c2p-cmd/Good-Quotes-Authors huggingface dataset:
I knew a girl and she felt like art.Sometimes colorful, sometimes dull,Sometimes with bright, hopeful eyes,Sometimes only black and white,But she was always a piece of exquisite art.
— Melanie Sargsian, Lovember: A Collection of Short Love Stories
My ears hear colors and my eyes see sounds.
— Suzy Kassem, Rise Up and Salute the Sun: The Writings of Suzy Kassem
Trauma and pain are the foundations of art. I believe that. When tragedy strikes, however, a muralist or a watercolorist has the opportunity to be a human being in the moment and an artist afterward. Faced with the death of a loved one, a sculptor or portraitist can first grieve, suffer, and heal--then create. Most artists go through life this way. They can react normally to the trials and tribulations of the human experience. They can pass through the world with compassion and comradeship. They can make their art later. Outside, elsewhere, beyond. But photography is immediate. It does not offer the luxury of time. Faced with blood, death, or transformation, a photographer has no choice but to reach for the camera. An artist first, a human being afterward. Photography is a neutral record of all events, a chronicle of things both sublime and terrible. By necessity, this work is made without emotion, without connection, without love.
— Abby Geni, The Lightkeepers
The spoken word is ephemeral. The written word, eternal. A symphony, timeless.
— A.E. Samaan
The identification of fantasy is always an attempt to avoid one's own suffering: the identification of art is the sharing in the suffering of another.
— W.H. Auden
Photography is like exploring a new dimension, only I can go there but I can show you where I've been.
— Destin Sparks
Some days you just get lucky… Other days you wait patiently for luck to happen
— Destin Sparks
The hardest part is setting the camera on the tripod, or making the decision to bring the camera out of the car, or just raising the camera to your face, believing, by those actions, that whatever you find before you, whatever you find there, is going to be good.
— Sally Mann
Right now, we need writers who know the difference between production of a market commodity and the practice of an art. Developing written material to suit sales strategies in order to maximize corporate profit and advertising revenue is not the same thing as responsible book publishing or authorship.
— Ursula K. Le Guin, Late in the Day: Poems 2010–2014
And I see a lot of us, the producers, who write the books and make the books, accepting this--letting commodity profiteers sell us like deodorant, and tell us what to publish, what to write. Books aren't just commodities; the profit motive is often in conflict with the aims of art. We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable--but then, so did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art. Very often in our art, the art of words.
— Ursula K. Le Guin, Late in the Day: Poems 2010–2014
Vulnerability is the essence of romance. It's the art of being uncalculated, the willingness to look foolish, the courage to say, 'This is me, and I'm interested in you enough to show you my flaws with the hope that you may embrace me for all that I am but, more important, all that I am not.
— Ashton Kutcher
A blank canvas is a playground for the imagination.
— Marty Rubin
Art never comes from happiness
— Chuck Palahniuk, Choke
I see a sacred beautiful art.
— Lailah Gifty Akita
The primary benefit of practicing any art, whether well or badly, is that it enables one's soul to grow.
— Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
LEFTISTS EAT THEIR CHILDREN: The poets, artists, and radicals are murdered first once the "revolution" actually comes about.﻿
— A.E. Samaan
Music is for souls & hearts to dance & sing.Art is for expressing your visionary being.Words are tools for exploring & celebrating.Time is a pool to swim & dream & create in.Waste not one jot of what you are given!Use everything you've got to maximise living.
— Jay Woodman
I could either succumb to the nightmares I’ve raised or paint them.
— Thomm Quackenbush, Flies to Wanton Boys
I believe that when you step into uncharted territory, you are also stepping into total abandonment, potential humiliation, and a space where nothing is guaranteed; there’s no case study or roadmap. I have so much respect for anybody who will step away from what they can do in order to find what they must do. That’s a hallmark characteristic of entrepreneurs and artists. And it’s scary and exciting as all hell.
