Art Quotes

To my mind, a picture should be something pleasant, cheerful, and pretty, yes pretty! There are too many unpleasant things in life as it is without creating still more of them.

~ Pierre-Auguste Renoir

A study in scarlet, eh? Why shouldn't we use a little art jargon? There's the scarlet thread of murder running through the colourless skein of life, and our duty is to unravel it, and isolate it, and expose every inch of it.

~ Arthur Conan Doyle

An artist is like a woman who can do nothing but love, and who succumbs to every stray male jackass.

~ Heinrich Böll

After all, what is art? Art is the creative process and it goes through all fields. Einstein’s theory of relativity – now that is a work of art! Einstein was more of an artist in physics than on his violin.Art is this: art is the solution of a problem which cannot be expressed explicitly until it is solved.

~ Piet Hein

Do you know that every great thing in the history of art and every beautiful thing in life is actually what you call nasty or has been caused by feelings that you would call nasty? By passion, by love, by hatred, by truth. Do you know that?

~ John Fowles

And I bet it's harder than people think, isn't it? Everything looks so simple from a distance. Then, the more you look, the more you see. And that's when you have to rise to the challenge.

~ Laura Pritchett

We're artists too, but we do a good job hiding it, don't we?

~ Roberto Bolaño

Find your authentic voice, become vulnerable, and then put yourself out there.

~ Meredith Brooks

... an artist is a person first. He is an individual. If there is no person, there is no artist.

~ Chaim Potok

But the very question of whether photography is or is not an art is essentially a misleading one. Although photography generates works that can be called art --it requires subjectivity, it can lie, it gives aesthetic pleasure-- photography is not, to begin with, an art form at all. Like language, it is a medium in which works of art (among other things) are made. Out of language, one can make scientific discourse, bureaucratic memoranda, love letters, grocery lists, and Balzac's Paris. Out of photography, one can make passport pictures, weather photographs, pornographic pictures, X-rays, wedding pictures, and Atget's Paris. Photography is not an art like, say, painting and poetry. Although the activities of some photographers conform to the traditional notion of a fine art, the activity of exceptionally talented individuals producing discrete objects that have value in themselves, form the beginning photography has also lent itself to that notion of art which says that art is obsolete. The power of photography --and its centrality in present aesthetic concerns-- is that it confirms both ideas of art. But the way in which photography renders art obsolete is, in the long run, stronger.

~ Susan Sontag

The task of a philosophy of photography is to reflect upon this possibility of freedom - and thus its significance - in a world dominated by apparatuses; to reflect upon the way in which, despite everything, it is possible for human beings to give significance to their lives in the face of the chance necessity of death. Such a philosophy is necessary because it is the only form of revolution left open to us.

~ Vilém Flusser

We don't need more museums that try to construct the historical narratives of a society, community, team, nation, state, tribe, company, or species. We all know that the ordinary, everyday stories of individuals are riches, more humane, and much more joyful.

~ Orhan Pamuk

There are no vital and significant forms of art; there is only art, and precious little of that.

~ Raymond Chandler

I know the empathy borne of despair; I know the fluidity of thought, the expansive, even beautiful, mind that hypomania brings, and I know this is quicksilver and precious and often it's poison. There has always existed a sort of psychic butcher who works the scales of transcendence, who weighs out the bloody cost of true art.

~ David Lovelace

I'm often painted as the bad guy, and the artistic part of me wants to hand out the brush.

~ Criss Jami

Drawing is what you see of the world, truly see...And sometimes what you see is so deep in your head you're not even sure of what you're seeing. But when it's down there on paper, and you look at it, really look, you'll see the way things are...that's the world, isn't it? You have to keep looking to find the truth.

~ Patricia Reilly Giff

More of me comes out when I improvise.

~ Edward Hopper

God and other artists are always a little obscure.....

~ Oscar Wilde

The only interesting ideas are heresies

~ Susan Sontag

Art is a person's private vision expressed in aesthetic forms.

