I'm not a writer, but today I think you have to be everything. As an artist you have an obligation to let people know what is on your mind and why you're doing this.
You really can't be a good artist if you can't say what you really feel. And people may be offended, but, you know, that's how you feel, and that is your right, and that is your gift as well.
The artist never really has any control over the impact of his work. If he starts thinking about the impact of his work, then he becomes a lesser artist.
In this world, artists are joyous. Unpredictability is the life of their paintings, their music, their novels. They delight in events not forecasted, happenings without explanation, retrospective.
Artists and creative workers - people who have accomplished work worthwhile have had a very high sense of the way to do things. They haven't been contented with mediocrity. They haven't confined themselves to the beaten tracks; they have never been satisfied to do things just as others do them, but always a little better. Few are those who see with their own eyesand feel with their own hearts.
It does not in the least concern me whether I shall have at the end of my life thirty people who understand or three hundred. I am like an artist who paints a picture because he must, otherwise he is unhappy - not unhappy, but he must obey that creative impulse.
I feel ever so strongly that an artist must be nourished by his passions and his despairs. These things alter an artist whether for the good or the better or the worse. It must alter him. The feelings of desperation and unhappiness are more useful to an artist than the feeling of contentment, because desperation and unhappiness stretch your whole sensibility.
I look on Sculpture as history. I do not think the Apollo and the Jove impossible in flesh and blood. Every trait the artist recorded in stone, he had seen in life, and better than his copy.
The mind of an artist, in order to achieve the prodigious effort of freeing whole and entire the work that is in him, must be incandescent...there must be no obstacle in it, no foreign matter unconsumed.