— Elle Luna
Reality is not enough for us, that’s why we have invented art to create different realities!
— Mehmet Murat ildan
The faculty of art is to change events
—  the faculty of science is to foresee them. The phenomena with which we deal are controlled by art
Such terms as 'diagnosis' and 'pathology' are of course used analogically here, but I am using the word 'science' deliberate and unequivocally in its original and broad sense of discovery and knowing, rather than its conventional sense of isolating the secondary causes of natural phenomena. For if I believe anything, it is that the primary business of literature and art is cognitive, a kind of finding out and knowing and telling, both in good times and bad; a celebration of the way things are when they are right, and a diagnostic enterprise when they are wrong.
— Walker Percy
While visual art is a thing of timeless beauty, to me, music is so much more. It brings you back to some of the greatest moments in your life. It represents so much more than just noise, it tingles and fills you with feelings. Overwhelms you with emotions of joy or sadness; comfort or anger. Like when you first hear a song that makes the hairs on the back of your neck stand up, made you want to dance, or go out and kick someone's a**. Music is truly a thing of absolute beauty.
— Jacob Cagnina
Obstacles cannot crush me. Every obstacle yields to stern resolve. He who is fixed to a star does not change his mind.
— Leonardo da Vinci
It's either perfect, or it's the worst thing ever made and everyone is an artistic failure, including myself. (Yay, emotional extremes!)
— Felicia Day, You're Never Weird on the Internet
But Hannah's friend didn’t understand the volatile balancing act between art and sanity, that the act of creation was like walking a tightrope during an earthquake. She didn’t understand Hannah’s stupid need for validation, or that the size of the audience increased the stakes and multiplied the fear. She didn’t understand that creativity was dangerous, that, yes, there were some people who could stand before a canvas, paint a sunset that would bring the world to its knees, and return to their loved ones as a complete person who didn’t hurt, didn’t cry, didn’t spill blood to appease the host of fickle muses. But Hannah did. Hannah’s best ideas—sometimes her only ideas—were buried beneath the skin.
— Jake Vander-Ark, The Day I Wore Purple
A man who makes a plate or a shirt or a loaf of bread or anything our great great ancestors called a work of art, has no need to try to be sincere; all he can do is practice his craft to the best of his ability. But once he starts making useless things, how can he not be sincere?
— René Daumal
Once art served to educate and edify, now it distracts and amuses.
— James Rozoff
Feedback doesn’t tell you about yourself. It tells you about the person giving the feedback. In other words, if someone says your work is gorgeous, that just tells you about *their* taste. If you put out a new product and it doesn’t sell at all, that tells you something about what your audience does and doesn’t want. When we look at praise and criticism as information about the people giving it, we tend to get really curious about the feedback, rather than dejected or defensive.
— Tara Mohr, Playing Big: Find Your Voice, Your Mission, Your Message
It does not much matter that an individual loses two or three hundred pounds in buying a bad picture, but it is to be regretted that a nation should lose two or three hundred thousand in raising a ridiculous building.
— John Ruskin
People are fond of spouting out the old cliché about how Van Gogh never sold a painting in his lifetime. Somehow his example serves to justify to us, decades later, that there is merit in utter failure.Perhaps, but the man did commit suicide. The market for his work took off big-time shortly after his death. Had he decided to stick around another few decades he most likely would’ve entered old age quite prosperous. And sadly for failures everywhere, the cliché would have lost a lot of its power.The fact is, the old clichés work for us in abstract terms, but they never work out in real life quite the same way. Life is messy; clichés are clean and tidy.
— Hugh MacLeod, Ignore Everybody: and 39 Other Keys to Creativity
Dance is your words expressed with movement.
