American Artist Quotations

There is a kind of beauty in imperfection.

The scene then as now was centered in New York. For the most part, I've kept a bit apart from that attractive and seductive city. I've done it by living in the country within commuting distance.

I'd never just want to do what everybody else did. I'd be contributing to the sameness of everything.

It seemed to me that this might be a great pageant, which would give a chance for a very interesting picture.

The whole drive of western culture, the part of it which is serious, is towards an extreme objectification. It's carried to the point where the human subject is treated almost as if it's dirt in the works of a watch.

I always felt I was living in two worlds. One was the Mexican world, because nearly everybody I knew, relatives and cousins and kids in the neighbourhood, were Mexican. Then school was a different world. It was ethnically mixed.

Just going along with this, what I did, or what I do is I imagine not being myself seeing it, but imagine somebody else who's seeing it for the first time.

Expect nothing at all and accept as a joyful surprise whatever good you find in matrimony.

With Jackson there was quiet solitude. Just to sit and look at the landscape. An inner quietness. After dinner, to sit on the back porch and look at the light. No need for talking. For any kind of communication.

So, when the special effects are at the service of the story and draw you into it, that is really the magic.

When I see a dolphin, I know it's just as smart as I am.

I'm trying to assemble materials for a different mode of life.

I never had any childhood, for the word means sunshine and freedom from care. I had a starved and pinched little childhood, as far as love and merriment go.

Yes, it's a prequel. It tells the story about how the girls were born with superpowers, but they weren't necessarily heroes at the beginning of this movie, so the movie is about the events that happen in their life to make them decide to be heroes.

I'm not so presumptuous to feel that they're gonna get it right away, get exactly what I have in mind. I hope that they'll enjoy looking at it at any rate, whatever it is. And that's why I started writing stories on my work.

Middle age is the awkward period when Father Time starts catching up with Mother Nature.

All that a city will ever allow you is an angle on it, an oblique, indirect sample of what it contains, or what passes through it; a point of view.

Today I see beauty everywhere I go, in every face I see, in every single soul.

The public is usually slow to catch on to new things, and it's important that musicians stick to their guns and not look for that instant gratification.

I decided on the spot that I would be an artist, and I assure you, it was no ordinary artist I had in mind.

Yes, if I had it my way I would do all the shots myself - I used to do that when I was just a cameraman, an operator - but there's no way; you can't do that anymore.

I am with you heart and soul in the great cause to which you are devoting all your energy and your life.

If you realize you aren't so wise today as you thought you were yesterday, you're wiser today.

I think that has been a benefit to me because I think most people understand quilts and not a lot of people understand paintings. But yet they're looking at one.

Behind every successful man you'll find a woman who has nothing to wear.

The historian's job is to aggrandize, promoting accident to inevitability and innocuous circumstance to portent.

Painting's not important. The important thing is keeping busy.

You can almost judge how screwed up somebody is by the kind of toilet paper they use. Go in any rich house and it's some weird coloured embossed stuff.

It may be that the deep necessity of art is the examination of self-deception.

Many of the artists who have represented Negro life have seen only the comic, ludicrous side of it, and have lacked sympathy with and appreciation for the warm big heart that dwells within such a rough exterior.

When I'm building my dome in my chapel, and I had a vision - I've worked on perpetual motion and I haven't never give it up yet. I still think it could be done, perpetual motion. I had a vision of a un resist able windmill.

Our father died when we were very young, so our mother raised six kids. We saw the world filtered through her eyes, being a minority woman raising six kids.

I saw Tequila Sunrise as a romantic picture with complex, bigger than life characters.

Lately, I can't shake the feeling that I've been living a dream for the last 10 years or so; I can't account for most of my 20s, and I have to continually remind myself that certain people are dead now and many of my friends have children.

I have never had trouble with any actor being able to visualise things. They are amazing. As long as you have your monster head on a long stick, so you can hold it up there and you can wave it around and let them see it and explain it to them, they are just great.

They are only after my money, they are nothing for me.

You probably wouldn't worry about what people think of you if you could know how seldom they do.

I think we're much smarter than we were. Everybody knows that abstract art can be art, and most people know that they may not like it, even if they understand there's another purpose to it.

One's art goes as far and as deep as one's love goes.

Today is either the beginning of the end, or the end of the beginning. Today we are making history.

In the business world an executive knows something about everything, a technician knows everything about something and the switchboard operator knows everything.

Once you give up rights, they're not going to give them back.

Life is what we make it, always has been, always will be.

The stars are matter, we're matter, but it doesn't matter.

My efforts have been to not only put the Biblical incident in the original setting, but at the same time give the human touch which makes the whole world kin and which ever remains the same.

It wasn't until school that we realised that we were abnormal.

A man who will not lie to a woman has very little consideration for her feelings.

The several tribes of Indians inhabiting the regions of the Upper Missouri, and of whom I spoke in my last Letter, are undoubtedly the finest looking, best equipped, and most beautifully costumed of any on the Continent.

I'm not really sure what social message my art carries, if any. And I don't really want it to carry one. I'm not interested in the subject matter to try to teach society anything, or to try to better our world in any way.

