The Art Quotes

We need to regain the art of civil discourse and more practically, I don't think you change anyone's mind by calling them names.

Theories of art carry the seeds of their own destruction.

I wrote in the War of Art that I could divide my life neatly into two parts: before turning pro and after. After is better.

Many of my family members are teachers in the arts, and I picked up the camera years ago, in high school.

The art model of problem solving is incredibly efficient because ideology has no place there.There's only the thing and what the thing needs to be.

I think about art a lot only in two contexts. One is narrative... The other thing that I'm interested in, which is tangential, but not unrelated... All art to me is about problem solving.

I'm learning about filming, and just conceptualizing as well. I think it's a good artistic inroad, even to music as well.

A great artist ... takes what he did not make and makes of it something that only he can make.

Art flouts convention. Convention became convention because it works.

One of the big failings of art schools is that students aren't given any teaching on how to survive as a one-person business, which is what it is.

Nothing is more difficult than the art of maneuver. What is difficult about maneuver is to make the devious route the most direct and to turn misfortune to advantage.

The most potent elements in a work of art are, often, its silences.

The work of art itself is . . . a vibrant, magical, and exemplary object which returns us to the world in some way more open and enriched.

Unfortunately, moral beauty in art - like physical beauty in a person - is extremely perishable.

The moral pleasure in art, as well as the moral service that art performs, consists in the intelligent gratification of consciousness.

A work of art, so far as it is a work of art, cannot - whatever the artist's personal intention - advocate anything at all.

Transparence is the highest, most liberating value in art - and in criticism - today. Transparence means experiencing the luminousness of the thing in itself, of things being what they are.

The notion of art as the dearly purchased outcome of an immense spiritual risk, one whose cost goes up with the entry and participation of each new player in the game.

In a culture whose already classical dilemma is the hypertrophy of the intellect at the expense of energy and sensual capability, interpretation is the revenge of the intellect upon art.

Self-exposure is commendable in art only when it is of a quality and complexity that allows other people to learn about themselves from it.

As industrialization provided social uses for the operations of the photographer, so the reaction against these uses reinforced the self-consciousness of photography-as-art.

I love art and I find myself at the MoMA all the time. Museums are a real refuge for me. I go to a museum for any break that I have, and I'm very inspired by art.

A piece of writing is like a piece of magic. You create something out of nothing.

All persistent practices in art have a creative function. They may serve several ends, but the chief one is the shaping of the work.

Is it conceivable that mysticism is a mark of inadequate art?

Everything progresses in waves. The march of civilization, the progression of worlds, is in waves. All human activities likewise progress in waves - art, literature, science, religion.

Is there no room for art in the spoken language? What is the use of creating an unnatural language to the exclusion of the natural one?

High achievements in art, music, etc., are the results of concentration.

Art must be in touch with nature - and wherever that touch is gone, Art degenerates - yet it must be above nature.

Every artist paints his Madonna according to his own pre-conceived ideas.

In art, interest must be centred on the principal theme.

The sculptor, the painter the musician the dancer, or any artist, if he can first obtain celebrate in Paris, acquires very easily the esteem and eulogy of other countries.

As thou thinkest, so art thou.

I'm not a very good predictor in any area of art, particularly my own. I don't know how to evaluate that.

I mean, certainly it's the single biggest event, I think, in terms of popular entertainment, or art even, if you say that, of the 20th Century. It's been film. It's the 20th Century's real art form.

I love art more than anything in the world except for my family.

In fact, every day I'll read a chapter of some art book. I don't know why. It's just a habit.

I can tell for sure, the technologists have made it clear that they don't care about musicians. The arts have been sacrificed on the altar of technological advancement.

The internet has surrounded television and turned television into an art form.

The thing about art for me is that you can go on theorising your work forever, because it's open to interpretation.

Art has nothing to do with politics. It is the freest thing in the world.

I don't want to deal with big, grand themes in my stories; art has nothing to do with themes. When you deal with themes, you are not creating; you are lecturing.

I think if art has one underlying value, it's that.

There's danger in glorifying negative emotions as fuel for art.

As I discovered music, especially Rock 'n Roll, new territory was opened to me. I was lured by the unbridled rhythm of this art form. It was like gasoline on the fire of my youthful spirit.

Us visual thinkers like me, be good at things like industrial design, graphics, art, those kind of jobs.

There are films that can only be made in a specific country but that have a wider meaning. I think that's true of any art form.

The internet is intimate. Everybody collects the art on the internet, everybody owns the art and enjoys it only for their self, completely selfishly.

Everything appears to me to be authored, in some strange way. And I wonder if this is not the spreading assumption of the psychedelic illusion/delusion/revelation that life is in fact art.

Science is the special province of the ego. And magic and art are the special province of something else. I could name it, but I won't. It prefers to be unnamed