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I didn't get paid for performances most of my life. If I did, I would be billionaire now, and I'm not. (Marina Abramovic)
Time spent in the advertising business seems to create a permanent deformity like the Chinese habit of foot-binding. (Dean G. Acheson)
I've always defined myself not as a cartoonist, but as an entrepreneur. That was true before I tried cartooning. I always imagined cartooning would be how I got my seed capital. I always thought my other businesses would be the less dominant part of my life. (Scott Adams)
A professional is a man who can do his job when he doesn't feel like it. An amateur is a man who can't do his job when he does feel like it. (James Agate)
Without laughter life on our planet would be intolerable. So important is laughter to us that humanity highly rewards members of one of the most unusual professions on earth, those who make a living by inducing laughter in others. This is very strange if you stop to think of it: that otherwise sane and responsible citizens should devote their professional energies to causing others to make sharp, explosive barking-like exhalations. (Steve Allen)
I've never really had a hobby, unless you count art, which the IRS once told me I had to declare as a hobby since I hadn't made money with it. (Laurie Anderson)
We reach the point where our profession is also our hobby. (Robert Anderson)
The first time I fired up a car, felt the engine shudder and the wheel come to life in my hands, I was hooked. It was a feeling I can't describe. I still get it every time I get into a race car. (Mario Andretti)
I've learned that making a 'living' is not the same thing as making a 'life.' (Maya Angelou)
Art is the only thing I have ever felt completely confident with. I could not imagine my life without art. (Dion Archibald)
All paid jobs absorb and degrade the mind. (Aristotle)
The very earliest influence was a horror of having to work in a bank or an office - a desire for a free and creative life. (Frank Auerbach)
My present post amounts to about 700 thaler, and when there are rather more funerals than usual, the fees rise in proportion; but when a healthy wind blows, they fall accordingly. (Johann Sebastian Bach)
A professional writer is an amateur who didn't quit. (Richard Bach)
It is a great happiness when men's professions and their inclinations accord. (Sir Francis Bacon)
So I really began as a failed poet - although when I first wanted to be a writer, I learned to write prose by reading poetry. (Nicholson Baker)
The price one pays for pursuing any profession or calling is an intimate knowledge of its ugly side. (James Baldwin)
Vocations which we wanted to pursue, but didn't, bleed, like colors, on the whole of our existence. (Honore de Balzac)
Art may be for the privileged few but they have earned the privilege and deny it to no one. (Darby Bannard)
Art is too popular. If plumbing was as popular as art is we would have
amateur plumbers running around brandishing wrenches and Roto-Rooters, climbing in and out of sewers and writing gibberish about pipe systems. And none of our our toilets would work. (Darby Bannard)
I never got tired of Tom and Jerry, but I did have a dream of doing more with my life than making cartoons. (Joseph Barbera)
I started doing cartoons when I was about 21. I never thought I would be a cartoonist. It happened behind my back. I was always a painter and drawer. (Lynda Barry)
I wanted to be a cartoonist when I was young. (Jean-Michel Basquiat)
I never thought that I would support myself with art - everyone in the Group of Seven had day jobs. I became a geography teacher so that I could get free field trips into the wilderness to paint. (Robert Bateman)
Imagine if you grew up in a place where your lineage was there for a hundred years, and part of the culture was to play music 50 percent of the time. You'd probably have a lot of musicians in your family too. (Jon Batiste)
It is the best of all trades, to make songs, and the second best to sing them. (Hilaire Belloc)
The free-lance writer is a man who is paid per piece or per word or perhaps. (Robert Benchley)
I have a simple life. I mean, you just give me a drum roll, they announce my name, and I come out and sing. In my job I have a contract that says I'm a singer. So I sing. (Tony Bennett)
I can do everything with ease on the stage, whereas in real life I feel too big and clumsy. So I didn't choose acting. It chose me. (Ingrid Bergman)
When I was drowning in depression during my Emergency Medicine residency and desperate to find a way out... I remembered my creative dreams of the past. I literally saved my life, and ultimately built a new career path. (Susan Biali, M.D.)
