I always thought it was strange when these artists like Kurt Cobain or whoever would get really famous and say 'I don't understand why this is happening to me.' There is a mathematical formula to why you got famous. It isn't some magical thing that just started happening.

I am famous because I am an African American jazz artist.

When I got into the music industry I wasn't focused on being the most famous artist or even getting a major record deal. It was just to make music on my own terms or create my own image do my own hair do my own makeup.

Know the names of past and current artists who are most famous for playing their instruments.

I think my father would have liked to have been an artist actually. But I think he didn't quite have perhaps the drive or I don't know I mean he had a family to bring up I suppose.

My family's lineage is five generations of artists who never made it.

Comics don't work if the story is all in the text and the images are illustrative. It's hard to have enough faith in the artists to allow them to do their job.

Failure and its accompanying misery is for the artist his most vital source of creative energy.

The higher the artist the fewer the gestures. The fewer the tools the greater the imagination. The greater the will the greater the secret failure.

Louis Malle was the best filmmaker I've ever worked with. He was such an artist. He was dealing with the theme of innocence and experience.

I've always loved the experience of working together with other people toward an artistic goal.

I think most artists will experience a lot of negative people on Twitter but thank God I've got so many followers that I'm not able to see them that much. I'll see some from time to time but for the most part I always focus on something good.

To me the job of the artist is to provide a useful and intelligent vocabulary for the world to be able to articulate feelings they experience everyday and otherwise wouldn't have the means to express in a meaningful and useful way.

People were being so mean as a result of my ability - a gift really. So I think that's what makes me fight harder to provide an option to aspiring kids or artists. I wouldn't want anyone to go through what I went through... to see a little girl or a little dancer experience such unnecessary rejection.

Women artists need to break barriers in order for women's experience to be valuable.

I left Jamaica for a while because as an artist I need to experience different things see the world have different energies. Living in one place is not good for me.

To the artist is sometimes granted a sudden transient insight which serves in this matter for experience. A flash and where previously the brain held a dead fact the soul grasps a living truth! At moments we are all artists.

Making an album should be an honest experience. It shouldn't be about trying to gauge where popular music is today it should be about artistic expression and putting down what you want to put down.

Artists need some kind of stimulating experience a lot of times which crystallizes when you sing about it or paint it or sculpt it. You literally mold the experience the way you want. It's therapy.

I think on-stage nudity is disgusting shameful and damaging to all things American. But if I were 22 with a great body it would be artistic tasteful patriotic and a progressive religious experience.

I firmly believe that all human beings have access to extraordinary energies and powers. Judging from accounts of mystical experience heightened creativity or exceptional performance by athletes and artists we harbor a greater life than we know.

I had the most reversed education possible. Every parent wants their son to be a businessman respectable - me it was the opposite. When I had an artist career my mum was like 'Oh finally I'm proud of you!'

My mother is a special education teacher but also an artist and my father an advertising executive. They are about as wacky as you can get without being alcoholics.

I love my early movies but naturalism is an artist's early style. Now I want to deal with feelings dreams an acceptance of irrationality.