One wanted, she thought, dipping her brush deliberately, to be on a level with ordinary experience, to feel simply that's a chair, that's a table, and yet at the same time, It's a miracle, it's an ecstasy.
~ Virginia Woolf
It is obvious that art cannot teach anyone anything, since in four thousand years humanity has learnt nothing at all. We should long ago have become angels had we been capable of paying attention to the experience of art, and allowing ourselves to be changed in accordance with the ideals it expresses. Art only has the capacity, through shock and catharsis, to make the human soul receptive to good. It’s ridiculous to imagine that people can be taught to be good…Art can only give food – a jolt – the occasion – for psychical experience.
~ Andrei Tarkovsky
Only in art will the lion lie down with the lamb, and the rose grow without thorn.
~ Martin Amis
Everyone wants to understand art. Why not try to understand the song of a bird? Why does one love the night, flowers, everything around one, without trying to understand them? But in the case of a painting people have to understand. If only they would realize above all that an artist works of necessity, that he himself is only a trifling bit of the world, and that no more importance should be attached to him than to plenty of other things which please us in the world, though we can't explain them. People who try to explain pictures are usually barking up the wrong tree.
~ Pablo Picasso
Though I am often in the depths of misery, there is still calmness, pure harmony and music inside me. I see paintings or drawings in the poorest cottages, in the dirtiest corners. And my mind is driven towards these things with an irresistible momentum.
~ Vincent Van Gogh
Art begins . . . when someone interprets, when someone sees the world through his own eyes. Art happens when what is seen becomes mixed with the inside of the person who is seeing it.
~ Chaim Potok
Long looking at paintings is equivalent to being dropped into a foreign city, where gradually, out of desire and despair, a few key words, then a little syntax make a clearing in the silence. Art... is a foreign city, and we deceive ourselves when we think it familiar... We have to recognize that the language of art, all art, is not our mother-tongue.
~ Jeanette Winterson
You want to know how I think art should be taught to children? Take them to a museum and say, 'This is art, and you can't do it.
~ Steve Martin
The artist, and particularly the poet, is always an anarchist in the best sense of the word. He must heed only the call that arises within him from three strong voices: the voice of death, with all its foreboding, the voice of love and the voice of art.
~ Federico García Lorca
There is no place for grief in a house which serves the Muse.
~ Sappho
It is in dialogue with pain that many beautiful things acquire their value. Acquaintance with grief turns out to be one of the more unusual prerequisites of architectural appreciation. We might, quite aside from all other requirements, need to be a little sad before buildings can properly touch us.
~ Alain De Botton
Without culture, and the relative freedom it implies, society, even when perfect, is but a jungle. This is why any authentic creation is a gift to the future.
~ Albert Camus
Basically there can be no categories such as 'religious' art and 'secular' art, because all true art is incarnational, and therefore 'religious.
~ Madeleine L'engle
You are born an artist or you are not. And you stay an artist, dear, even if your voice is less of a fireworks. The artist is always there.
~ Maria Callas
The only honest art form is laughter, comedy. You can't fake it...try to fake three laughs in an hour -- ha ha ha ha ha -- they'll take you away, man. You can't.
~ Lenny Bruce
Art is whether or not there is a scream in him wanting to get out in a special way.
A week after my drugs ran out, I left my bed to perform at the college, deciding at the last minute to skip both the doughnut toss and the march of the headless plush toys. Instead, I just heated up a skillet of plastic soldiers, poured a milkshake over my head and called it a night.
~ David Sedaris
A man who works with his hands is a laborer, a man who works with his hands and his brain is a craftsman, but a man who works with his hands and his brain and his heart is an artist.
~ Louis Nizer
Creating is living doubly. The groping, anxious quest of a Proust, his meticulous collecting of flowers, of wallpapers, and of anxieties, signifies nothing else.
We feel lonely now and then and long for friends and think we should be quite different and happier if we found a friend of whom we might say: “He is the one.” But you, too, will begin to learn that there is much self-deception behind this longing; if we yielded too much to it, it would lead us from the road.
If you could say it in words, there would be no reason to paint.
~ Edward Hopper
There must always be two kinds of art: escape-art, for man needs escape as he needs food and deep sleep, and parable-art, that art which shall teach man to unlearn hatred and learn love.
~ W.h. Auden
Every act of creation is first of all an act of destruction. ― Pablo Picasso
It was odd to have something so personal out there in that way, but the good thing about art is that no one necessarily knows what you mean by it anyway.
~ Gabrielle Zevin
Be natural my children. For the writer that is natural has fulfilled all the rules of
~ Charles Dickens
Not marble nor the gilded monumentsOf princes, shall outlive this powerful rhyme,But you shall shine more bright in these contentsThan unswept stone, besmeared with sluttish time.When wasteful war shall statues overturnAnd broils roots out the work of masonry,Nor mars his sword nor war's quick fire shall burnThe living record of your memory.'Gainst death and all-oblivious enmityShall you pace forth; your praise shall still find roomEven in the eyes of all posterityThat wear this world out to the ending doom.So, till judgement that yourself arise,You in this, and dwell in lovers eyes.
~ William Shakespeare
Watch a French housewife as she makes her way slowly along the loaded stalls… searching for the peak of ripeness and flavor… What you are seeing is a true artist at work, patiently assembling all the materials of her craft, just as the painter squeezes oil colors onto his palette ready to create a masterpiece.
~ Keith Floyd
All real works of art look as though they were done in joy.
~ Robert Henri
To consult the rules of composition before making a picture is a little like consulting the law of gravitation before going for a walk.
~ Edward Weston
Every now and then one paints a picture that seems to have opened a door and serves as a stepping stone to other things.
I'm tired of feeling like I'm fucking crazy.I'm tired of driving till I see stars in my eyes.
~ Lana Del Rey
It is a mistake to think that the practice of my art has become easy to me. I assure you, dear friend, no one has given so much care to the study of composition as I. There is scarcely a famous master in music whose works I have not frequently and diligently studied.
~ Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
The aim of language...is to communicate...to impart to others the results one has obtained...As I talk, I reveal the situation...I reveal it to myself and to others in order to change it.
~ Jean-Paul Sartre
It's a good thing you and your pills weren't around a few hundred years ago or there never would have been a Vermeer or a Caravaggio. You'd have drugged Girl with a Pearl Earring and The Taking of Christ right the hell out of them.
~ Jennifer Donnelly
The greatest artist does not have any conceptWhich a single piece of marble does not itself containWithin its excess, though onlyA hand that obeys the intellect can discover it.
~ Michelangelo Buonarroti
Lies are the religion of slaves and masters. Truth is the god of the free man.
~ Maxim Gorky
Artists are those who can evade the verbose.
~ Haruki Murakami
I have things in my head that are not like what anyone taught me — shapes and ideas so near to me, so natural to my way of being and thinking.
~ Georgia O'keeffe
An artist should create beautiful things, but should put nothing of his own life into them.
~ Oscar Wilde
The tools are real. The viewer is real, you, the artist, is real and a part of everything you paint. You connect yourself to the viewer by sharing something that is inside of you that connects with something inside of him. All you have as your guide is that you know what moves you. All you have to do it with is a brush, some chemical and canvas, and technique.
~ Steven Brust