As a rock star, I have two instincts, I want to have fun, and I want to change the world. I have a chance to do both. (Bono)
You'll make no money for a very long time, it's physically demanding, you'll have no life, and if at the end you can't imagine doing anything else, you'll know it's the life for you. (Anthony Bourdain)
I love writing, it's the center of my life. If you don't love what you do, you'd better find something else to love. Otherwise, you don't have a reason for living. (Ray Bradbury)
To keep from going stale you must forget your professional outlook and rediscover the virginal eye of the amateur. (Gyula Halasz, Brassai)
Your vocation is as real and as true as any other. Those who denounce the artist as idle manifest a deep ignorance of the nature of art. (Charles Philip Brooks)
Find a job you like and you add five days to every week. (H. Jackson Brown, Jr.)
We enjoy the process far more than the proceeds. (Warren Buffett)
You know I vowed when I became President not to talk about the loneliest toughest job in the world and I didn't. (George H.W. Bush)
Look, when you're the president, there's all kinds of things said about us. I mean, it's just the nature of the job. (George W. Bush)
I look back on my years as a Wall Street lawyer as time spent in a foreign country... (Susan Cain)
After more than three decades of creating commercial art as a graphic designer and book illustrator - telling other people's stories - I have begun the journey of a full-time painter, to tell my own. (Ken Campbell)
- Pioneer Pottery...
When somebody asks you, 'What made you take to pottery?' the only possible answer, if you are honest, is, 'I was no good at anything else.' (Michael Cardew)
How will you serve the world? What do they need that you can provide? The effect you have on others is the most valuable currency there is. (Jim Carrey)
Now then, you of noble mind, who love this profession, come at once to art and accept these precepts: enthusiasm (love), reverence, obedience, and perseverance. As soon as you can, place yourself under the guidance of a master, and remain with him as long as possible. (Cennino Cennini)
There is no such thing as an amateur artist as different from a professional artist. There is only good art and bad art. (Paul Cezanne)
I never know where I am going or where I want to go with this damned profession. (Paul Cezanne)
My hands were too soft... I had to find some special occupation, some kind of work that would not force me to turn away from the sky and the stars, that would allow me to discover the meaning of life. (Marc Chagall)
Music is my life, professionally, for nearly 60 years. To be recognized by the academy is still the highest honor. (Ray Charles)
I feel more confident and more satisfied when I reflect that I have two professions and not one. Medicine is my lawful wife and iterature is my mistress. When I get tired of one I spend the night with the other. (Anton Chekhov)
I'm an artist, a designer, a craftsman, interior designer, half-architect. There's no one name that fits me very well. (Dale Chihuly)
I was going to be a great woman novelist. Then the war came along and I think it's hard for young people today, don't you, to realize that when World War II happened we were dying to go and help our country. (Julia Child)
All I ever thought was, 'I'm going to do this as long as I can, and if I can't get paid at it, I'll be a bum doing it.' And so, here I am. (Bruce Cockburn)
If income was directly proportional to technical proficiency and education, classical and jazz musicians would be some of the most affluent people in the world. (Robert Coleman)
Dynasty was the opportunity to take charge of my career rather than waiting around like a library book waiting to be loaned out. (Joan Collins)
I would love to make the transition from professional to amateur. All the hobby artists I know do exactly what they want, when they want, from the heart – and not to pay the mortgage. (Melinda Cooper)
Figure out what it is in life you don't do well, and then don't do it. (Doug Coupland)
I become more and more inclined to sink the minister in the man, and abandon my present calling in toto as a profession... to create a living religion in landscape painting. (Christopher Pearse Cranch)
-Joy Division
I used to work in a factory, and I was really happy because I could daydream all day. (Ian Curtis)
Art at the college level is sheltered. It's about ideas, pushing the boundaries and it is fun. Making a living making art requires a whole new set of values and strategies. (Judith D'Agostino)
For most professions, most of the time you don't need to be on the cutting edge. As long as you stay slightly ahead of or even with clients, everything will be fine. (Jeff Davidson)
The way art is reported makes it very difficult for people outside the arts to consider visual art a sensible profession. (Anne Desmet)
