Pastoral Resources

Every portrait that is painted with feeling is a portrait of the artist, not of the sitter.

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

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

I think being an artist, or just being creative, or imaginative, or aware, where I think everybody starts out, and by about the age of 10, that's been pretty effectively whipped out by education.

All kids, when they go to school, are pretty good artists and dancers and singers and poets. All that gets buried, basically through being educated, or brainwashed.

A visual image in the hand of an artist is merely a tool to trigger a mental image.

I think most artists find it difficult to part with their work but it's the parting that keeps us alive and keeps us working. In the case of the chariot, although it's been sold I actually still have it, just in another form.

Month after month, Wizard Academy equips people who want to make a difference. This is why journalists and scientists and artists and educators and business owners and advertising professionals and ministers are attracted to our little school.

I feel a lot more comfortable being me these days. I'm constantly told that my work is good. A lot of fans and a lot of other artists say my songs and albums mean a lot to them. Isn't that what's important?

Luxury is the wolf at the door and its fangs are the vanities and conceits germinated by success. When an artist learns this, he knows where the danger is.

You get used to it when you feel like you're an artist.

Fred Astaire is my hero. I love him because he was willing to kill himself to make his art look effortless. And because he proved it's possible to be an artist and a good person.

I'm always looking for ways to develop as an artist, especially as a jazz artist-to find different ways of testing my voice.

They consistently hobble artists' in the name of selling more units then are surprised when the fans don't buy the lukewarm music this produces. So they then drop the artist.

Music is more emotional than prose, more revolutionary than poetry. I'm not saying I've got the answers, just a of questions that I don't hear other artists asking.

I don't believe that recordings should sound radically better than the artist, I think that's dishonest. For example, I'm not a great singer but if I spent enough time tweaking my vocals, I could sound like one. But I don't, what you hear is pretty much what I sing.

We, the artists, make the stuff they sell and they're like ticks on our backs, sucking the life out of us.

So I guess the complete lack of any new developments is what struck me. That and the fact that much of the good we had done for the artists' side of the industry with G.O.D. had been just as quickly undone by the big boys.

Read the folklore masters. Go to galleries. Walk in the woods. That's what you need to be an artist or storyteller.

I'm an artist, I'm not an academic folklorist.