Envy is the art of counting the other fellow's blessings instead of your own.

You can tell by the kindness of a dog how a human should be.

It will stick with you and show up for better or worse in spite of all you or anyone else can do.

And then you start getting into the technical side of it and the aesthetic side and with those areas you can come up with new ways to visualise things, new ways to render and use the computer to make things look different and new and stuff like that.

I don't know what a painting is; who knows what sets off even the desire to paint? It might be things, thoughts, a memory, sensations, which have nothing to do directly with painting itself. They can come from anything and anywhere.

We probably wouldn't worry about what people think of us if we could know how seldom they do.

Pop Art looks out into the world. It doesn't look like a painting of something, it looks like the thing itself.

The fellow who thinks he knows it all is especially annoying to those of us who do.

That is why we profess a spiritual kinship with primitive and archaic art.

Because of this the representation I'm interested in is of those things only the eye can touch.

I live in a Mobile Home - I've never had a house, except once; I rented a log cabin.

First of all there was a guy named Charles Nicholas, who used to do all of the inking that Jack and Simon didn't do. Simon used to do splashes and covers, but Charles Nicholas, after a while, did the inside of all of the stuff.

I think maybe chance works better in a situation like music because music exists over a period of time, and you don't maintain constantly the you can't refer back from one area to another area.

The landscapes were in my arms as I did it.

I had a call to the University of Miami where I'd run a revival in 1950.

It was a pretty rough neighborhood where I grew up The really tough places were over around Third Avenue where it ran into the Harlem River, but we weren't far away.

It's far easier to forgive an enemy after you've got even with him.

Corporations cannot commit treason, or be outlawed or excommunicated, for they have no souls.

Johnny Rotten. He's a big fan of mine. I used to see him out in the audience in England and he'd stand up and holler. He's funny. Smart too, and a nice guy. Don't think he's a jerk because he isn't.

We've gotten involved in cat rescue - we take them in and find homes for them. I've always loved cats. I saw how homeless cats were living out there. We take them in, put out flyers.

I have a picture of an ideal consciousness.

Things aren't much wilder now, I don't think, than they were back then. Of course I just read about all the goings-on now. Ha.

A consumer is a shopper who is sore about something.

This would be a distortion of their meaning, since the pictures are intimate and intense, and are the opposite of what is decorative; and have been painted in a scale of normal living rather than an institutional scale.

Most of modern rock and roll is a product of guilt.

Oh, yes. I knew I was weird by the time I was four. I knew I wasn't like other boys. I knew I was more fearful. I didn't like the rough and tumble most boys were into. I knew I was a sissy.

We grew out of the superhero comics, but we still liked comics, so we started putting our own experiences in the stories we were doing for our own amusement.

The procedure was that an artist got a mural and then he would have anywhere from two to ten assistants depending on the size of the mural and how many assistants he needed, or she needed.

When I'm makin' lectures to these universities, I tell 'em I like that little building because when I run short a audience, if I can get three people in there I've got a good crowd.

Dennis the Menace was probably the most realistic comic book ever done. No space aliens ever invaded!

I just focus on one show, when this is over then I'll start looking at what is coming up.

My studio was on 9th Street between University and Broadway.

I'm interested in what would normally be considered the worst aspects of commercial art. I think it's the tension between what seems to be so rigid and cliched and the fact that art really can't be this way.

It took them a while to catch on that Batman would be the greatest.

I can't work completely out of my imagination. I must put my foot in a bit of truth; and then I can fly free.

The only thing worse than an active conscience is one that's retroactive.

You have to keep the business side together as well as the creative side. We have constantly surprised people and stayed with bands until they have grown on people.

People were more interested in the phenomena than the art itself. This, combined with the growing interest in collecting art as an investment and the resultant boom in the art market, made it a difficult time for a young artist to remain sincere without becoming cynical.

One of the best things people could do for their descendents would be to sharply limit the number of them.

That Sid Vicious was obviously a schizophrenic, kind of a mean one too.

But, when I had this feeling and started painting sacred art, as I had this feeling to do, then it come to me: my problem is I'll get a lot of criticism and another problem is my work's not good enough to sell.

I realize that every picture isn't a work of art.

I see the tool set being the same and maybe doing virtual movies and that's fine for some stories but not for others. And maybe make all CG movies but they are already doing it.

The Jumble Shop would be one place where we'd sometimes accumulate down in the Village. I think it might be just a place that's unknown that was right around the corner from wherever it was that we met.

I became interested in making books, starting about 1965, when I did the Serial Project #1, deciding that I needed a small book to show how the work could be understood and how the system worked.

Maybe I am not very human - what I wanted to do was to paint sunlight on the side of a house.

The will to label will always prevail over what's being labeled, usually at the expense of either truth or understanding.

Clem had made it known that Pollock was a great painter.

The wind is a very difficult sound to get. It's always changing.

I took business classes as a back up but I made movies all the time. I would get my classes done in two days and then spend the rest of the time making my movies.

Well, I'd say that the beginning of this thing came through with Art of This Century, Peggy Guggenheim's, where she opened this gallery and began showing some things that caused a little talk, amongst a lot of other things.