Should it happen tomorrow, I would fall to my knees to give thanks to God for such a career. (Placido Domingo)
I quit acting when I was 11 because I was cast as a bouncing ball in 'Alice in Wonderland,' and I felt slighted and wounded. (Lena Dunham)
I'm always afraid that I'm being unprofessional, yet I continue to sign all my e-mails 'xoxo.' (Lena Dunham)
I came to design through architecture, Ray came to design through painting. This should not be at all surprising since I feel that most everything is a form of architecture, certainly all of the environment that man creates for himself - and Ray feels that painting is related to everything and of course I feel that painting
comes under the heading of architecture. (Charles Eames)
Enjoy your achievements as well as your plans. Keep interested in your own career, however humble; it is a real possession in the changing fortunes of time. (Max Ehrmann)
The profession of film director can and should be such a high and precious one; that no man aspiring to it can disregard any knowledge that will make him a better film director or human being. (Sergei Eisenstein)
The best augury of a man's success in his profession is that he thinks it the finest in the world. (George Eliot)
Each man has his own vocation; his talent is his call. There is one direction in which all space is open to him. (Ralph Waldo Emerson)
I was directed because I knew I wanted to be a novelist, but I didn't have a very good job or a way of getting published. I found those years to be among the most difficult of my life. (Jeffrey Eugenides)
I'm sometimes called a 'documentary photographer' but... a man operating under that definition could take a sly pleasure in the disguise. Very often I'm doing one thing when I'm thought to be doing another. (Walker Evans)
-The 4-Hour Workweek...
I will take as a given that, for most people, somewhere between six and seven billion of them, the perfect job is the one that takes the least time. (Timothy Ferriss)
I kind of fell backwards into acting. I was studying to be a high school teacher. I look now and I understand completely, or actually barely, how much work it is to be a teacher. It's an incredible amount of work. (Nathan Fillion)
The historian must have... some conception of how men who are not historians behave. Otherwise he will move in a world of the dead. (E. M. Forster)
As a kid, I was into music, played guitar in a band. Then I started acting in plays in junior high school and just got lost in the puzzle of acting, the magic of it. I think it was an escape for me. (Michael J. Fox)
I don't know of any other profession where friends and family feel as free to tell you how to do your job as they do to an artist. (Nina Allen Freeman)
The society that scorns excellence in plumbing because plumbing is a humble activity, and tolerates shoddiness in philosophy because it is an exalted activity, will have neither good plumbing nor good philosophy. (John W. Gardner)
It may be true, that men, who are mere mathematicians, have certain specific shortcomings, but that is not the fault of mathematics, for it is equally true of every other exclusive occupation. (Karl Freiderich Gauss)
In life and art it's better to be an enthusiastic amateur than a jaded professional. (Robert Genn)
Art is a course in personal development that has no reliable diploma and no known end. The pursuit of art instructs in beauty as well as ugliness, fantasy as well as common sense. Art levels souls and baffles brains. Art softens pain because it is pain. Art gives joy because it is joy. (Robert Genn)
I am not an academic, nor a writer. I am a painter whose images are his words and story. (Claudio Ghirardo)
Contrary to hearsay, it is possible to make a living that way. (Alexander Girard)
Literature became a major love of mine. Later, it became a difficult choice for me whether to major in music or literature. It wasn't until my 30s that I began a profession in music. (Tom Glazer)
Your profession is not what brings home your paycheck. Your profession is what you were put on earth to do. With such passion and such intensity that it becomes spiritual in calling. (Vincent van Gogh)
I thought, enough of this, I'm not an abstract painter, what the hell am I going to do? Should I get a job in a shoe store, sell real estate, or what? I was really depressed by the whole thing, because I felt like a painter, yet I couldn't make paintings. (Ralph Goings)
Being a screenwriter is not enough for a full creative life. (William Goldman)
Art is not a career – it's a life. (Andy Goldsworthy)
I am a person before I am anything else. I never say I am a writer. I never say I am an artist... I am a person who does those things. (Edward Gorey)
No matter what you do for a living, nurture your art. (Irwin Greenberg)
I heard people say, 'Why would he want to do this?' My answer is 'Why not?' It is what I love. It's what I know. (Wayne Gretzky)