— Pablito Greco
When an artist is asked to speak about form, you expect something different than when a critic talks about it. Because you think that somewhere between sentences and words, the secret will slip out. I am trying to give you that secret; it isn't a secret at all, but it is building solidly, not using secrets. I had been trying to extend into metaphysical extension; that film is changing, metamorphic; that is, infinite; the idea that the movement of life is totally important rather than a single life. My films were built on an incline, an increase in intensity. I hoped to make a form which was infinite, the changingness of things. I thought I would want to find a total form which conveyed that sense, particularly in reference to an Oriental subject. My impression was: one is walking down a corridor of a hotel. One hears a sound, opens a door and a man is playing; one listens for three minutes and closes the door. The music went on before you opened the door and it continues after you close the door. There was neither beginning nor end. Western music increases in intensity to a climax and then resolves itself. Oriental music is infinite; it goes on and on. The Chinese theater goes on for hours and hours with time for lunch moving scenery, etc.
— Maya Deren
Dance is the language of artistic kinesis.
— Pablito Greco
I wish to approach truth as closely as is possible, and therefore I abstract everything until I arrive at the fundamental quality of objects.
— Piet Mondrian
A peaceful feeling: A happy harmony or symphony of all of our character pieces working in powerful unison” from Cinderella In Focus
— H.L. Balcomb, Cinderella In Focus: "Curiosity is the doorway to our personal possibility!" 2nd Edition coming Oct.  31, 2017
All my life’s work will drain away without ever being realized. For a sculptor, working with their hands is crucial and hands must be supported by a strong and supple back. And I work with sturdy materials that need dexterity and strength to handle — metal and stone and sometimes even bricks! How do I do any of it now?
— Radhika Mukherjee, Broken Shadows
At the Uffizi, I experienced a moment that was touching, painful, and almost embarrassing. We stopped in front of the famous Botticelli painting, The Birth of Venus. I gazed wistfully at her incomparably lovely, yet, as Vasari described, oddly distorted form emerging from the waves in a seashell, her long red-golden tresses blown by Zephyrs. No woman ever had so elongated a neck or such sinuous limbs. Botticelli contorted, and some might say deformed, the human shape to give us a glimpse of the sublime.
— Gary Inbinder, Confessions of the Creature
In the heart of appeasement there's the fear of rejection, and in acts of fear there are mirrors of oppression.
— Criss Jami
How do I define art? A work of art is not an object of monetary value; it is a timid attempt by man to recreate the miracle of which every young woman is capable: to produce life from nothing. Hence, only women and artists have respect for life, and the segment of the so-called "society" that denies women the right to vote and therefore to participate, and denies artists the right to exist, does not really care for life. It oppresses humanity,and it has, directly or indirectly, a vested interest in wars.
— Oskar Kokoschka
Feet on the ground, head in the clouds. That's how giants walk.
— Andrea Pomelli
We all have an artistic side that we have to express if we want to live a life that feels whole.
— Dhani Jones
Dance is moving sculpture.
— Pablito Greco
This was a family that consumed attractive, talented people. Its aim was to preserve beauty and genius through the centuries. For all eternity. To bottle the spark of magic that flares up in the soul of an artist, to preserve in wax the pain that is born in the heart of an actor, to dry and store the subtle, shifting images that hover above the head of a writer.Madness. They didn't realize it was impossible. As the years pass by, feelings and emotions are blunted. And thousands of years of life kill all feelings. The soul becomes cold. It can't burn anymore. The farys took away from humans the one thing that I sought and valued in them most of all—their bright, vital feelings.
— Lena Meydan
Dance fotografers/videografers (ph=f) capture a moment in movement
—  while dancers get birth of their artscience.
Art is not about achievement, but rather a new perspective to look from.
— Armin Houman
Other young women were more than kind when it came to teaching him the basics of makeup artistry, but he did not like the idea of foundation, knowing enough alchemy to realize it had historically been made with lead and mercury.
