Art Quotes

Art does not reproduce what we see. It makes us see.

~ Paul Klee

We need our Arts to teach us how to breathe

~ Ray Bradbury

I am an obscure and patient pearl-fisherman who dives into the deepest waters and comes up with empty hands and a blue face. Some fatal attraction draws me down into the abysses of thought, down into those innermost recesses which never cease to fascinate the strong. I shall spend my life gazing at the ocean of art, where others voyage or fight; and from time to time I’ll entertain myself by diving for those green and yellow shells that nobody will want. So I shall keep them for myself and cover the walls of my hut with them.

~ Gustave Flaubert

Art transcends its limitations only by staying within them.

~ Flannery O'connor

If you can sustain your interest in what you’re doing, you’re an extremely fortunate person. What you see very frequently in people’s professional lives, and perhaps in their emotional life as well, is that they lose interest in the third act. You sort of get tired, and indifferent, and, sometimes, defensive. And you kind of lose your capacity for astonishment — and that’s a great loss, because the world is a very astonishing place. What I feel fortunate about is that I’m still astonished, that things still amaze me. And I think that that’s the great benefit of being in the arts, where the possibility for learning never disappears, where you basically have to admit you never learn it.

~ Milton Glaser

...The efficacy of psychedelics with regard to art has to do with their ability to render language weightless, as fluid and ephemeral as those famous bubble letters of the sixties. Psychedelics, I think, disconnect both the signifier and the signified from their purported referents in the phenomenal world - simultaneously bestowing upon us a visceral insight into the cultural mechanics of language, and a terrifying inference of the tumultuous nature that swirls beyond it. In my own experience, it always seemed as if language were a tablecloth positioned neatly upon the table until some celestial busboy suddenly shook it out, fluttering and floating it, and letting it fall back upon the world in not quite the same position as before - thereby giving me a vertiginous glimpse into the abyss that divides the world from our knowing of it. And it is into this abyss that the horror vacui of psychedelic art deploys itself like an incandescent bridge. Because it is one thing to believe, on theoretical evidence, that we live in a prison-house of language. It is quite another to know it, to actually peek into the slippery emptiness as the Bastille explodes around you. Yet psychedelic art takes this apparent occasion for despair and celebrates our escape from linguistic control by flowing out, filling that rippling void with meaningful light, laughter, and a gorgeous profusion.

~ Dave Hickey

Grey has no agenda. . . . Grey has the ability, that no other colour has, to make the invisible visible.

~ Roma Tearne

Remember, light and shadow never stand still.

~ Benjamin West

Don't make it new, make it whole.

~ Alex Ross

The need to be a great artist makes it hard to be an artist. The need to produce a great work of art makes it hard to produce any art at all.

~ Julia Cameron

Art isn't meaningless... It is in itself. It isn't in that it tries to make life less so.

~ F. Scott Fitzgerald

Perhaps it's good for one to suffer. Can an artist do anything if he's happy? Would he ever want to do anything? What is art, after all, but a protest against the horrible inclemency of life?

~ Aldous Huxley

The basic project of art is always to make the world whole and comprehensible, to restore it to us in all its glory and its occasional nastiness, not through argument but through feeling, and then to close the gap between you and everything that is not you, and in this way pass from feeling to meaning. It's not something that committees can do. It's not a task achieved by groups or by movements. It's done by individuals, each person mediating in some way between a sense of history and an experience of the world.

~ Robert Hughes

Glitter is the herpes of craft supplies.

~ Demetri Martin

In a world of lies and liars, an honest work of art is always an act of social responsibility.

~ Robert Mckee

Innovation is an evolutionary process, so it's not necessary to be radical all the time.

~ Marc Jacobs

Photography is essentially an act of recognition by street photographers, not an act of invention. Photographers might respond to an old man’s face, or an Arbus freak, or the way light hits a building—and then they move on. Whereas in all the other art forms, take William Blake, everything that came to that paper never existed before. It’s the idea of alchemy, of making something from nothing.

