Art Quotes

Humans make art to remember and be remembered,” said Caius. “Art is their weapon against forgetting.

~ Melissa Grey

Now take a human body. Why wouldn't you like to see a human body with a curling tail with a crest of ostrich feathers at the end? And with ears shaped like acanthus leaves? It would be ornamental, you know, instead of the stark, bare ugliness we have now. Well, why don't you like the idea? Because it would be useless and pointless. Because the beauty of the human body is that is hasn't a single muscle which doesn't serve its purpose; that there's not a line wasted; that every detail of it fits one idea, the idea of a man and the life of a man.

~ Ayn Rand

If we have no heretics we must invent them, for heresy is essential to health and growth.

~ Yevgeny Zamyatin

The world doesn't make sense, so why should I paint pictures that do?

~ Pablo Picasso

It is in books, poems, paintings which often give us the confidence to take seriously feelings in ourselves that we might otherwise never have thought to acknowledge.

~ Alain De Botton

The creative act is not performed by the artist alone, the spectator brings the work in contact with the external world by deciphering and interpreting its inner qualifications and thus adds his contribution to the creative act.

~ Marcel Duchamp

Forget art. Put your trust in ice cream.

~ Charles Baxter

Every creator painfully experiences the chasm between his inner vision and its ultimate expression. The chasm is never completely bridged. We all have the conviction, perhaps illusory, that we have much more to say than appears on the paper.

~ Isaac Bashevis Singer

Provided we can escape from the museums we carry around inside us, provided we can stop selling ourselves tickets to the galleries in our own skulls, we can begin to contemplate an art which re-creates the goal of the sorcerer: changing the structure of reality by the manipulation of living symbols ... Art tells gorgeous lies that come true.

~ Hakim Bey

A genuine work of art must mean many things; the truer its art, the more things it will mean. If my drawing, on the other hand, is so far from being a work of art that it needs THIS IS A HORSE written under it, what can it matter that neither you nor your child should know what it means? It is there not so much to convey a meaning as to wake a meaning. If it do not even wake an interest, throw it aside. A meaning may be there, but it is not for you. If, again, you do not know a horse when you see it, the name written under it will not serve you much. At all events, the business of the painter is not to teach zoology.

~ George Macdonald

Art arises from loss. I wish this weren't the case. I wish that every time I met a new woman and she rocked my world, I was inspired to write my ass off. But that is not what happens. What happens is we lie around in bed eating chocolate and screwing. Art is what happens when things don't work out, when you're licking your wounds. Art is, to a larger extent than people would like to think, a productive licking of the wounds.

~ Steve Almond

I do not have many things that are meaningful to me. Except my doubts and my fears. And my art.

~ Chaim Potok

This is Art holding a Mirror up to Life. That’s why everything is exactly the wrong way around.

~ Terry Pratchett

Perhaps everything lies in knowing what words to speak, what actions to perform, and in what order and rhythm; or else someone's gaze, answer, gesture is enough; it is enough for someone to do something for the sheer pleasure of doing it, and for his pleasure to become the pleasure of others: at that moment, all spaces change, all heights, distances; the city is transfigured, becomes crystalline, transparent as a dragonfly.

~ Italo Calvino

Art is not, as the metaphysicians say, the manifestation of some mysterious idea of beauty or God; it is not, as the aesthetical physiologists say, a game in which man lets off his excess of stored-up energy; it is not the expression of man's emotions by external signs; it is not the production of pleasing objects; and, above all, it is not pleasure; but it is a means of union among men, joining them together in the same feelings, and indispensable for the life and progress toward well-being of individuals and of humanity.

~ Leo Tolstoy

This is the time for every artist in every genre to do what he or she does loudly and consistently. It doesn't matter to me what your position is. You've got to keep asserting the complexity and the originality of life, and the multiplicity of it, and the facets of it. This is about being a complex human being in the world, not about finding a villain. This is no time for anything else than the best that you've got.

~ Toni Morrison

For me, Art is the restoration of order. It may discuss all sort of terrible things, but there must be satisfaction at the end. A little bit of hunger, but also satisfaction.

~ Toni Morrison

It is through living that we discover ourselves, at the same time as we discover the world around us.

~ Henri Cartier-Bresson

All art is propaganda. It is universally and inescabably propaganda; sometimes unconsciously, but often deliberately, propaganda.

~ Upton Sinclair

I have forced myself to contradict myself in order to avoid conforming to my own taste.

~ Marcel Duchamp

If you don't want a generation of robots, fund the arts!

~ Cath Crowley

Fashion is ephemeral, dangerous and unfair.

~ Karl Lagerfeld

The art of life is not controlling what happens to us, but using what happens to us

~ Gloria Steinem

The great artists of the world are never Puritans, and seldom even ordinarily respectable.

~ H.l. Mencken

Observation is a dying art.

~ Stanley Kubrick

I’ve decided the act that cannot wait / is the important will to create / But, ah, if my belly is ignored / the pantry door I shall implore / But I’ve been known to reach the bed / ideas still famished in my head.

~ Roman Payne

To discover the mode of life or of art whereby my spirit could express itself in unfettered freedom.

~ James Joyce

In the traditional Islamic world, the hierarchy of the arts was not based on whether they were fine or industrial or minor. It was based upon the effect of art on the soul of the human being.

~ Seyyed Hossein Nasr

One thing that struck me early is that you don’t put into a photograph what’s going to come out. Or, vice versa, what comes out is not what you put in.

~ Diane Arbus

Bring together things that have not yet been brought together and did not seem predisposed to be so.

~ Robert Bresson

The term bohemian has a bad reputation because it's allied to myriad clichés, but Parisians originally adopted the term, associated with nomadic Gypsies, to describe artists and writers who stayed up all night and ignored the pressures of the industrial world.

~ Sarah Thornton

If London is a watercolor, New York is an oil painting.

~ Peter Shaffer

Maybe you are a poet and a dreamer, but don't you realize that those two species are extinct now?

~ J.g. Ballard

Art is communication.

~ Madeleine L'engle

Not all are called to be artists in the specific sense of the term. Yet, as Genesis has it, all men and women are entrusted with the task of crafting their own life: in a certain sense, they are to make of it a work of art, a masterpiece.

~ John Paul Ii

It is really a matter of ending this silence and solitude, of breathing and stretching one's arms again.

~ Mark Rothko

But then, that’s the beauty of writing stories—each one is an exploratory journey in search of a reason and a shape. And when you find that reason and that shape, there’s no feeling lik

~ T.c. Boyle

A work of art which did not begin in emotion is not art.

~ Paul Cézanne

Serious art is born from serious play.

~ Julia Cameron

The individual, man as a man, man as a brain, if you like, interests me more than what he makes, because I've noticed that most artists only repeat themselves.

~ Marcel Duchamp