— Thomm Quackenbush, Flies to Wanton Boys
The trouble is that we have a bad habit, encouraged by pedants and sophisticates, of considering happiness as something rather stupid. Only pain is intellectual,only evil interesting. This is the treason of the artist: a refusal to admit the banality of evil and the terrible boredom of pain. If you can't lick 'em, join 'em. If it hurts, repeat it. But to praise despair is to condemn delight, to embrace violence is to lose hold of everything else.
— Ursula K. Le Guin, The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas
In time, all great masterpieces turn into shameless creatures who laugh at their creators.
— Erol Ozan
An artist reveals his naked soul in his work - and so, gentle reader, do you when you respond to it.
— Ayn Rand
What happens when you combine your passion, strength and value? This is the process of creating true art.
— J.R. Rim
Some of the greatest masterpieces of art are created against the odds of reality.from the book: stuff i think about
— Sondra Faye
Every young sculptor seems to think that he must give the world some specimen of indecorous womanhood, and call it Eve, Venus, a Nymph, or any name that may apologize for a lack of decent clothing. I am weary, even more than I am ashamed, of seeing such things. Nowadays people are as good as born in their clothes, and there is practically not a nude human being in existence. An artist, therefore, as you must candidly confess, cannot sculpture nudity with a pure heart, if only because he is compelled to steal guilty glimpses at hired models. The marble inevitably loses its chastity under such circumstances. An old Greek sculptor, no doubt, found his models in the open sunshine, and among pure and princely maidens, and thus the nude statues of antiquity are as modest as violets, and sufficiently draped in their own beauty. But as for Mr. Gibson's colored Venuses (stained, I believe, with tobacco juice), and all other nudities of to-day, I really do not understand what they have to say to this generation, and would be glad to see as many heaps of quicklime in their stead.
— Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Marble Faun
There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written. That is all.The nineteenth century dislike of realism is the rage of Caliban seeing his own face in a glass.The nineteenth century dislike of romanticism is the rage of Caliban not seeing his own face in a glass. The moral life of man forms part of the subject-matter of the artist, but the morality of art consists in the perfect use of an imperfect medium
— Oscar Wilde
If you don't know it's impossible, it's easier to do.
— Neil Gaiman
What is always needed in the appreciation of art, or life, is the larger perspective. Connections made, or at least attempted, where none existed before, the straining to encompass in one's glance at the varied world the common thread, the unifying theme through immense diversity, a fearlessness of growth, of search, of looking, that enlarges the private and the public world. And yet, in our particular society, it is the narrowed and narrowing view of life that often wins
— Alice Walker, In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens: Womanist Prose
Art is the reflection of an imaginative mind.
— Debasish Mridha
A successful actor is praised for never giving up his dreams to become someone else for a living but to dream to be an unmasked artist is a mortal sin in a consumerist society. Artists don't consume; they create things that can’t be consumed with riches. You consume art by seeing, by listening, by feeling, never by buying.
— Bruce Crown, How Dim the Promised Land
If art does not enlarge men's sympathies, it does nothing morally.
— George Eliot
Horror is the law of the world of living creatures, and civilization is concerned with masking that truth. Literature and art refine and beautify, and if they were to depict reality naked, just as everyone suspects it is (although we defend ourselves against that knowledge), no one would be able to stand it.
— Czesław Miłosz
That day I behaved like a good artist, one whose job is to build rather than break.
— Anuradha Bhattacharyya, One Word
I love the smell of pastels...that breaths life into my soul.
— Ama H. Vanniarachchy
This is the second Old Master I have encountered that has the signatures of another artist forged over it. A painting that has been created by another artist entirely. It's like they played mix and match.
— Dayna S. Rubin, Code of Siman: All is Not Lost
Life is art.
