The Art Quotes

Pollock was terrific. I think he freed himself of all kinds of worry about this world. Ran around and dripped, and then he managed to express ecstasy.

The worst in life, we are told, is compatible with the best in art. So too the worst in life is compatible with the best in humour.

Art... does not take kindly to facts, is helpless to grapple with theories, and is killed outright by a sermon.

I think my stance and my way of life is my most important art.

This is a very general understanding of art in China, that being an artist can make you money and turn you into a star.

Bad art might be defined as a series of bad choices about what to show and what to leave out.

In their different ways, art and philosophy help us, in Schopenhauer's words, to turn pain into knowledge.

I don't think there's really any difference between art - or writing, or music - and magic. And I particularly draw the link between magic and writing. I think that they are profoundly connected.

Art does not tolerate reason.

Just as all thought, and primarily that of non-signification, signifies something, so there is no art that has no signification.

Generations to come will find it difficult to believe that a man such as Gandhi ever walked the face of this earth.

We are always in danger of rejecting the creational in name of the fall and of accepting the fallen in name of creation.

Words don't heal. Art heals!

Who will dare say he has defined art?

I think that that's why artists make art - it is difficult to put into words unless you are a poet. What it takes is being open to the flow of universal creativity. The Zen artists knew this.

Twitter has to be about art. It can't be about banal things. Banal things and art are two different worlds.

So modern 'pothecaries, taught the art By doctor's bills to play the doctor's part, Bold in the practice of mistaken rules, Prescribe, apply, and call their masters fools.

All Nature is but art, unknown to thee All chance, direction, which thou canst not see; All discord, harmony not understood; All partial evil, universal good.

I wanted to be with the men I admired rather than the Scottish Arts Council crowd, so I spent a lot of time in graveyards. You get less trouble from the dead.

There are no watertight compartments in our inmost nature.

Sometimes in the history of art it is possible to describe a period or a generation of artists as having been obsessed by a particular problem.

As the husband is the wife is; thou art mated with a clown, As the grossness of his nature will have weight to drag thee down.

Art flourishes where there is a sense of adventure.

Art flourishes where there is a sense of adventure, a sense of nothing having been done before, of complete freedom to experiment.

Assuredly it would be a pity if laughter should ever become, like rhetoric and the arts, a habit.

I thought you had to give up a lot for art, and you did. It required complete concentration. It also required that whatever money you had had to be put into art materials.

I am a result of what has happened on this planet - how could I find the art to say that? I can't, and yet, I am drawn to it because of the enormity of it. That seems really important.

Documentary is thought to be art when it transcends its reference to the world, when the work can be regarded, first and foremost, as an act of self-expression on the part of the artist.

There is probably nothing wrong with art for art's sake if we take the phrase seriously, and not take it to mean the kind of poetry written in England forty years ago.

The student who deceives himself into thinking that he is giving his life like an ascetic in the spirit of sacrifice for art, is the victim of a deplorable species of egotism.

It is because of the servility of photography that I am fundamentally contemptuous of this chance invention which will never be an art but which plagiarizes nature by means of optics. (1848)

My art career actually began under the kitchen table. My mother wanted to get me out of her hair while she cooked, so she laid out some paper and pencils on the floor under the kitchen table.

WAR, n. A by-product of the arts of peace. The most menacing political condition is a period of international amity.

PROPHECY, n. The art and practice of selling one's credibility for future delivery.

PHOTOGRAPH, n. A picture painted by the sun without instruction in art. It is a little better than the work of an Apache, but not quite so good as that of a Cheyenne.

You can only make art that talks to the masses when you have nothing to say to them.

The true painter strives to paint what can only be seen through his world.

There's nothing wrong with provocative art work: I even look forward to the day when I can take pictures which will disturb even me.

An artist is nothing without his or her obsessions.

I see my work plagiarized in gardening programmes and decorating programmes and car adverts, and I suppose I have to accept that's just the way art gets assimilated into culture.

As you grow older you realize that art has an enormous effect. It's frightening sometimes to think of the effect that we can have.

Why do people think artists are special? It's just another job.

Voyeurism is a director's job description. It's an artist's, too.

During the 1960s, I think, people forgot what emotions were supposed to be. And I don't think they've ever remembered.

I always like to see if the art across the street is better than mine.

Don't think about making art.

One does not set out with the idea that I've just had a great idea and now I'm going to go and carry it out. Almost all art that's made like that doesn't go anywhere.

All the arts are predominantly national, and therefore the Australian Film Commission should be funding us. The battle gets more and more vicious each year.

Art stands on the shoulders of craft, which means that to get to the art, you must master the craft.

The passions are the seeds of vices as well as of virtues, from which either may spring, accordingly as they are nurtured. Unhappy they who have never been taught the art to govern them!