I'm still not sure what pulled me into the career I chose, even though, now, I can't imagine having done anything else. Mostly, I think I wanted to be a writer, or at least to try for a while. (Peter Gzowski)
It would be bypassing the issue to say that the artist's business is to work with this and that material or manipulate the findings of perceptual psychology, and that the rest should be left to other professions. (Hans Haacke)
I have learned to insist upon myself. I am not 'going to suddenly come to my senses and get a real job.' (Joel Haas)
I don't remember deciding to become a writer. You decide to become a dentist or a postman. For me, writing is like being gay. You finally admit that this is who you are, you come out and hope that no one runs away. (Mark Haddon)
-An Astronaut's Guide to Life on Earth...
Square astronaut, round hole. But somehow, I'd managed to push myself through it, and here was the truly amazing part: along the way, I'd become a good fit. It had only taken 21 years. (Chris Hadfield, astronaut)
If you see 100 paintings while on the drive to work, then you are doing the wrong work. (Andrew Hamilton)
The trajectory started when I was on the roof of our house looking out at a swamp when I was 19. I had written for several years, starting at about 15, but that day on the roof I took my vows and acknowledged my calling. (Jim Harrison)
The man who feels that he must be hopeful and cheerful to get along ignores the careers of some pretty successful misanthropes. (Henry S. Haskins)
Acting is a nice childish profession - pretending you're someone else and, at the same time, selling yourself. (Katharine Hepburn)
I found one had to do some work every day, even at midnight, because either you're professional or you're not. (Barbara Hepworth)
As an actor, I'm thankful I have lived not one life, but many. (Charlton Heston)
I think of art as a first-order practice, as important as sociology, psychology, physics, politics or whatever. (Susan Hiller)
I never know what to tell young people when they come here. It could never happen for anyone they way it happened for me. It was all an accident. (Al Hirschfeld)
I've sold shoes, hawked newspapers, jerked sodas, gazed rapturously at the tinsel dream at the end of a runway from my usher's aisle in a burley-cue, drove a truck - then because I didn't like being pushed around, started pushing a pencil around. (Burne Hogarth)
From the time I took my nose off that lithographic stone, I have had no master, and never shall have any. (Winslow Homer)
If you persist in looking at your profession as if it were a hobby or avocation you will never do anything in art. You have to live in art. (William Hook)
My professional life has been a constant record of disillusion... (Harry Houdini)
If I had to choose between a great acting job and a good directing job, I'd choose the directing job. (Ron Howard)
It is the rarest thing to find a player who has not had his character affected for the worse by the practice of his profession. Nobody can make a habit of self-exhibition, nobody can exploit his personality for the sake of exercising a kind of hypnotic power over others, and remain untouched by the process. (Aldous Huxley)
I was lucky - I found what I love to do early in life. (Steve Jobs)
In an age of incompetence, I've been able to last in this crazy business. I actually know how to play my ax and write a song. That's my job. (Billy Joel)
There are few ways in which a man can be more innocently employed than in getting money. (Samuel Johnson)
I'm still astonished that somebody would offer me a job and pay me to do what I wanted to do. (Chuck Jones)
To flourish in any field of activity, you need to gain a deep understanding of it. (Rod Judkins)
I've always felt that if one was going to take seriously this vocation as an artist, you have to get beyond that decorative facade. (Anish Kapoor)
My mother thought I would have a hard life as a painter. My father thought the highest thing a person could be was an architect. Below that was a painter. So he thought it was much better than being, say, a doctor. (Alex Katz)
An unemployed jester is nobody's fool. (Danny Kaye)
I became an entertainer not because I wanted to but because I was meant to. (Danny Kaye)
A society in which vocation and job are separated for most people gradually creates an economy that is often devoid of spirit, one that frequently fills our pocketbooks at the cost of emptying our souls. (Sam Keen)
I am an amateur and intend to remain one my whole life long. (Andre Kertesz)
Six months painting hard will cure anyone's fantasies. The road is hard, unpaved and full of poodles large enough to take a whole person in head first, the family too, even the family dog can end up starving! (Nader Khaghani)
Whatever your life's work is, do it well. A man should do his job so well that the living, the dead, and the unborn could do it no better. (Martin Luther King, Jr.)