— Lailah Gifty Akita
The absence of models, in literature as in life, to say nothing of painting, is an occupational hazard for the artist, simply because models in art, in behavior, in growth of spirit and intellect--even if rejected--enrich and enlarge one's view of existence. Deadlier still, to the artist who lacks models, is the curse of ridicule, the bringing to bear on an artist's best work, especially his or her most original, most strikingly deviant, only a fund of ignorance and the presumption that as an artist's critic one's judgement is free of the restrictions imposed by prejudice, and is well informed, indeed, about all the art in the world that really matters.
— Alice Walker
When art calls, you have to follow it. It doesn’t happen often, so take the opportunity when it strikes. In all reality, what I do is art. I do create fabulous pieces of decorative baked goods.
— A.M. Willard, Frosted Sweets
The minute we moved in (1712 North Crescent Heights), Dennis Hopper decided to give a party for Andy (Warhol), who was coming out to Los Angeles, and he decided that the one thing that would really make the house stand out, fabulously, would be billboards. So he papered the downstairs bathrooms with billboards. He had also decided that the food at the party would be hot dogs and chili. So we had a hot-dog stand! And Dennis had found huge papier-mâché Mexican figures with firecrackers hanging on them.
— Brooke Hayward, Dennis Hopper: The Lost Album: Vintage Prints from the Sixties
Not having enough talent seemed almost worse than not having any, because having a little meant having just enough to know what you lacked
— Kat Howard
In the end the soul is itself the longing of the soulless for salvation.
— Theodor W. Adorno
Allow the courage to create overwhelmed you.
— Micheline Jean Louis
In De Rerum Natura, Lucretius pointed out a very central truth concerning the examined life. That is, that the man of science who concerns himself solely with science, who cannot enjoy and be enriched by art, is a misshapen man. An incomplete man.
— William Styron
ART happens every time we live in the spirit of the moment’s greatness" from Cinderella in Focus
— H.L. Balcomb, Cinderella In Focus: "Curiosity is the doorway to our personal possibility!" 2nd Edition coming Oct.  31, 2017
I am the Constellation of my own
— Oksana Rus
Personally, I'm not much for symbolism. I never get it. Why can't things be just as they are? I never thought to psychoanalyze Seymour Glass or sought to break down "Desolation Row." I just wanted to get lost, become one with somewhere else, slip a wreath on a steeple top solely because I wished it.
— Patti Smith, M Train
Just take my hand, lead, dance with me...and I will simply follow the blueness of the water, the white waves rolling free...where the earth beneath my feet and stars make my heart whole again...in long and priceless moments of shared solitude...
— Oksana Rus
The serenity of the lulling ocean is a wondrous thing to behold..more precious than the gems coveted and covered in platinum or gold...
— Oksana Rus
Infatuated painted clouds, enamored of our silky bed-lagoon, reflect with silent tremors your sweetest of the kisses...whispers...then lightly consume its shining sunset skin with loving smiles greeting the lacy starry night ahead...making our senses dance so softly stepping on to the adorn petals of the place no one else knows...
— Oksana Rus
No amount of art, even of the Great American variety, can elevate you above, or insulate you from, the divisions, the cataclysms, of ordinary life.
— Garth Risk Hallberg, City on Fire
That is what the highest criticism really is, the record of one's own soul. It is more fascinating than history, as it is concerned simply with oneself. It is more delightful than philosophy, as its subject is concrete and not abstract, real and not vague. It is the only civilized form of autobiography, as it deals not with events, but with the thoughts of one's life; not with life's physical accidents of deed or circumstance, but with the spiritual moods and imaginative passions of the mind...The best that one can say of most modern creative art is that it is just a little less vulgar than reality, and so the critic, with his fine sense of distinction and sure instinct of delicate refinement, will prefer to look into the silver mirror or through the woven veil, and will turn his eyes away from the chaos and clamor of actual existence, though the mirror be tarnished and the veil be torn. His sole aim is to chronicle his own impressions. It is for him that pictures are painted, books written, and marble hewn into form.
