The progress of an artist is a continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
To be an artist you have to give up everything, including the desire to be a good artist.
The real artist has no idea that he is sacrificing himself for art. He does what he does for one reason and one reason only-he can't help doing it.
Some artists shrink from self-awareness, fearing that it will destroy their unique gifts and even their desire to create. The truth of the matter is quite opposite.
Art is only a means to life, to the life more abundant. It is not in itself the life more abundant. It merely points the way, something which is overlooked not only by the public, but very often by the artist himself. In becoming an end it defeats itself.
If it is the mark of the artist to love art before everything, to renounce everything for its sake, to think all the sweet human things of life well lost if only he may attain something, do some good, great work - then I was never an artist.
An artist never really finishes his work, he merely abandons it.
Being an artist is dragging your innermost feelings out, giving a piece of yourself, no matter in which art form, in which medium.
Artists rarely do the same thing over and over again. Art is about the new, doing things in a new way.
Being an artist is in part an act of rupture.
Artists instinctively want to reflect humanity, their own and each other's, in all its intermittent virtue and vitality, frailty and fallibility.