I'm convinced that had I not changed my name, I don't think I would have had quite the same career curve that I eventually had. (Ben Kingsley)
At the beginning of my career I was told that photography was one of two things: either a golden conduit or a cul-de-sac. Photography became a mechanism to explore life and to look for the feeling on the outside of what was happening within. (Tim Knox)
I was always an artist. I was a broker to earn a living, but I was always thinking about my art. (Jeff Koons)
I'm an artist because that's what I was best at as a kid. It was fun... I continue to be an artist... for the freedom that an art career can bring. I don't need an alarm clock and I am my own boss. (Mark Kostabi)
My mother was against me being an artist. She just wanted me to marry a rich man. (Yayoi Kusama)
I wanted to become a cartoon artist, a portrait artist, and an illustrator. This was my first idea. (Karl Lagerfeld)
If you're looking for work and have a choice of a job, choose a job that allows the opportunity for some creativity, and for spending time with your family. Even if it means less pay... (Dalai Lama)
I print giclees for artists and photographers for a livelihood. My original idea was to somehow combine the two. (Don Lambert)
I decided to be a philanthropist. (Mark A. Landis)
I've never not been sure that I was a photographer any more than you would not be sure you were yourself. I was a photographer, or wanting to be a photographer, or beginning but some phase of photographer I've always been. (Dorothea Lange)
The transition from painter to artist comes when you cross the line of painting what you see to painting what you feel about what you see. (T. Allen Lawson)
Many in the creative professions were nerds in their pasts because they spent so long reading comics and using their imaginations when they were growing up. (Jim Lee)
Even when I wasn't making much of a living, I didn't think about making a living. (David Leffel)
I realized I couldn't be a journalist because I like to take a side, to have an opinion and a point a view; I liked to step across the imaginary boundary of the objective view that the journalist is supposed to have and be involved. (Annie Leibovitz)
At a certain point you have to make a decision in your life about where will you best serve, and I decided that I would best serve as a producer as opposed to a studio executive. There are many upsides to being the studio executive, but one of the downsides is that you get removed from the actual process of making the movie. (Adam Leipzig)
My parents wanted me to be a lawyer. But I don't think I would have been very happy. I'd be in front of the jury singing. (Jennifer Lopez)
Transitioning from a graphic artist to full-time fine artist has been as much about attitude as aptitude. Experimentation has proven as important and rewarding as focus and repetition. (Dorothy Lorenze)
If a person is not talented enough to be a novelist, not smart enough to be a lawyer, and his hands are too shaky to perform operations, he becomes a journalist. (Norman Mailer)
A time comes, after years in the trenches, when the artist begins to fathom what his career has looked like so far and what it will look like if he continues as he's proceeded. (Eric Maisel)
I chose photography over writing. I had to make a living. (Sally Mann)
You can't say I'm going to become a painter in the same way you say I'm going to become a dentist. Or maybe you can nowadays. But it's an endeavor. (Brice Marden)
Analyzing what you haven't got as well as what you have is a necessary ingredient of a career. (Orison Swett Marden)
A musician must make music, an artist must paint, a poet must write if he is to be ultimately at peace with himself. What one can be, one must be. (Abraham Maslow)
Sometimes I wonder if I would've been more successful if I wasn't acting and I concentrated on other things... (Danny Masterson)
If I didn't choose art, I would have become an astronomer. (Peter Max)
Amateurs built the Ark; Professionals built the Titanic. (Elizabeth May)
I am grateful that my job is making art, even when it seems the strangest employment on the planet! (Carole Mayne)
I don't know why I started writing. I don't know why anybody does it. Maybe they're bored, or failures at something else. (Cormac McCarthy)
And I was mischievous. I was always into something. So when I got good attention from the singing, I knew that was probably where I needed to land. (Reba McEntire)
I got my first guitar when I was 16. I'd play for my family and friends, but taking that guitar out there into the wide, wide world wasn't something I ever thought about. (Don McLean)
Acting professionally breeds professionalism. (Bob McMurray)
-in a letter to Fritz Werner, 1856...