~ Chaim Potok

I abhor the supreme folly of those who blame the disciples of nature in defiance of those masters who were themselves her pupils

~ Leonardo Da Vinci

The world, every day, is New. Only for those born in, say, 1870 or so, can there be a meaningful use of the term postmodernism, because for the rest of us we are born and we see and from what we see and digest we remake our world. And to understand it we do not need to label it, categorize it. These labels are slothful and dismissive, and so contradict what we already know about the world, and our daily lives. We know that in each day, we laugh, and we are serious. We do both, in the same day, every day. But in our art we expect clear distinction between the two...But we don't label our days Serious Days or Humorous Days. We know that each day contains endless nuances - if written would contain dozens of disparate passages, funny ones, sad ones, poignant ones, brutal ones, the terrifying and the cuddly. But we are often loathe to allow this in our art. And that is too bad...

~ Dave Eggers

If there is on earth, and among all these things of nothing, a belief worthy of adoration, if there is anything holy, pure and sublime, anything answering that immoderate desire for the infinite and the vague that we call the soul, it is art.

~ Gustave Flaubert

Of course they won't bloody remember, they'll be dead.' Then she called him a name in a dead language that translated, roughly, to 'poop on a stick,' but sounded more succinct, like this: 'Of course they won't bloody remember, they'll be dead, Poopstick.

~ Christopher Moore

I feel like I'm in a film about a struggling artist who keeps getting up at all hours of the night to look at his big, blank empty canvas. And in a way I am. Except that i'm not struggling. I'm Hector Kipling. I might be getting up at all hours of the night to look at my big, blank, empty canvas, but I am not fucking struggling.

~ David Thewlis

I say that good painters imitated nature, but that bad ones vomited it.

~ Miguel De Cervantes Saavedra

I regard the theatre as the greatest of all art forms, the most immediate way in which a human being can share with another the sense of what it is to be a human being.

~ Oscar Wilde

every portrait that is painted with feeling is a portrait of the artist, not of the sitter. The sitter is merely the accident, the occasion. It is not he who is revealed by the painter; it is rather the painter who, on the coloured canvas, reveals himself.

~ Oscar Wilde

Art always serves beauty, and beauty is the joy of possessing form, and form is the key to organic life since no living thing can exist without it.

~ Boris Pasternak

Dancing is surely the most basic and relevant of all forms of expression. Nothing else can so effectively give outward form to an inner experience. Poetry and music exist in time. Painting and architecture are a part of space. But only the dance lives at once in both space and time. In it the creator and the thing created, the artist and the expression, are one. Each participates completely in the other. There could be no better metaphor for an understanding of the mechanics of the cosmos.

~ Lyall Watson

The critic has to educate the public, the artist has to educate the critic.

~ Oscar Wilde

You have to be willing to spend time making things for no known reason.

~ Lynda Barry

This, then, is the ultimate, that is only, consolation: simply that someone shares some of your own feelings and has made of these a work of art which you have the insight, sensitivity, and — like it or not — peculiar set of experiences to appreciate. Amazing thing to say, the consolation of horror in art is that it actually intensifies our panic, loudens it on the sounding-board of our horror-hollowed hearts, turns terror up full blast, all the while reaching for that perfect and deafening amplitude at which we may dance to the bizarre music of our own misery.

~ Thomas Ligotti

What has our culture lost in 1980 that the avant-garde had in 1890? Ebullience, idealism, confidence, the belief that there was plenty of territory to explore, and above all the sense that art, in the most disinterested and noble way, could find the necessary metaphors by which a radically changing culture could be explained to its inhabitants.

~ Robert Hughes

When we did art with the kids, the demons would lie down.

~ Anne Lamott

No amount of skillful invention can replace the essential element of imagination.

~ Edward Hopper

The lonesome and desperate kids out there, that pain will translate to magic perhaps.

~ Tenacious D

Anyone can put paint on a canvas, but only a true master can bring the painting to life. Anyone can kill, but only a genius can make murder an art.

~ Shaun Jeffrey

There's a very fine line between being artistic and being a dickhead - it's like love and hate.

~ Peter Hook

Art goes into the world unarmed, vulnerable to every quirk of fate, and it must survive only by its power to move men not to destroy it.

~ Chelsea Quinn Yarbro