Artist Quotes

We must grant the artist his subject his idea his donnee: Our criticisms apply only to what he makes of it.

~ Henry James

When they asked Michelangelo how he made his statue of David he is reported to have said It is easy. You just chip away the stone that doesn't look like David.

~ Michelangelo

Works of Art are of an infinite loneliness.

~ Rainer Maria Rilke

Art is I science is we.

~ Claude Bernard

The artist like the God of the creation remains within or behind or beyond or above his handiwork invisible refined out of existence indifferent paring his fingernails.

~ James Joyce

Designers and free lance artists and editors can set their hourly rates by dividing their annual income needs by 1000.

~ Mike Rider

Children like animals use all their senses to discover the world. Then artists come along and discover it the same way all over again.

~ Eudora Welty

When power leads man toward arrogance poetry reminds him of his limitations. When power narrows the areas of man's concern poetry reminds him of the richness and diversity of his experience. When power corrupts poetry cleanses. For art establishes the basic human truths which must serve as the touchstones of our judgement. The artist. . . faithful to his personal vision of reality becomes the last champion of the individual mind and sensibility against an intrusive society and an offensive state.

~ John F. Kennedy

Art is the expression of an enormous preference.

~ Wyndham Lewis

Conception my boy fundamental brainwork is what makes the difference in all art.

~ Dante Gabriel Rossetti

An artist may visit a museum but only a pedant can live there.

~ George Santayana

All profoundly original art looks ugly at first.

~ Clement Greenberg

Pioneers did not produce original works of art because they were creating original human environments they did not imagine Utopias because they were shaping them.

~ George Woodcock

Art is a human activity consisting in this that one man consciously by means of external signs hands on to others feelings he has worked through and other people are infected by these feelings and also experience them.

~ Leo Tolstoy

A picture lives by companionship. It dies by the same token. It is therefore risky to send it out into the world. How often it must be impaired by the eyes of the unfeeling.

~ Mark Rothko

Abstract art is uniquely modern. It is a fundamentally romantic response to modern life - rebellious individualistic unconventional sensitive irritable.

~ Robert Motherwell

Culture is something you cannot buy something you cannot import something you cannot learn or produce at will. A writer an artist or musician cannot sit down and say 'Now I will produce culture.' Culture is something that evolves out of the simple enduring elements of everyday life elements most truthfully expressed in the folk arts and crafts of a nation.

~ Thor Hansen

Dance is the only art of which we ourselves are the stuff of which it is made.

~ Ted Shawn

Art is not an end in itself but a means of addressing humanity.

~ Modest Mussorgsky

All art is a revolt against man's fate.

~ Andri Malraux

Art is a delayed echo.

~ George Santayana

Art is a kind of illness.

~ Giacomo Puccini

One must work nothing but work and one must have patience.

~ Auguste Rodin

Art does not reproduce the visible rather it makes it visible.

~ Paul Klee

The more horrifying this world becomes the more art becomes abstract.

~ Paul Klee

One of the recognizable features of the authentic masterpiece is its capacity to renew itself to endure the loss of some kinds of immediate relevance while still answering the most important questions men can ask including new ones they are just learning how to frame.

~ Arnold Stein

Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once he grows up.

~ Pablo Picasso

Art is man's nature nature is God's art.

~ P. J. Bailey

With the pride of the artist you must blow against the walls of every power that exists the small trumpet of your defiance.

~ Norman Mailer

All art is a kind of confession more or less oblique. All artists if they are to survive are forced at last to tell the whole story to vomit the anguish up.

~ James Baldwin

History repeats itself but the special call of an art which has passed away is never reproduced. It is utterly gone out of the world as the song of a destroyed wild bird.

~ Joseph Conrad

Illustrations have as much to say as the text. The trick is to say the same thing but in a different way. It's no good being an illustrator who is saying a lot that is on his or her mind if it has nothing to do with the text. . . the artist must override the story but he must also override his own ego for the sake of the story.

~ Maurice Sendak

In any evolutionary process even in the arts the search for novelty becomes corrupting.

~ Kenneth Boulding

The cheap no matter how charming how immediate does not wear so well. It has a way of telling its whole story the first time through.

~ William Littler

A work of art is a corner of creation seen through a temperament.

~ Entile Zola

Art washes away from the soul the dust of everyday life.

~ Pablo Picasso

Art gropes it stalks like a hunter lost in the woods listening to itself and to everything around it unsure of itself waiting to pounce.

~ John W. Gardner

Man in Canadian art is rarely in command of his environment or ever at home in it.

~ Elizabeth Kilbourn

What's an artist but the dregs of his work - the human shambles that follows it around?

~ William Gaddis

Art has no other object than to set aside the symbols of practical utility the generalities that are conventionally and socially accepted everything in fact which masks reality from us in order to set us face to face with reality itself.

~ Henri Bergson