It is so true that the more a person is suited for art, the more he is disheartened by the craft aspect of his work. But all art is craft, something that has to be learned with difficulty, and that is where the greatness of art lies. (Adolph Menzel)
I have always thought of myself as a painter derailed by circumstance. (Joni Mitchell)
A career is wonderful thing, but you can't snuggle up to it on a cold night. (Marilyn Monroe)
Insurance companies now consider being an artist to constitute, 'A Pre-Existing Condition,' and grounds to cancel all underwriting... (Brad Michael Moore)
I just decided to make a movie. I had no training, no film school, but I had been to a lot of movies. (Michael Moore)
I have no wish to be remembered as a painter, for I never was a painter; my idea of that profession was perhaps too exalted; I may say, is too exalted. I leave it to others more worthy to fill the niches of art. (Samuel Morse)
It's one thing to paint, it's one thing to launch your career, but it's a whole other thing to sustain it. (C. W. Mundy)
Professional men, they have no cares; whatever happens, they get theirs. (Ogden Nash)
It was more than a profession. It was even a therapy, for there I just told it as it was. It takes a lot of courage in life to tell it how it is. (Alice Neel)
You know when I decided to become professional - that means to expose yourself naked to the world with the other creative minds - I said, 'I'm going into areas I don't know. I might just fall right down to hell and kill myself.' (Louise Nevelson)
It was the drawing that led me to architecture, the search for light and astonishing forms. (Oscar Niemeyer)
The best author will be the one who is ashamed to become a writer. (Friedrich Nietzsche)
When I'm doing theatre, I prefer to be doing cinema. When I'm doing cinema, I prefer to be doing theatre. (Peter O'Toole)
It was an epiphany when I realized you don't have to call yourself a linguist, a translator, a poet. You can call yourself an artist and you can do all these things. (Jan Peacock)
My parents were intelligent and encouraging, but at the same time, they were displeased at me becoming a wandering troubadour and wire walker. (Philippe Petit)
Perhaps the ideal life is that of the week-end artist, who preserves the integrity of his own aesthetic ideals because of his economic independence... If his daily grind is hateful he has his weekly solace in art. (Walter J. Phillips)
Painting is a blind man's profession. He paints not what he sees, but what he feels, what he tells himself about what he has seen. (Pablo Picasso)
Financial firms are sending their back-office jobs overseas. But what do fine artists do? They create something new, unexpected, and delightful that changes the world. MFA abilities are harder to outsource and more important in an abundant world. (Daniel H. Pink)
If your career is a bad boyfriend, it is healthy to remember you can always leave and go sleep with somebody else. (Amy Poehler)
Every professional was once an amateur. (Alexander Pope)
Allow me to say that I would long since have committed suicide had desisting made me a professor of Latin. (Ezra Pound)
I was training to be an electrician. I suppose I got wired the wrong way round somewhere along the line. (Elvis Presley)
The professional has learned that success, like happiness, comes as a by-product of work. (Steven Pressfield)
A cobbler should stick to his last. (proverb)
A chef is a mixture maybe of artistry and craft. You have to learn the craft really to get there. (Wolfgang Puck)
It's not written anywhere that an artist should starve. (Bob Ragland)
I live the art life quite nicely - because I work at it - on purpose! (Bob Ragland)
The verdict you pronounce upon the source of your livelihood is the verdict you pronounce upon your life. (Ayn Rand)
- The Jew with the Iron Cross, A Record of Survival in WWII Russia...
