Art Quotes

Complexity is not an aesthetic criterion. It is a quality associated only with division and organization of labor.

~ Christopher Caudwell

Success or Failure, there should always be a Drive to Keep on Creating.

~ Henry Johnson Jr

Like creating a masterpiece, quitting is an art: you have to decide what to keep within the frame and what to keep out.

~ Richie Norton

At the end of his life, which had included financial ruin in the Great Depression, his wife's barbiturate addiction and death by overdose, and then his own lung cancer, Doc said, It was enough to have been a unicorn. What he meant was that he got to do art. It was magic to him that his hands and mind got to make wonderful things, that he didn't have to be just another goat or horse.

~ Mark Vonnegut

It was amazing how many colors there were, all running into the gutter in a stream: a dozen shades of blue, twenty different reds, and all that black soot, like a nightmare given form, the insides of a heart, destroyed so easily, done away with before anyone could stop the damage, or salvage what was lost, or even try to save him.

~ Alice Hoffman

...We lost our faith and went around wondering what life was for. If art was no more than a frustrated out-flinging of desire, if religion was no more than self-delusion, what good was life? Faith had always given us answers to all things. But it all went down the drain with Freud and Darwin. We were and still are a lost people.

~ Ray Bradbury

We are sorry about the way things turned out. We gave, in the phrasing of our words if not literally in the words themselves, the false impression that these pages might hold some small fragment, some slight fragrance of a greater truth. That there might be something here to be learned. Before we go any further the author of this cartoon wishes to make an apology. Such an impression was deliberately cultivated. It is a ruse. It is a lie. We are every bit as lost and afraid as children abandoned in a wood: every bit as lost as you.

~ Anders Nilsen

Me: All right, but you said we had to put emotion into our art. I don't know what that means. I don't know what I'm supposed to feel.

~ Laurie Halse Anderson

My personal philosophy is that you do art to experience emotion that you don't have the luxury of experiencing in real life.

~ Kinan Azmeh

Emotion resulting from a work of art is only of value when it is not obtained by sentimental blackmail.

~ Jean Cocteau

The emotion of art is impersonal. And the poet cannot reach this impersonality without surrendering himself wholly to the work to be done. And he is not likely to know what is to be done unless he lives in what is not merely the present, but the present moment of the past, unless he is conscious, not of what is dead, but of what is already living.

~ T.s. Eliot

Painting is a great outlet for those inner emotions you cannot get out any other way.

~ Carol Brearley

The brush must draw by itself. This cannot happen if one does not practice constantly. But neither can it happen if one makes an effort.

~ Alan W. Watts

Mountains should be climbed with as little effort as possible and without desire. The reality of your own nature should determine the speed. If you become restless, speed up. If you become winded, slow down. You climb the mountain in an equilibrium between restlessness and exhaustion.

~ Robert M. Pirsig

This, then, is what counts: a lightning reaction which has no further need of conscious observation. In this respect at least the pupil makes himself independent of all conscious purpose.

~ Eugen Herrigel

I think we ought to find something else to do,” said Mandy. “But Alecto my love, you’re the first person to notice my retro diner kitchen. When my parents saw it, they thought I was creating a weird art project.”“I like it. It's got that let’s-drown-ourselves-in-better-days type ambiance,” Alecto declared, his gray eyes narrowed.

~ Rebecca Mcnutt

The big secret about Art is that no one wants it to be true.

~ Adam Phillips

Trying to be offensive for the sole purpose of being offensive should always deem one the least offensive of offenders.

~ Criss Jami

As a mother you have thoughts. You get interrupted. You forget.You are distracted. Your thoughts and ideas become fragmented,diluted, or simply evaporate. You must have faith that you willagain have a thought. Creativity is the string uponwhich you hang the pearls of your identity,your authentic presence.—Suzi Banks Baum

~ Suzi Banks Baum

The artist and the mother are vehicles, not originators. They don't create the new life, they only bear it. This is why birth is such a humbling experience. The new mom weeps in awe at the little miracle in her arms. She knows it came out of her but not from her, through her but not of her.

~ Steven Pressfield

Men have firm beautiful bodies with cut muscles. But the curves and gentleness of a woman’s body is beyond a words measure, with their dazzling rawness it’s impossible to perfect but I crave the need to depict such a fathomless beauty.