~ Duane Michals

We are not being true to the artist as a man if we consider his art work junk simply because we differ with his outlook on life. Christian schools, Christian parents, and Christian pastors often have turned off young people at just this point. Because the schools, the pastors, and the parents did not make a distinction between technical excellence and content, the whole of much great art has been rejected with scorn and ridicule. Instead, if the artist's technical excellence is high, he is to be praised for this, even if we differ with his world view. Man must be treated fairly as man.

~ Francis A. Schaeffer

As an artist you organize your life so that you get a chance to paint, a window of time, but that's no guarantee you'll create anything worth all your effort. You're always haunt by the idea you're wasting your life.

~ Chuck Palahniuk

Art is partly communication, but only partly. The rest is discovery.

~ William Golding

The Painting is not shit,' said Lucien.'I know,' said Henri. 'That was just part of the subterfuge. I am of royal lineage; subterfuge is one of the many talents we carry in our blood, along with guile and hemophilia.

~ Christopher Moore

The artist committing himself to his calling has volunteered for hell, whether he knows it or not. He will be dining for the duration on a diet of isolation, rejection, self-doubt, despair, ridicule, contempt, and humiliation.

~ Steven Pressfield

The same sensitivity that opens artists to Being also makes them vulnerable to the dark powers of non-Being. It is no accident that many creative people--including Dante, Pascal, Goethe, Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, Beethoven, Rilke, Blake, and Van Gogh--struggled with depression, anxiety, and despair. They paid a heavy price to wrest their gifts from the clutches of non-Being. But this is what true artists do: they make their own frayed lives the cable for the surges of power generated in the creative force fields of Being and non-Being. (Beyond Religion, p. 124)

~ David N. Elkins

Art is something you choose to make... it's a bringing together of... of everything around you into something that makes you more human, more khepri, whatever. More of a person.

~ China Miéville

Without atmosphere a painting is nothing.

~ Rembrandt

Any great art work … revives and readapts time and space, and the measure of its success is the extent to which it makes you an inhabitant of that world - the extent to which it invites you in and lets you breathe its strange, special air.

~ Leonard Bernstein

The artist is a collector of things imaginary or real. He accumulates things with the same enthusiasm that a little boy stuffs his pockets. The scrap heap and the museum are embraced with equal curiosity. He takes snapshots, makes notes and records impressions on tablecloths or newspapers, on backs of envelopes or matchbooks. Why one thing and not another is part of the mystery, but he is omnivorous.

~ Paul Rand

It is only in his work that an artist can find reality and satisfaction, for the actual world is less intense than the world of his invention and consequently his life, without recourse to violent disorder, does not seem very substantial. The right condition for him is that in which his work in not only convenient but unavoidable.

~ Tennessee Williams

The urge is always with me to retouch yesterday's canvas with today's paintbrush and cover the things that fill me with regret..

~ Andrew Davidson

The best art always comes unbidden.

~ Christopher Pike

But an artist, he realized. Or rather so-called artist. Bohemian. That's closer to it. The artistic life without the talent.

~ Philip K. Dick

I believe in walking out of a museum before the paintings you've seen begin to run together. How else can you carry anything away with you in your mind's eye?

~ Elizabeth Kostova

Sometimes an artist's first invention is herself.

~ Stephanie Vaughn

There’s something about being naïve. Really interesting things come because you don’t know what the rules are, what you can and can’t do.

~ Steve Buscemi

She soon learned, though, that giving weight to other people's opinions was creative nihilism; it was like being banished from the Land of No Words and exiled to the Land of All Bullshit.

~ Stephanie Kallos

He realised, more vividly than ever before, that art had two constant, two unending preoccupations: it is always meditating upon death and it is always thereby creating life.

~ Boris Pasternak

That's creativity in a nutshell. A messy tug-of-war with imagination to erase that feeling that nothing really matters anyway.

~ Zoe Whittall

At eight, he had once told his mother that he wanted to paint air.

~ Vladimir Nabokov

The sculpture is already complete within the marble block, before I start my work. It is already there, I just have to chisel away the superfluous material.

~ Michelangelo Buonarroti

The artist is always beginning. Any work of art which is not a beginning, an invention, a discovery is of little worth.

~ Ezra Pound