hashish, but only once.”
“Only by examining our personal biases can we grow as artists; only by cultivating empathy can we grow as people.”
“Every artist joins a conversation that s been going on for generations, even millennia, before he or she joins the scene.”
“The crazy creatives are the creatives who never go completely mad. They aren t so easily disheartened by the seemingly endless amounts of scrutiny that creative individuals tend to receive because they, like insanity, are the ones who feed off of opposition and negative feedback and manage to continue along with a healthy ambition. It is the crazy that teaches us to use our gifts wisely and own all the attackers.”
“Suicide carried off many. Drink and the devil took care of the rest”
“—except for the fact that your scars mean you’ve been hurting, I am one-hundred-percent cool with having them in the painting. Some models, especially the professional ones, it’s like painting air-brushed people. Give me something raw any day.”
“To become an artist you have to be curious.”