Art Quotations | Page 6

Painting is a source of endless pleasure, but also of great anguish.

At no point do I wish to be in conflict with any man or masculine thought. It doesn't enter my consciousness. Art is anonymous. It's not competitive with men. It's a complementary contribution.

Providence School of Art students used to sneak into P Funk concerts.

In art, the only one who really knows whether what you've done is honest is the artist.

I always thought it would be a great thing to do an art carwash. So you can actually go and get your car washed, but while you're sitting around waiting you can walk in that hallway where you look at the cars going through the window, and that could be changing exhibitions.

All of us use art and literature as an escape from time to time, but if it's any good, it has a healing quality - a quality that enlarges our human spirits.

I think making art is something where you think you know, you also know you don't know and you hope - all these things are in play all the time. I think it's what makes the excitement of creativity for the artist.

I have a pretty expanded view of what art is. I include pop music and even some sports.

I'm interested in all kinds of art. I draw and paint and don't know how to play the banjo, but I do play the banjo.

I have long accepted that an art fair is not a perfectly curated museum show. Instead, it's more like a brightly lit bazaar, where art is haggled over and handled like any other commodity.

Every man should follow the bent of his nature in art and letters, always provided that he does not offend against the rules of morality and good taste.

I've stopped going to see art films because every critic gives them four stars and say things like 'masterpiece,' 'spellbinding' and 'mesmerizing.' I mean, they're doing that with my film, but I don't want to use those blurbs. Critical reviews aren't worth too much anymore because just about every film can get one or two of them.

Great art should be shown with great excitement.

Art imitates life and, sometimes, life imitates art. It's a weird combination of elements.

Children do have the potential to kill art. But now I think they kill the bad art. At least that is what my son has done for me.

I think whatever art form you're in, whether TV, film or theater, you should know the history of who came before you and how the art form has changed or not changed and to learn from the greats.

An art aims, above all, at producing something beautiful which affects not our feelings but the organ of pure contemplation, our imagination.

The art of losing isn't hard to master; so many things seem filled with the intent to be lost that their loss is no disaster.

When I go to galleries in New York, I feel like I'm in school. I know that there's good contemporary conceptual art, but I have a really hard time caring about it. I'd rather look at images of people and things I can relate to. Then again, I didn't go to art school.

I was always interested in art at school, and after year twelve, senior year, I spent three years studying graphic design at college. I worked in advertising for two years but didn't like it much, then began doing a bit of illustration work for various publishers.

It would be obvious for me to do conceptual art, and I think I've done it already with smashing bass guitars and whatever - I consider that as conceptual.

As an architect, you have to provide a shelter to enjoy art. And you have to love art. It's like when you make a concert hall. You must love music. This is the reason why you make the space, to enjoy music - making a space for art is the same thing.

I'm a firm believer that actors take to work who they aren't at home. People show their other self in their art or in their work.

Comedy is inherently subversive because it turns the normal reality on its head. The art form is all about these questions and contradictions. In comedy, we're dealing with language that we all understand, but words can have a dozen other things around them that alter or affect meaning.

Only in art will the lion lie down with the lamb, and the rose grow without the thorn.

I'm into fashion because it contains the mood of the day, of the moment - like music, literature, and art.

I think of fashion as an art form as well as an industrial product - and something that has to be sold well and has to be of high quality.

There is always a multitude of reasons both in favor of doing a thing and against doing it. The art of debate lies in presenting them; the art of life lies in neglecting ninety-nine hundredths of them.

I know that I am an excellent live performer. I know that I have spent my life paying attention to my art form, developing my art form, worrying about my show and what it is I'm bringing to people, making sure that I give them a fine trade. They get a two-hour show, sometimes a three-hour show, for a decent price.

Country music, the music of the white rural working class, has often been mocked by elitists whose understanding of power and art was shaped at expensive private schools.

I guess some fans like art and get it, others are just into the music, don't really turn up and have an opinion. The fans that have shown interest are all with me all the way.

Once the subject matter of rock n' roll changed from cars and pop love songs to songs about really true love and the blues and death and mortality, this light bulb went off in my head and I went, 'Oh, that's what they're doing. That's kind of - that's art.'

It is art that makes life, makes interest, makes importance and I know of no substitute whatever for the force and beauty of its process.

