Art Quotes

A composition—and every work of art is one—is created in a wondrous interplay between imagination and reason, or between mind and reflection. For there will always be an element of chance in the creative process.

~ Jostein Gaarder

Where there is a true art and genuine virtuosity the artist can paint an incomparable masterpiece without leaving even a trace of his identity.

~ Orhan Pamuk

I will admit that I wanted to shout for standing on the top of a scaffold in front of a good new wall always goes to my head. It is a sensation something between that of an angel let out of his cage into a new sky and a drunkard turned loose in a royal cellar.And after all, what nobler elevation could you find in this world than the scaffold of a wall painter? No admiral on the bridge of a new battleship designed by the old navy, could feel more pleased with himself than Gulley, on two planks, forty feet above dirt level, with his palette table beside him, his brush in his hand, and the draught blowing up his trousers; cleared for action.

~ Joyce Cary

In short, it became possible - never easy, but possible - in the poet Auden's phrase to find the mortal world enough.

~ Stephen Greenblatt

B-but, Mr Jimson, I w-want to be an artist.''Of course you do,' I said, 'everybody does once. But they get over it, thank God, like the measles and the chickenpox. Go home and go to bed and take some hot lemonade and put on three blankets and sweat it out.''But Mr J-Jimson, there must be artists.''Yes, and lunatics and lepers, but why go and live in an asylum before you're sent for? If you find life a bit dull at home,' I said, 'and want to amuse yourself, put a stick of dynamite in the kitchen fire, or shoot a policeman. Volunteer for a test pilot, or dive off Tower Bridge with five bob's worth of roman candles in each pocket. You'd get twice the fun at about one-tenth of the risk.

~ Joyce Cary

Goya’s savage verve, his harsh, brutal genius, captivated Des Esseintes. On the other hand, the universal admiration his works had won rather put him off, and for years he had refrained from framing them, for fear that if he hung them up, the first idiot who saw them would might feel obliged to dishonour them with a few inanities and go into stereotyped ecstasies over them.

~ Joris-Karl Huysmans

The stratagems by which briefly youameliorated, even seeminglyuntwisted what still twists within you —you loved their taste and lay thereon your sidenursing like a puppy.

~ Frank Bidart

All life is death. You don't fool yourself about this anymore. You slash at the perfect canvas with strokes of paint and replace the perfect picture of your imagination with the reality of what you are capable of. From death, and sorrow, and compromise, you create. This is what it means, you finally realize, to be alive. (The Chambered Fruit)

~ M. Rickert

Art must always stand guard against stirring emotions that lie outside the aesthetic: sexual arousal, terror, disgust, shock.

~ Milan Kundera

Protect art. It is the antidote to the innate barbarism of the human race.

~ Peter Adolphsen

...I thought, with a certain amount of sorrow, how much enormous talent there must be in the world for nature simply to toss it away so arbitrarily! But nature could not care less what we think about it, and as far as talent is concerned, there is such an excess that our artists will soon become their own audiences, and audiences made up of ordinary people will no longer exist.

~ Hermann Hesse

As far as he could see, the drawings were simply alive. They might be colored earth on rock, but they were as alive as the kangaroo that'd just hopped away.

~ Terry Pratchett

The riders, clad in crimson and black, stopped to scan the maze. Blaise shrank into the hedge, but one keen-eyed hunter spied him. He raised his crossbow, took careful aim and fired.

~ Teresa Flavin

Life is very nice, but it has no shape. The object of art is actually to give it some ... Jean Anouilh, The Rehearsal

~ Kate Taylor

Indeed, the future is signalled in the past, but time has to pass to see it. Art is the witness.BLOG post-Perpetual Beginning-November 14 2011

~ Kathryn Brimblecombe-Fox

Design is not really a way for me to express myself. Design is a product that we produce for a client.

~ Peleg Top

Because that’s what a comic is, ultimately: a collection of pages. It’s not a flatpanel or a touchscreen, even though that’s where it might eventually be displayed. It’s a page.

~ John Heffernan

there is no problems, only solutions.

~ Vesa Peltonen

The notion of making money by popular work, and then retiring to do good work, is the most familiar of all the devil's traps for artists.

~ Logan Pearsall Smith

I'm completely aware of Matisse and what he said, that painters must begin by cutting out their tongues.

~ Don Delillo

Degas is one of the very few painters who have given the floor its true importance.

~ Paul Valéry

Dalin must have whiffed the anarch in me, a man with no ties to state or society. Still, he was unable to sense an autonomy that puts up with these forces as objective facts but without recognizing them. What he lacked was a grounding in history.Opposition is collaboration; this was something from which Dalin, without realizing it, could not stay free. Basically, he damaged order less than he confirmed it. The emergence of the anarchic nihilist is like a goad that convinces society of its unity.The anarch, in contrast, not only recognizes society a priori as imperfect, he actually acknowledges it with that limitation. He is more or less repulsed by state and society, yet there are times and places in which the invisible harmony shimmers through the visible harmony. This is obviously chiefly in the work of art. In that case, one serves joyfully.But the anarchic nihilist thinks the exact opposite. The Temple of Artemis, to cite an example, would inspire him to commit arson. The anarch, however, would have no qualms about entering the temple in order to meditate and to participate with an offering. This is possible in any temple worthy of the name.

