The audience’s performance is always more or less stochastic.

An artist will betray himself by some sort of sincerity.

Always the artist, never the superstar.

An artist is always alone - if he is an artist. No, what the artist needs is loneliness.

A great artist is always before his time or behind it.

All art is unstable. Its meaning is not necessarily that implied by the author, There is no authoritative active voice. There are only multiple readings.

The artist after all is a solitary being.

La critique est aisée, et l'art est difficile.

To all appearances, the artist acts like a mediumistic being who, from the labyrinth beyond time and space, seeks his way out to a clearing.

The progress of an artist is a continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality.

I think that at the bottom of every artist there is absence.

An artist constantly risks falling fully into chaos, instead of transforming it.

The artist, like the God of creation, remains within or behind or beyond or above his handiwork, invisible, refined out of existence, indifferent, paring his fingernails

What all this posturing and fake glamor results in is a vast detachment and cynicism on the part of the artists. Since it's impossible to have respect for an audience that'll take just about anything you care to dish out, and the impassive demeanor is so central to the role, a general numbnose is all that can be expected.