Art Quotes

I want to overhear passionate arguments about what we are and what we are doing and what we ought to do. I want to feel that art is an utterance made in good faith by one human being to another. I want to believe there are geniuses scheming to astonish the rest of us, just for the pleasure of it.

~ Marilynne Robinson

The point of art is to inspire you to create your own.

~ Misha Collins

...sometimes we enter art to hide within it. It is where we can go to save ourselves, where a third-person voice protects us.

~ Michael Ondaatje

As humanity perfects itself, man becomes degraded. When everything is reduced to the mere counter-balancing of economic interests, what room will there be for virtue? When Nature has been so subjugated that she has lost all her original forms, where will that leave the plastic arts? And so on. In the mean time, things are going to get very murky.

~ Gustave Flaubert

This grandiose tragedy that we call modern art.

~ Salvador Dalí

Tattooing, when understood in its entirety, must be seen as a religious act. The human being brings forth images from the center of the self and communicates them to the world. Fantasy is embodied in reality and the person is made whole.

~ Spider Webb

When the work takes over, then the artist is enabled to get out of the way, not to interfere. When the work takes over, then the artist listens.

~ Madeleine L'engle

Art is what gets us beyond what is real. It makes reality more real. It also shortens the distance we gotta travel to see how connected we are.

~ Laura Pritchett

Art is literacy of the heart.

~ Elliot Eisner

I'm an observer. I read about life. I research life. I find a corner in a room and melt into it. I can become invisible. It's an art, and I am a wonderful practitioner.

~ Christine Feehan

Great art is the outward expression of an inner life in the artist, and this inner life will result in his personal vision of the world.

~ Edward Hopper

I try to apply colors like words that shape poems, like notes that shape music.

~ Joan Miró

For all the pain you suffered, my mama. For all the torment of your past and future years, my mama. For all the anguish this picture of pain will cause you. For the unspeakable mystery that brings good fathers and sons into the world and lets a mother watch them tear at each other’s throats. For the Master of the Universe, whose suffering world I do not comprehend. For dreams of horror, for nights of waiting, for memories of death, for the love I have for you, for all the things I remember, and for all the things I should remember but have forgotten, for all these I created this painting—an observant Jew working on a crucifixion because there was no aesthetic mold in his own religious tradition into which he could pour a painting of ultimate anguish and torment.

~ Chaim Potok

The professional has learned that success, like happiness, comes as a by-product of work. The professional concentrates on the work and allows rewards to come or not come, whatever they like.

~ Steven Pressfield

Whatever the source of emotion that drives me to create, I want to give it a form which has some connection with the visible world, even if it is only to wage war on that world....I want my paintings to be able to defend themselves to resist the invader, just as though there were razor blades on all surfaces so no one could touch them without cutting his hands.

~ Pablo Picasso

Art's cruel. You can get away with murder with words. But a picture is like a window straight through to your inmost heart.

~ John Fowles

Where does contagion end and art begin?

~ Neil Gaiman

I will always know the glory of the beautiful and rare, as they will know security from labour and prayer. As they will hear the laughter of the children they gave life, I will know the torments of the song born under knife.

~ Roman Payne

I realized that the longing for art, like the longing for love, is a malady that blinds us, and makes us forget the things we already know, obscuring reality.

~ Orhan Pamuk

I hope to depart in no other way than looking back with love and wistfulness and thinking, oh paintings that I would have made..

~ Vincent Van Gogh

Consider everything an experiment.

~ Corita Kent

Mockingbirds are the true artists of the bird kingdom. Which is to say, although they're born with a song of their own, an innate riff that happens to be one of the most versatile of all ornithological expressions, mocking birds aren't content to merely play the hand that is dealt them. Like all artists, they are out to rearrange reality. Innovative, willful, daring, not bound by the rules to which others may blindly adhere, the mockingbird collects snatches of birdsong from this tree and that field, appropriates them, places them in new and unexpected contexts, recreates the world from the world. For example, a mockingbird in South Carolina was heard to blend the songs of thirty-two different kinds of birds into a ten-minute performance, a virtuoso display that serve no practical purpose, falling, therefore, into the realm of pure art.

~ Tom Robbins

Lying, the telling of beautiful untrue things, is the proper aim of Art.

~ Oscar Wilde

The good qualities in our soul are most successfully and forcefully awakened by the power of art. Just as science is the intellect of the world, art is its soul.

~ Maxim Gorky

Art is essentially the affirmation, the blessing, and the deification of existence.

~ Friedrich Nietzsche

With respect to the requirement of art, the probable impossible is always preferable to the improbable possible.

~ Aristotle

How to Draw a Picture (XII)Know when you're finished, and when you are, put your pencil or your paintbrush down. All the rest is only life.

~ Stephen King

It was a miserable machine, an inefficient machine, she thought, the human apparatus for painting or for feeling; it always broke down at the critical moment; heroically, one must force it on.

~ Virginia Woolf

Modern art is what happens when painters stop looking at girls and persuade themselves that they have a better idea.

~ John Ciardi

I really, sincerely believe that one should trust the work, and not the author.

~ Peter Greenaway

Well, life isn't a cakewalk, is it?! Eighty-nine percent of the world's most valuable art was created by men living in rat-infested flats. You think Velásquez wore Adidas? You think he enjoyed the luxuries of central heating and twenty-four-hour pizza delivery?!

~ Marisha Pessl

Curiosity is the main energy...

~ Robert Rauschenberg

What's with the serum?I don't know, but it sounds ominous. We better put a telepathic direction finder on Benway. The man's not to be trusted. Might do almost anything...Turn a massacre into a sex orgy...Or a joke.Precisely. Arty type...No principles...

~ William S. Burroughs

One of the most valuable things one of my art teachers said to me was, ‘Don’t get upset by criticism. Value the fact that at least someone noticed what you did.

~ Chris Ware

You must write as if Dostoyevsky himself will be reading your novel, and Shakespeare will be acting it out.

~ Christina Westover

The modern artist is working with space and time and expressing his feelings rather than illustrating.

~ Jackson Pollock

The world before us is a postcard, and I imagine the story we are writing on it.

~ Mary E. Pearson

What do you think an artist is? An imbecile who only has eyes, if he is a painter, or ears if he is a musician, or a lyre in every chamber of his heart if he is a poet, or even, if he is a boxer, just his muscles? Far from it: at the same time he is also a political being, constantly aware of the heartbreaking, passionate, or delightful things that happen in the world, shaping himself completely in their image. How could it be possible to feel no interest in other people, and with a cool indifference to detach yourself from the very life which they bring to you so abundantly? No, painting is not done to decorate apartments. It is an instrument of war.

~ Pablo Picasso

To draw something is to try to capture it FOREVER, if you really love something, you never try to keep it the way it is forever. You have to let it be free to change

~ Cassandra Clare

I'm not an abstractionist. I'm not interested in the relationship of color or form or anything else. I'm interested only in expressing basic human emotions: tragedy, ecstasy, doom, and so on.

~ Mark Rothko