Regarding race or gender or sexuality, one of the great things about art and music is that they can provide people with very little else in common with a similar entry point for discussion, but the discussions still need to happen for life to get more interesting.

Japanese people accept that art and commerce will be blended; and, in fact, they are surprised by the rigid and pretentious Western hierarchy of 'high art.'

I've come up through art school, through painting, through graphic design, through advertising, through TV commercials and music video. I've designed books, built billboards, matchbooks, corporate identities. I continuously paint, I've done conceptual art pictures.

Politics is the art of realizing what there is to realize.

I was going to school thinking I was going to do something entirely different, thought acting was just a hobby at that point, met Stanley Kubrick and was like, 'Whoa, this can be an art form, and you can really move people the way you do simply by acting.'

My parents always got a kick out of my art. I was always able to make them laugh. As I got older, I remember the thrill I got when I graduated from making my classmates laugh to making adults laugh. Kind of a watershed moment.

I am able to write musically about the visual. I can pick up tones, I can pick up themes. And I find visual art is a wonderful launching-off place.

There's obviously nothing wrong with selling your art - only an idiot with a trust fund would tell you otherwise. But it's confusing to know how far you should take it.

Fiction seeks to represent human experience as it is lived and as it reverberates in our hopes, fears, dreams, and memories. So much of our lives are internal. The art of fiction has claimed - more than anything else - this internal ground as its own.

I agree that Ruskin has done much harm to counter balance much good in giving people the trick of talking about Art instead of really doing a little of it to enable them to understand.

Balance is key. Balance is a virtue. Balance is next to godliness, maybe. We should all aspire to better balance. Too much of what is said in this world is one-sided, and we need more balance - in our speech, in our music, in our art, in everything.

The whole art of war consists of guessing at what is on the other side of the hill.

It's a good note for any young hopeful in this business to take: study up and make sure you are informed at all times because knowing how to anticipate someone's subtle nuances in a performance will only elevate your own art!

Art is a subjective thing, and it should be a subjective thing. And the difficulty of subjectivity is that it becomes hugely problematized when you start applying large sums of money to art objects. That's where it all starts to get a bit sticky.

For me, learning is a continuous process and an all-inclusive one - reading a book, learning a musical instrument or learning the martial art called taekwondo. Teach myself something new - that's my prayer.

The job at Brooklyn is interesting because Brooklyn reflects what happened to university art departments everywhere. It might be the worst department now, and yet at one point it was the best in the country.

You have to make a choice when you start to sing and decide whether you want to service the music, and be at the top of your art, or if you want to be a very popular tenor.

Why must art be static? You look at an abstraction, sculptured or painted, an entirely exciting arrangement of planes, spheres, nuclei, entirely without meaning. It would be perfect but it is always still. The next step in sculpture is motion.

The house has to please everyone, contrary to the work of art which does not. The work is a private matter for the artist. The house is not.

What liberals mean by 'goose-stepping' or 'ethnic cleansing' is generally something along the lines of 'eliminating taxpayer funding for the National Endowment for the Arts.' But they can't say that, or people would realize they're crazy.

Works of art, in my opinion, are the only objects in the material universe to possess internal order, and that is why, though I don't believe that only art matters, I do believe in Art for Art's sake.

Most art is fragile and some should be placed and never moved away.

Art and religion are, then, two roads by which men escape from circumstance to ecstacy.

Inspiration comes from everywhere: books, art, people on the street. It is an interior process for me.

You don't take a photograph, you make it.

Nothing is as dangerous in architecture as dealing with separated problems. If we split life into separated problems we split the possibilities to make good building art.

An art book is a museum without walls.

Postmodernism surely requires an even greater grasp of symbolism, as it's increasingly an art of gesture alone.

I think performance art comes from a simple place of wanting to express things beyond just sound.

Diplomacy, n. is the art of letting somebody else have your way.

I think of horror films as art, as films of confrontation. Films that make you confront aspects of your own life that are difficult to face. Just because you're making a horror film doesn't mean you can't make an artful film.

What motivates me in art is the ugly and beautiful nature of the truth. It has to be truthful and honest, even if it is ugly and grotesque.

I am following Nature without being able to grasp her, I perhaps owe having become a painter to flowers.