~ S.k. Logsdon

Yes, but the artist? said Nigel almost fiercely. He's different, you know he is. He's driven by some compulsion: if he can't do what he knows he has to do with his life he might as well be dead. He's got to break through the world's indifference, or else break himself against it. He can't help it.

~ Mary Stewart

An artist is a person first.

~ Chaim Potok

The art of biography is more difficult than is generally supposed.

~ Thornton Wilder

He said, it's rather like your voice. You put up with your voice and speak with it because you haven't any choice. But it's what you say that counts. It's what distinguishes all great art from the other kind.

~ John Fowles

The life of sensation is the life of greed, it requires more and more. The life of the spirit requires less and less, time is ample and its passage sweet.

~ Annie Dillard

The most demanding part of living a lifetime as an artist is the strict discipline of forcing oneself to work steadfastly along the nerve of one’s own most intimate sensitivity.

~ Annie Dillard

Visual and performing artists produce art that lives in the present world. The art of the writer exists in another dimension. Through strings of words and phrases writers inspire their readers to imagine, to conjure images, to suspend disbelief, to enter a world visible only in their minds. It is in that unseen world where the art of the writer lives.

~ Mindie Burgoyne

Fear is good. Like self-doubt, fear is an indicator. Fear tells us what we have to do. Remember our rule of thumb: The more scared we are of a work or calling, the more sure we can be that we have to do it. Resistance is experienced as fear; the degree of fear equates to the strength of Resistance. Therefore the more fear we feel about a specific enterprise, the more certain we can be that that enterprise is important to us and to the growth of our soul. That's why we feel so much Resistance. If it meant nothing to us, there'd be no Resistance.

~ Steven Pressfield

Entrepreneurship is an art, you do it because you love it.

~ Farshad Asl

He disregarded everything, he gave everything to art. He tirelessly visited galleries, spent whole hours standing before the works of great masters, grasped and pursued a wondrous brush. He never finished anything without testing himself several times by these great teachers and reading wordless but eloquent advice for himself in their paintings.

~ Nikolai Gogol

His whole being, his whole life was awakened in one instant, as if youth returned to him, as if the extinguished sparks of talent blazed up again. The blindfold suddenly fell from his eyes. God! to ruin the best years of his youth so mercilessly; to destroy, to extinguish the spark of fire that had perhaps flickered in his breast, that perhaps would have developed by now into greatness and beauty, that perhaps would also have elicited tears of amazement and gratitude!

~ Nikolai Gogol

I want constructive energy generated by every brushstroke and between every line.

~ Siren Waroe

Her life was like a burst of wild, flowing Chinese calligraphy, written under the influence of alcohol.

~ Zhou Weihui

I watched the surrounding landscape with great curiosity, and I wanted to discover the words that could describe all its unspoiled beauty.

~ Daniel J. Rice

In a way, her strangeness, her naivete, her craving for the other half of her equation was the consequence of idle imagination. Had she paints, or clay, or knew the discipline of the dance, or strings; had she anything to engage her tremendous curiosity and her gift for metaphor, she might have exchanged the restlessness and preoccupation with whim for an activity that provided her with all she yearned for. And like any artist with no art from, she became dangerous.

~ Toni Morrison

Yet I am incapable of writing the only kind of novel which interests me: a book powered with an intellectual or moral passion strong enough to create order, to create a new way of looking at life. It is because I am too diffused. I have decided never to write another novel. I have fifty 'subjects' I could write about; and they would be competent enough. If there is one thing we can be sure of, it is that competent and informative novels will continue to pour from the publishing houses. I have only one, and the least important, of the qualities necessary to write at all, and that is curiosity. It is the curiosity of the journalist.

~ Doris Lessing

Little decisions over time make a big impact on our lives.

~ Eric Samuel Timm

Rather than feeling that every moment you’ve got to exert this enormous control, you can take the attitude that your job as a writer is not to control everything, but to set things in motion.

~ Stuart Dybek

There’s a difference between the ‘art’ of writing and the ‘craft’ of writing. Art is subjective, its beauty lies in the eyes of the beholder, but craft is objective. There is a right way and a wrong way to craft.

~ Gerard De Marigny