I have been an artist for 50 years, completing over 2000 oils, 1000 drawings, hundreds of watercolors and serigraphs as well as numerous sculptures. I'd have loved to write more, but there just wasn't enough time. (Georg Rausch)
I wanted to be an actor. That was my real goal. But I wasn't any good at it, so I wrote my own material and acted through that. That's my idea of fun. I get to be all these things in the songs. (Lou Reed)
-b.1913 d.1967...
It is not right for painters to think that painting is like prostitution, that 'first you do it for love, then you do it for others, and finally you do it for money.' (Ad Reinhardt)
Cezanne mistook his vocation. He should have been a butcher. (William Blake Richmond)
All professions are... filled with demands. (Rainer Maria Rilke)
Suddenly degrees aren't worth anything. Isn't that true? When I was a student, if you had a degree, you had a job. If you didn't have a job it's because you didn't want one. And I didn't want one, frankly. (Sir Ken Robinson)
Some people have been kind enough to call me a fine artist. I've always called myself an illustrator. I'm not sure what the difference is. All I know is that whatever type of work I do, I try to give it my very best. Art has been my life. (Norman Rockwell)
We artists have the only profession in which, by working, we are creating our own vacations. (Richard J. Rogers)
You don't get paid for the hour. You get paid for the value you bring to an hour. (Jim Rohn)
Don't just let your business or your job make something for you, let it make something of you. (Jim Rohn)
I would've been intrigued by being a film director. I would've been intrigued by politics. I thought about architecture. (Charlie Rose)
Not everybody paints what the public will pay for. The method in which an artist receives money is nobody's business, what matters is that paintings are produced. (Jim Rowe)
I'm either going to be a writer or a bum. (Carl Sandburg)
An amateur is an artist who supports himself with outside jobs which enable him to paint. A professional is someone whose wife works to enable him to paint. (Ben Shahn)
My career doesn't depend on painting Bill Clinton. (Nelson Shanks)
I already turned down a family business. I didn't want to work in a factory. (Burt Shavitz)
My main reason for adopting literature as a profession was that, as the author is not seen by his clients, he need not dress respectably. (George Bernard Shaw)
- answer to the question, "What do you consider your greatest achievement?", The Guardian...