— Oscar Wilde, The Critic as Artist
art is never finished, only abandoned
— Leonardo da Vinci
Of course a miracle may happen, and you may be a great painter, but you must confess the chances are a million to one against it. It'll be an awful sell if at the end you have to acknowledge you've made a hash of it.""I've got to paint," he repeated."Supposing you're never anything more than third-rate, do you think it will have been worth while to give up everything? After all, in any other walk in life it doesn't matter if you're not very good; you can get along quite comfortably if you're just adequate; but it's different with an artist.""You blasted fool," he said."I don't see why, unless it's folly to say the obvious.""I tell you I've got to paint. I can't help myself. When a man falls into the water it doesn't matter how he swims, well or badly: he's got to get out or else he'll drown.
— W. Somerset Maugham, The Moon and Sixpence
Everyday objects shriek aloud.
— René Magritte
Art is everywhere.
— A.D. Posey
Never be ashamed of your creativity. It simply shows everyone of how you can express your emotions through art
— Ysabelle Nidea
All art is a form of vulnerability because at least part of the artist goes into the piece.
— A.D. Posey
We need to insist on making culture out of our desire: making paintings, novels, plays and films potent and seductive and authentic enough to undermine and overwhelm the Iron Maiden.
— Naomi Wolf, The Beauty Myth
The power of the artform is stronger than stone, the poet says, and chooses the sonnet, a form concerned with argument and persuasion, to say so. This sonnet, he says, will last longer than any gravestone-and you'll be made shinier, brighter, by it. In this form it will-and therefore you will-avoid destruction by war, history, time generally; it'll even keep you alive after death; in fact it'll form a place for you to live, not die, where you'll be seen in the eyes of and the context of this love right to the end of time.
— Ali Smith
And it suggests this truth about the place where aesthetic form meets the human mind. For even if we were to find ourselves homeless, in a strange land, with nothing of ourselves left-say we lost everything-we'd still have another kind of home, in aesthetic form itself, in the familiarity, the unchanging assurance that a known rhythm, a recognised line, the familiar shape of a story, a tune, a line or phrase or sentence gives us every time, even long after we've forgotten we even know it.
— Ali Smith, Artful
A painting walks into the room supported by the collector. It is the painting of a nude by a contemporary artist. She is scarred by shadows from venetian blinds. “The ritual scarification of light and shadow,” I say. But am thinking, silently, the female nude is the self-ironization of the male. She, in his shadow, by design.
— Carla Harryman, There Never Was a Rose Without a Thorn
Who says that art and science cannot coincide? Art is seen as subjective, and science is seen as objective. Paintings, drawings, and sculptures can contain geometric patterns. Most anything you can mix in a beaker or a Petri dish could be displayed as art. The point is that there is art in science, and there is science in art.
— Jen Selinsky
To me, he is art, poetry for the eyes and heart. He is the most terrifyingly beautiful guy I have ever seen. And his scars have to tell a story...
— Jessica Sorensen, Unbeautiful
Art is life.
— A.D. Posey
Every work of art tells a story.
— A.D. Posey
My father said that artists see the world differently than normal people. I see a tree where you mights see a collection of lines, shapes, and shadows.
— Stacey H. Lee
Many years before, Ka had explained to me that when a good poet is confronted with difficult facts that he knows to be true but also inimical to poetry, he has no choice but to feel to the margins; it was, he said, this very retreat that allowed him to hear the hidden music that is the source of all art.
— Orhan Pamuk
Style jazzes up your canvas.
— A.D. Posey
Most great products have been made over the dead bodies of experts.
— David Brown
In the event that everything goes wrong and I’m not here tomorrow, there’s not enough time to fuck around. Why make art? Because it beautifies the world. It’s above people. It’s idealistic. It’s something to strive for that is not the mundane. It gives people peace of mind. It’s something you reach for that you can barely tickle but not quite get a hold of. And this [outpouring] makes that idealistic beauty so bright that you’d have to be a bitter asshole to deny its existence.
