A Quote by Robert Genn

In life and art it's better to be an enthusiastic amateur than a jaded professional.

Robert Genn

Quote Topics

Amateur Art Better Enthusiastic Jaded Life Professional Than

Quote Author

Robert Genn
Canadian - Artist
May 15, 1936 - May 27, 2014

The difference between an amateur and a professional is in their habits. An amateur has amateur habits. A professional has professional habits. We can never free ourselves from habit. But we can replace bad habits with good ones.

Steven Pressfield

I'm an amateur photographer, apart from being a professional one, and I think maybe my amateur pictures are the better ones.

Elliott Erwitt

As an amateur, you may envy the professional, wishing you could combine business with pleasure into a kind of full-time hobby, using professional equipment and facilities. However, the professional knows that much of the hidden advantage of being amateur is the freedom you have to shoot what and when you like.

Michael Langford

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 think of myself as an amateur filmmaker, not a professional, in the sense that "amateur" means love of something, for the form.

Jim Jarmusch

An amateur at LIFE is an amateur at ART.

Laurence Gartel

I've been asked often what is the difference between an amateur and a professional artist, and I will tell you. An amateur artist is one who works all week at something else so he can paint on Saturday and Sunday. A professional artist is one whose wife works so he can paint all the time.

Ben Shahn

Every honest researcher I know admits he's just a professional amateur. He's doing whatever he's doing for the first time. That makes him an amateur. He has sense enough to know that he's going to have a lot of trouble, so that makes him a professional.

Charles Kettering

The entire 'my art is better than your art' thing really gets under my skin. The fact of the matter is: Your art IS better than my art... at being what it is. So what? It just so happens that my art is better than your art, at being what it is.

Derek R. Audette

The difference between an amateur and a professional photographer is that the amateur thinks the camera does the work. And they treat the camera with a certain amount of reverence. It is all about the kind of lens you choose, the kind of film stock you use… exactly the sort of perfection of the camera. Whereas, the professional the real professional – treats the camera with unutterable disdain. They pick up the camera and sling it aside. Because they know it’s the eye and the brain that count, not the mechanism that gets between them and the subject that counts.

David Hemmings

I would hate to think I am not an amature. An amateur is one who loves what he is doing. Very often, I'm afraid, the professional hates what he is doing. So, I'd rather be an amateur.

Yehudi Menuhin

Usually the amateur is defined as an immature state of the artist: someone who cannot — or will not — achieve the mastery of a profession. But in the field of photographic practice, it is the amateur, on the contrary, who is the assumption of the professional: for it is he who stands closer to the (i)noeme(i) of Photography.

Roland Barthes

Once the amateur's naive approach and humble willingness to learn fades away, the creative spirit of good photography dies with it. Every professional should remain always in his heart an amateur.

Alfred Eisenstaedt

By the time I was 22, I was a professional. A young and flawed professional, but not an amateur.

Stephen Sondheim

I think the greatest photographers are the amateur photographers who do it because they love it. Arnold Newman is a good example; he is a consummate professional, but he's also an 'amateur' in the pure sense of the word.