The funny thing is musicians often love to go to see visual art because you've got all these pictures to turn into metaphors.

Romance can end, but I don't think art really ends, as romantic as that might sound.

Unfortunately, music devolved instead of evolved. The music business got into the hands of lawyers and accountants rather than the entrepreneurial creative people, and that's when the beginning of the end started. It's all based on money instead of art and creativity.

Any form of art is a form of power; it has impact, it can affect change it can not only move us, it makes us move.

The art galleries of Paris contain the finest collection of frames I ever saw.

My parents have always given me whatever I wanted. Took me to the ballet, the opera, museum exhibitions. I was always surrounded by art. It's their fault I've become an actress.

My own interest in art was because of my mother. My father didn't like contemporary art, so he didn't give her large sums to spend. So, she began buying prints and drawings. During my school days, I remember sitting in on many of the early meetings.

Art imitates life. It's definitely helpful to feel that way. You feel that way when you're leading a show and you're on a set.

When I say art influences me, which it does, it's not at all in a literal form. You go and see exhibitions or collections or meet an artist. It's all a compilation. Every moment, at all times, all this information. Then all this information disappears, and it shows up later in the process.

Alchemy is the art of far and near, and I think poetry is alchemy in that way. It's delightful to distort size, to see something that's tiny as though it were vast.

Art is dangerous. It is one of the attractions: when it ceases to be dangerous you don't want it.

Art is the provocation for talking about enigma and the search for sense in human life. One can do that by telling a story or writing about a fresco by Giotto or studying how a snail climbs up a wall.

You wouldn't have the same art on the walls at every restaurant or the same waiter uniforms. Neither should you have the same service style at every restaurant.

Practice makes an actor excel. It is like cycling and motor driving. It is an art, which can be learnt and practised.

Tackling, and that ability to stay on your feet and pressurise a player, is a dying art.

Melbourne, where I grew up, is one of the street art capitals of the world. Something about discovering freshly painted walls always fills me with optimism; it's autonomous and democratic, and reminds me that maybe people are paying attention after all.

We live in this thought web; we identify things and put them away and distance ourselves from them. But to be completely present? That is source, that is art, that is spirituality. And meditation is a way to defy fear and experience that source.

As far as playing jazz, no other art form, other than conversation, can give the satisfaction of spontaneous interaction.

I love biographies. I read Patti Smith's 'Just Kids.' I'm into that time frame in New York, the '70s and '80s. In art school, I read 'Close to the Knives,' the autobiography of the artist and AIDS activist David Wojnarowicz.

Love-making is an art which must be studied.

Lou Tyrrell has created a theatre that is a safe haven for playwrights, a birthing center for new American writing. Arts Garage has created a vital, enthusiastic audience for theatre, music, painting and sculpture in Delray Beach.

What moves those of genius, what inspires their work is not new ideas, but their obsession with the idea that what has already been said is still not enough.

Martial arts should be part of every girl's education.

Art should offend people because art should challenge people.

Statesmanship is harder than politics. Politics is the art of getting along with people, whereas statesmanship is the art of getting along with politicians.

What does that represent? There was never any question in plastic art, in poetry, in music, of representing anything. It is a matter of making something beautiful, moving, or dramatic - this is by no means the same thing.

My mission is not to forbid French art. If the quality is there, I buy; if the quality isn't there, I don't.

Film will only became an art when its materials are as inexpensive as pencil and paper.

I don't like a lot of the stuff that goes on in the art world, but it's hard to be old and like what goes on around you.

Art has a double visage: it looks before and after. Romance is its forward-looking face. The germ of growth is in romanticism. Formalism, on the other hand, consolidates tradition; gleans what has been gained and makes it facile to the hand or the mind; economizes the energy of genius.

Well, it was one of my most gratifying experiences because I could devote my knowledge and my talent for the good for the City of Washington, and all the Federal projects where the Fine Arts Commission had jurisdiction, and it was a tremendous experience.

There is a deep question whether the possible meanings that emerge from an effort to explain the experience of art may not mask the real meanings of a work of art.

There is only one valuable thing in art: the thing you cannot explain.

Works of art often last forever, or nearly so. But exhibitions themselves, especially gallery exhibitions, are like flowers; they bloom and then they die, then exist only as memories, or pressed in magazines and books.