— Josh Homme
Poetry is a storm asking peace to dance with her.
— Jenim Dibie, The Calligraphy of God
You are the Poem I dreamed of writing, the Masterpiece I longed to paint. You are the shining Star I reached for in my ever hopeful quest for life fulfilled. Yes, I am Blessed.
— Oksana Rus
Why does man need bread? To survive. But why survive if it is only to eat more bread? To live is more than just to sustain life - it is to enrich, and be enriched by, life.
— Shashi Tharoor, Bookless in Baghdad: Reflections on Writing and Writers
If women have failed to make “universal” art because we’re trapped within the “personal,” why not universalize the “personal” and make it the subject of our art?
— Chris Kraus
The sky blue strengthens slowly, the dawn light rosy and pale the summer song of our romance begin to unveil...with every heart beat and the waves' breath...the time stood in harmony still. Your morning kiss my hands could feel...by your lips soft, so warm, so very gentle, nice and full of life...
— Oksana Rus
Echo of the waves appears in the sky, their lights reflected in your eyes. I'm back in our world and happy again. The sound of your voice, compassionate embrace... The power in your touch, serenity of stride... The beating of your heart calms down my presence, gracing with eternal peace of mind... Bathing in the sunshine of your arms I'm deeply aware of the melodic stream that has no language...gliding beneath the quiet Heaven of your eyes...
— Oksana Rus
In my ArtI have butone fear:that we willfail to befearless.
— Clive Barker, Tonight, Again
Soft on the neck of either dove love's hands let slip the reins: and while we look for light of love, love's twilight wanes...
— Oksana Rus
We should all realize that we can only talk about the bad forgeries, the ones that have been detected; the good ones are still hanging on the walls
— Frank Wynne, I Was Vermeer: The Rise and Fall of the Twentieth Century's Greatest Forger
I wish for everyone to fall in love with their own work. Did you just paint something that you think is cool? Photograph it! Are you struggling over an issue that’s affecting your creativity? Write about it! Your art is the story of your life and you are the only one who can tell it. Tell people what you want them to know about you. Tell them why your art is special. Be constantly overflowing with enthusiasm for your work. Be you, not another artist. Meet the world as you are, and grow with them. The art experience and the human experience can be very similar at times.
— Shayla Maddox
To cherish perfection is to commit creative suicide, and every true artist knows that a masterpiece is an accident that should be burned.
— Barry Hughart, The Story of the Stone
The ability to find pixilation amid the pixelation is at the essence of the gift of celestial Grace.
— David B. Lentz, The Fine Art of Grace: A Novel
Who knows when a trenchant line becomes a human face?
— Ben Shahn
Art is the business of selling fetishes, sacred relics once touched by genius: what the forger offers the gullible buyer is not art, it is "authenticity
— Frank Wynne, I Was Vermeer: The Rise and Fall of the Twentieth Century's Greatest Forger
Film is the ultimate canvas, the elixir of art, and the magic of life.
— A.D. Posey
From personal adversity comes great art
— Tan Redding, A Banquet Of Crumbs
All good art is political. Between the lines of every book, the author implants messages for the unsuspecting reader. If not, what point does it serve?
— Chloe Thurlow, Katie in Love
Good talent needs a showcase to prove its worth.There are many cases across the world across arts where good and talented artists have disappeared bcz no one saw them.
— Chetan katigar
There's nothing more difficult than a line.
— Pablo Picasso
Everything is fair in love and art.
— Christos Tsiolkas, Merciless Gods
Hard and dry, a chickpea is inedible.Hard and dry, a heart is unlovable.Presoak it in dance, music and art.
— Khang Kijarro Nguyen
Maybe we're all ongoing stories, defined at various stages of life, or whenever people oblige us to declare ourselves. Fiction is marvelous for studying this, allowing the writer and reader to leap decades in a sentence. No other art lets you bend time as much.
