Art Quotes

Art is sanctioned pornography

~ Stewart Home

It is the form that allows a writer the greatest opportunity to explore human experience...For that reason, reading a novel is potentially a significant act. Because there are so many varieties of human experience, so many kinds of interaction between humans, and so many ways of creating patterns in the novel that can’t be created in a short story, a play, a poem or a movie. The novel, simply, offers more opportunities for a reader to understand the world better, including the world of artistic creation. That sounds pretty grand, but I think it’s true.

~ Don Delillo

Perfection seems sterile; it is final, no mystery in it; it's a product of an assembly line.

~ Dejan Stojanovic

...What I depend on is a vigorous audience that can discover sweetness and light, beauty and truth, beyond the ability of the artist, on his own, to create them.

~ Orson Scott Card

Language has time as its element, all other media have space as their element.

~ Søren Kierkegaard

From recovery to rags and rags to recovery symbolizes art - a perfect compilation of human imperfections.

~ Criss Jami

If there’s a thing, a scene, maybe, an image that you want to see real bad, that you need to see but it doesn’t exist in the world around you, at least not in the form that you envision, then you create it so that you can look at it and have it around, or show it to other people who wouldn’t have imagined it because they perceive reality in a more narrow, predictable way. And that’s it. That’s all an artist does.

~ Tom Robbins

That's the beauty of art--we strive for perfection but never achieve it. The journey is everything.

~ Rafe Esquith

So. Lie there, my art.

~ William Shakespeare

Color which, like music, is a matter of vibrations, reaches what is most general and therefore most indefinable in nature: its inner power.

~ Paul Gauguin

My father used to say, 'If you want to know the artist, look at the art'. He was usually talking about Stanley Matthews or Don Bradman when he said it.

~ David Peace

Modern art has to be what is called ‘intense.’ it is not easy to define being intense; but, roughly speaking, it means saying only one thing at a time, and saying it wrong.

~ G.k. Chesterton

All the products of one period have something in common; the artists who illustrate the poetry of their generation are the same artists who are employed by the big financial houses. And nothing reminds me so much of the monthly parts of Notre-Dame de Paris, and of various books by Gérard de Nerval, that used to hang outside the grocer's door at Combray, than does, in its rectangular and flowery border, supported by recumbent river-gods, a 'personal share' in the Water Company.

~ Marcel Proust

There is something about the act of studying an unclothed body, as an artist does, that allows a person to appreciate it as pure form, regardless of the kinds of traits traditionally regarded as imperfections. In a figure drawing class, an obese woman's folds of flesh take on a kind of beauty. You can look at a man's shrunken chest or legs or buttocks with tenderness. Age is not ugly, just poignant.

~ Joyce Maynard

Life itself has lost its plane reality: it is projected, not along the old fixed points, but along the dynamic coordinates of Einstein, of revolution. In this new projection, the best-known formulas and objects become displaced, fantastic, familiar-unfamiliar. This is why it is so logical for literature today to be drawn to the fantastic plot, or to the amalgam of reality and fantasy. (The New Russian Prose)

~ Yevgeny Zamyatin

Art teaches something we all need to learn, especially about people who are different from ourselves: To see things the way they truly are, sometimes you have to look more deeply.

~ Ron Hall

Art was the very antithesis of crass moralism.

~ Alain De Botton

Art is creative for the sake of realization, not for amusement: for transfiguration, not for the sake of play. It is the quest of our self that drives us along the eternal and never-ending journey we must all make.

~ Max Beckmann

Wonderful art can spring from misery,I'm the last person to deny that.I'd go even further:the best works of art of all time are probably stemmed from the deep human sorrow or hellish frustration,the death of a loved one or a divorce and yes:jealousy.Heartache and impotence as the man-spring for making the unverifiable verifiable and for giving it face.How romantic,beautiful and especially useful pain and misery can be.

~ Esther Verhoef

Life itself is an art form.

~ Tyree Guyton

What does one prefer? An art that struggles to change the social contract, but fails? Or one that seeks to please and amuse, and succeeds?

