Artistic Integrity Quotes

“But it would have made me a whore to leave it incomplete. It would have made it easier to leave future work incomplete. It would have made it more and more difficult to draw upon that additional aching surge of effort that is always the difference between integrity and deceit in a created work. I would not be the whore to my own existence. Can you understand that? I would not be the whore to my own existence.”
― Chaim Potok, My Name Is Asher Lev

“Ultimately, the artist and the revolutionary function as they function, and pay whatever dues they must pay behind it because they are both possessed by a vision, and they do not so much follow this vision as find themselves driven by it. Otherwise, they could never endure, much less embrace, the lives they are compelled to lead.”
― James Baldwin

“Working with the morning pages, we begin to sort through the differences between our real feelings, which are often secret, and our official feelings, those on the record for public display.”
― Julia Cameron, The Artist's Way: A Spiritual Path to Higher Creativity

“You know, there used to be a difference between authentic music and sellout music. I'm talking about when I was young, in the sixties? Back then we knew there was a soullessness to the sellouts, and we wanted to be on the side of the artists. But now? Being a sellout is the authentic thing. When Molly Miller says 'I'm just being real,' what she means is that everyone wants money and fame and any artist who claims otherwise is lying. the only fundamental truth is greed, and the only question is who is up front about this. That's the new authenticity. Molly Miler can never be accused of selling out because selling out was her goal all along.”
― Nathan Hill, The Nix

“Creativity is always a leap of faith. Writers sit down in front of empty pages. Painters stare before blank easels. Thespians rehearse looking toward empty stages. Creativity is experimental by nature.”
― Brian D'Ambrosio, From Haikus to Hatmaking: One Year in the Life of Western Montana

“If a person wishes to engender self-improvement, they must eschew conventional norms and seek an authentic conversation with the self. I need to acknowledge all my ugly warts and attempt to use the conscious mind to trace my lowly state of existence devoted to pleasure seeking and self-glorification. I can give into the dismal implications of all the years I labored in foolish vocational and recreational pursuits or labor to transform former suffering into a creative force. I seek to convert the toxic tears of bitterness into a healing serum by cultivating an artistic approach to life. Cheerfully living in exile and embracing solitude creates personal space needed to flourish.”
― Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls

“If you write to please everyone, you plant nothing. If you write from truth, you seed a forest.”
― Lawrence Nault

“The rebellion against fascism is immensely important to society when its grip on our dreamers strangles the creativity out of our ambition, finally snuffing out all progress as we know it, and as if implanting a tombstone, parks institutions in its place.”
― Oliver Oyanadel

“Show me an artist whose work is not self indulgent, and I'll show you a sell out.”
― Oliver Oyanadel

“We said that we had to please ourselves first, that was the point of what being an artist was all about. If you didn't keep your integrity in the face of hard commercial decisions, you were lost. Your soul was dead.”
― Mick Fleetwood, Fleetwood: My Life and Adventures in Fleetwood Mac

“Artistic "style" that does not evolve as a result of a natural process is the embodiment of "fake it till you make it," referring to the way something APPEARS, not the way that it IS. It's a veneer, a hollow afterthought technique hung on the artwork to dress it up... I prefer to think in terms of the artist's VOICE. Voice is deeper, manifested from the very core of your being. You earn it through research, experimentation, and discovery. It is a synthesis of the experiences, intellectual concepts, and aesthetic interests you possess, executed in your distinctive way, in the formal, emotional and intellectual language of your chosen medium. When successful, the realization of your voice follows the gestalt principle. The combination of your ideas and the work's physical embodiment is greater than the sum of its parts and distinguishes your outcome from everyone else's.”
― Kate Kretz, Art from Your Core: A Holistic Guide to Visual Voice

“Artists are one the final holdouts. Virtually every profession is being driven towards commodification. And corporations, with their profit-driven standardization, building consensus, obfuscation, and aversion to risk, are the ENEMY of art.”
― Kate Kretz, Art from Your Core: A Holistic Guide to Visual Voice

“It is frightening for me to hear freshman art students talk about "branding," because, know it or not, they represent the last frontier. If the artists give up, there is no one else left. If we throw away our agency, being seduced into a corporate mentality so we can simply make our product to get our piece of the pie, we put another nail in the coffin of art's higher power.”
― Kate Kretz, Art from Your Core: A Holistic Guide to Visual Voice

“Artists fire bullets of truth to pierce the ever-thickening wall of relentless lies.”
― Kate Kretz, Art from Your Core: A Holistic Guide to Visual Voice

“Most of you won't like this, and I don't blame you at all. It's not meant for you.

[Liner notes to Metal Machine Music]”
― Lou Reed

“It's probably for the best that Van Gogh isn't around to see his work selling for squillions of dollars, as he'd probably start painting for that market. He may have lost an ear, but he'd still have that magic eye and a new nose for a deal. We're denied access to this poor man's genius by having the richest people on earth hanging his life's work in their mansions.”
― Stewart Stafford