Not having to have a proper job. (David Shrigley)
In my profession, I'm around a lot of people whose bodies are their instruments in one way or another. (Anna Deavere Smith)
The test of a vocation is the love of the drudgery it involves. (Logan Pearsall Smith)
By the time I was 22, I was a professional. A young and flawed professional, but not an amateur. (Stephen Sondheim)
I see no reason to quit. I can't imagine walking away from being Big Bird. I mean, that's an awfully good job that there's not too many of them. So I just want to keep doing it till I can't do it anymore. (Caroll Spinney)
No is a word on your path to Yes. Don't give up too soon. Not even if well-meaning parents, relatives, friends, and colleagues tell you to get a real job. Your dreams are your real job. (Joyce Spizer)
If I had wanted only to make lots of money, I would have chosen a different profession. (Peter Stamm)
Career is too pompous a word. It was a job, and I have always felt privileged to be paid for what I love doing. (Barbara Stanwyck)
Firefighter is one of the few jobs kind enough to warn me away by containing two words I'm not interested in, unlike the deceptive bookkeeper. (Joel Stein)
I am impelled, not to squeak like a grateful and apologetic mouse, but to roar like a lion out of pride in my profession. (John Steinbeck)
I, mostly my own doctor / A lawyer and builder smart / A teacher, prince and pastor / A horse, a plow, a cart. (Stephan G. Stephansson)
I simply make music, and people have always been foolish enough to pay me for it. I never told them that I would have done it all for nothing. (Leopold Stokowski)
When, in the autumn of 1947, I was fired from the first and only job I have ever held, I wanted one thing out of life: to become a writer. (William Styron)
I am interested in study, reflection, philosophy - but always as a dilettante. I also consider myself a dilettante as a painter. (Antoni Tapies)
I paint, you know, and have a fairly good career going. And I'm touchy when elitists say you can't be taken seriously in more than one form of art. Duke Ellington said that everybody should do two things. I'll listen to Duke Ellington before I'll listen to the critics. (Bernie Taupin)
An amateur is someone who creates art out of love while a professional does it for money, a matter of choice and intention, not talent. In fact, an amateur may actually produce better work because she doesn't have clients dictating to her. (Corinna Taylor)
When I said I no longer wanted to be a painter, that I wanted to be an actor, the first thing I did was get a stinking job in an insurance building. (Rod Taylor)
Perhaps it is this specter that most haunts working men and women: the planned obsolescence of people that is of a piece with the planned obsolescence of the things they make. Or sell. (Studs Terkel)
I think that anyone who's pushed to do the very best that they can is privileged. It's a luxury. (Twyla Tharp)
My profession is always to be alert, to attend to all the oratorios and the operas in nature. (Henry David Thoreau)
-b.ca.1485 d.ca.1576...
Painting done under pressure by artists without the necessary talent can only give rise to formlessness, as painting is a profession that requires peace of mind. (Titian)
My art career actually began under the kitchen table. My mother wanted to get me out of her hair while she cooked, so she laid out some paper and pencils on the floor under the kitchen table. (Alton S. Tobey)
Resolve to pay any price or make any sacrifice to get into the top ten percent of your field. The payoff is incredible! (Brian Tracy)
If I hadn't been President of the United States, I probably would have ended up a piano player in a bawdy house. (Harry S. Truman)
A healthy and wholesome cheerfulness is not necessarily impossible to any occupation. (Mark Twain)
Professionalism is knowing how to do it, when to do it, and doing it. (Frank Tyger)
The difference between a professional and an amateur is: A professional borrows from a master and an amateur borrows from an apprentice. (Author unknown)
On a particularly boring day, I had a clever but unfortunate inspiration. I seized a piece of cardboard, some tubes of tint and petroleum base - since I lacked real oil - and, confronting a typical Montmartre street corner, I suddenly found myself a practitioner of this difficult and thankless art of painting. (Maurice Utrillo)
My profession is dreaming. Could anyone be luckier? (Robert Wade)
Why do people think artists are special? It's just another job. (Andy Warhol)
The true professional makes art when he is not feeling good, if the studio is too cold or too warm or the walls are falling down. We are painters and we paint. If I were a sculptor, I'd sculpt. (Jack White)
Professionals are focused, dedicated, and stay the course regardless of the inevitable hurdles encountered. They take up their brushes daily whether they're 'in the mood' or not. There's no waiting for inspiration to knock at the studio door; they're confident it will show up once they begin their process. (Lesley White)
My father was the editor of an agricultural magazine called 'The Southern Planter.' He didn't think of himself as a writer. He was a scientist, an agronomist, but I thought of him as a writer because I'd seen him working at his desk. (Tom Wolfe)
At 18 I began painting steadily full time and at age 20 had my first New York show at the Macbeth Gallery. (Andrew Wyeth)
If an artist and a scientist have a common point, it is probably in the need for some kind of imaginative thinking to interpret the material they have. (Catherine Yass)
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