~ Robert Hughes

A deliberate plan is not always necessary for the highest art, it emerges.

~ Paul Johnson

Without enthusiasm nothing great can be effected in art.

~ Robert Schumann

The flow. Yeah. Knowing you could step on the court and make it happen. You practiced, sure. But then, when you walked out there, you could just go. You could flow, that was it: you created and you didn't totally know how. You just knew you could, so you did. It wasn't thinking and it wasn't imitating somebody else's moves, though you always looked carefully when you watched good players play. But when you played... it was something you couldn't explain. Neal used to know. It didn't come from thinking about it.

~ Doug Wilhelm

I spent an hour looking at pots and carpets in the museums the other day, until the desire to describe them became like the desire for the lusts of the flesh.

~ Virginia Woolf

Color is the keyboard, the eyes are the harmonies, the soul is the piano with many strings. The artist is the hand that plays, touching one key or another, to cause vibrations in the soul.

~ Wassilly Kandinsky

But nobody is visually naive any longer. We are cluttered with images, and only abstract art can bring us to the threshold of the divine.

~ Dominique De Menil

We must change life,' the poet [Rimbaud] had written, and so the Situationists set out to transform everyday life in the modern world through a comprehensive program that included above all else the construction of 'situations' -- defined in 1958 as moments of life 'concretely and deliberately constructed by the collective organization of a unitary ambiance and a play of events' -- but that also necessary entailed the supersession of philosophy, the realization of art, the abolition of politics, and the fall of the 'spectacle-commodity economy.

~ Tom Mcdonough

There's no retirement for an artist, it's your way of living so there's no end to it.

~ Henry Moore

One picks one's way about through the glass and aluminum doors, the receptionists' smiles, the lunches with too much alcohol, the openings with more, the mobs of people desperately trying to define good taste in such loud voices one can hardly hear oneself giggle, while the shebang is lit by flashes and flares through the paint-stained window, glimmers under the police-locked door, or, if one is taking a rare walk outside that day, by a light suffusing the whole sky, complex as the northern aurora.

~ Samuel R. Delany

The truth is, anyone who puts so much of herself and her life into art as you do must naturally fear any failure in that art as a potential threat to your life. And so you protect your art more than you protect your health or the common forms of happiness the rest of us have. And you probably have this in common with every artist you admire.

~ Arthur Phillips

Talent consists not in inventing shapes but in causing those that were invisible to emerge.

~ Muriel Barbery

The snapshots in CHINA: Portrait of a People are not meant to be works of art. I was too preoccupied with participating, with reveling in the moment, to worry about their perfection. Their purpose, then, is to form a candid portrait of China exactly as China presented itself to me.

~ Tom Carter

The closer and more completely you can come to explaining what a work of art means, the less like art it seems.

~ Laura Miller

A metamorphosis... The shining butterfly of the soul from the pupa of the body. Larva, pupa, imago. An image of art.

~ A.s. Byatt

He has no talent at all, that boy! You, who are his friend, tell him, please, to give up painting.–--Manet to Monet, on Renoir---

~ Edouard Manet

If an artist wants to use his mind for creative work, cutting oneself off from society is a necessary thing

~ Glenn Gould

Art is affirmation.

~ N. Scott Momaday

A storyteller who provided us with such a profusion of details would rapidly grow maddening. Unfortunately, life itself often subscribes to this mode of storytelling, wearing us out with repetition, misleading emphases and inconsequential plot lines. It insists on showing us Bardak Electronics, the saftey handle in the car, a stray dog, a Christmas card and a fly that lands first on the rim and then in the centre of the ashtray.Which explains how the curious phenomenon whereby valuable elements may be easier to experience in art and in anticipation than in reality. The anticipatory and artistic imaginations omit and compress; they cut away the periods of boredom and direct our attention to critical moments, and thus, without either lying or embellishing, they lend to life a vividness and a coherence that it may lack in the distracting wooliness of the present.

~ Alain De Botton

Art isn't a product. It's an experience

~ Lori Lansens