~ Ernst Jünger

The wood-carver can fashion whatever he will. Yet his products are but toys of the moment, to be glanced at in jest, not fashioned according to any precept or law. When times change, the carver too will change his style and make new trifles to hit the fancy of the passing day. But there is another kind of artist, who sets more soberly about his work, striving to give real beauty to the things which men actually use and to give to them the shape which tradition has ordained. This maker of real things must not for a moment be confused with the maker of idle toys.

~ Murasaki Shikibu

This apparent hurly-burly and disorder turn out, after all, to reproduce real life with its fantastic ways more accurately than the most carefully studied out drama of manners. Every man is in himself all humanity, and if he writes what occurs to him he succeeds better than if he copies, with the help of a magnifying glass, objects placed outside of him.

~ Théophile Gautier

After 1980, you never heard reference to space again. Surface, the most convincing evidence of the descent into materialism, became the focus of design. Space disappeared.

~ Arthur Erickson

However my mother had once said, ‘When you go to art school, you’ll find everybody sitting around practicing how to do their signature'; and sure enough, there they were, some of them doing just that.

~ Richard Williams

Armus: 'No need for interogation if you'd tell me this earlier.'Samarga: 'You wouldn't buy it if I gave it away without squeal.

~ Toba Beta

He had a sense—honed by experience—that what he’d contrived might achieve something of the effect he wanted. That, Martinius had always said, was the best any man in this fallible world could expect. [p. 67]

~ Guy Gavriel Kay

The image titled “The Homeless, Psalm 85:10,” featured on the cover of ELEMENTAL, can evoke multiple levels of response. They may include the spiritual in the form of a studied meditation upon the multidimensional qualities of the painting itself; or an extended contemplation of the scripture in the title, which in the King James Bible reads as follows: “Mercy and truth are met together; righteousness and peace have kissed each other.” The painting can also inspire a physical response in the form of tears as it calls to mind its more earth-bound aspects; namely, the very serious plight of those who truly are homeless in this world, whether born into such a condition, or forced into it by poverty or war.

~ Aberjhani

Painting, it is true, was undergoing a series of -isms reminiscent of the whims of a pregnant woman.

~ M.f.k. Fisher

We live today amid ritualized anithumanisms. Among those intelligent enough to feel despair, some seek salvation in the literary artist. Artists love flattery; and the scam doesn't work without mystifying the process.The weather is unpredictable, but it is not mysterious.Wall Street is unpredictable, but it is not mysterious. Writing is unpredictable, (like street and sky, there are too many variables.) Its mystery vanishes, like a shadow, the moment the light aimed at your characters turns back upon yourself.

~ Doran Larson

But if I am not a criminal, I beg to be permitted to go abroad with my wife temporarily, for at least one year, with the right to return as soon as it becomes possible in our country to serve great ideas in literature without cringing before little men, as soon as there is at least a partial change in the prevailing view concerning the role of the literary artist. (“Letter To Stalin”)

~ Yevgeny Zamyatin

What we need in literature today are vast philosophic horizons; we need the most ultimate, the most fearsome, the most fearless 'Why?' and 'What next?'(Literature, Revolution, and Entropy)

~ Yevgeny Zamyatin

The scientific spirit, the contempt of tradition, the lack of discipline and the exaltation of the individual have very nearly made an end of art. It can only be restored by the love of beauty, the reverence for tradition, the submission to discipline and the rigor of self-control.

~ Kenyon Cox

The market follows the artist. The artist does not follow the market.

~ Iimani David

Some centuries ago they had Raphael and Michael Angelo; now we have Mr. Paul Delaroche, and all because we are progre

~ Théophile Gautier

I set about seeking a thread, a theme, a style, in the realm of legend. Something that might allow me to give free rein to my juvenile sense of romanticism and the beautiful image.

~ Leni Riefenstahl

A gypsy girl approached Don Zana and Alfanhui and held out her tambourine. Don Zana said to her, 'You don't pay for art, kid.

~ Rafael Sánchez Ferlosio

In the Somme valley, the back of language broke. It could no longer carry its former meanings. World War I changed the life of words and images in art, radically and forever. It brought our culture into the age of mass-produced, industrialized death. This, at first, was indescribable.

~ Robert Hughes

Men and women who are lonely create. Those who are gregarious rarely do... Any poet would rather bed with a girl than write a poem about her. All art is the result of frustration. Art is energy deflected from its normal course in action.

~ Burton Rascoe