— Tom Rachman
The relentless persistence of Light eventually exhausts darkness.
— David B. Lentz, The Fine Art of Grace: A Novel
Art is about emotion
—  if art needs to be explained it is no longer art.
Freedom and fullness of expression are of the essence of the art.
— Virginia Woolf, A Room of One's Own
if you have to wait for it to roar out ofyou,then wait patiently.if it never does roar out of you,do something else.
— Charles Bukowski, Sifting Through the Madness for the Word, the Line, the Way
unless it comes out ofyour soul like a rocket,unless being still woulddrive you to madness orsuicide or murder,don’t do it.unless the sun inside you isburning your gut,don’t do it.when it is truly time,and if you have been chosen,it will do it byitself and it will keep on doing ituntil you die or it dies in you.there is no other way.and there never was.
— Charles Bukowski, Sifting Through the Madness for the Word, the Line, the Way
In advanced societies it is not the race politicians or the "rights" leaders who create the new ideas and the new images of life and man. That role belongs to the artists and intellectuals of each generation. Let the race politicians, if they will, create political, economic or organizational forms of leadership; but it is the artists and the creative minds who will, and must, furnish the all important content. And in this role, they must not be subordinated to the whims and desires of politicians, race leaders and civil rights entrepreneurs whether they come from the Left, Right, or Center, or whether they are peaceful, reform, violent, non-violent or laissez-faire. Which means to say, in advanced societies the cultural front is a special one that requires special techniques not perceived, understood, or appreciated by political philistines.
— Harold Cruse
Vincent Van Gogh used to eat yellow paint because he thought it would get the happiness inside him. Many people thought he was mad and stupid for doing so because the paint was toxic, never mind that it was obvious that eating paint couldn't possibly have any direct correlation to one's happiness, but i never saw that.If you were so unhappy that even the maddest ideas could possibly work, like painting the walls of your internal organs yellow, then you are going to do it. It's really no different than falling in love or taking drugs. There is a greater risk of getting your heart broken or overdosing, but people still do ir everyday because there was always that chance it could make things better.Everyone has their own yellow paint.
— Alexandra Timmer
If art is the bridge between what you see in your mind and what the world sees, then skill is how you build that bridge.
— Twyla Tharp
The worst that being an artist could do to you would be that it would make you slightly unhappy constantly.
— J.D. Salinger, De Daumier-Smith's Blue Period
Communication is an art form that is crafted throughout our lives.
— Asa Don Brown, Interpersonal Skills in the Workplace, Finding Solutions that Work
Sometimes taking a leap faith requires an imaginative mind that can create the ending you are unable to see.
— Shannon L. Alder
The extent of creativity to which I admire in an individual is his ability to be richly creative while still, in a way, telling the truth. It is the fool who creates only his own lies, and the bore who simply repeats what he is told.
— Criss Jami, Healology
The best thing about Art is that the people who create it live forever.
— Jonathan Heatt
...those works that don't touch the heart, it seems to me, miss the true aim of Art.
— Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary
Creativity is the result of renunciation on the journey of spiritual enlightenment, not of a thirst for glory or personal pride.
— Ray Mancini, Zen, Meditation & the Art of Shooting: Performance Edge - Sports Edition
Inspiration fans the flame of creation.
— Ka Chinery, Perceptions from the Photon Frequency: The Ascended Version
I had considered myself some kind of genius and had considerably underestimated the toils and difficulties encountered along the path to an art.
— Hermann Hesse, Gertrude
All art is the result of one’s having been in danger of having gone through an experience all the way to the end when no one can go any further. This is what it is like to be an artist – you are unsteady on the edge of life like a swan before an anxious launching of himself on the floods where he is gently caught.
— Edmund de Waal
A heart favours love, a head favours work, a heart and head both favours hobby.
— Amit Kalantri
It is well known that in exchange for visionary powers, artists often suffer with extreme sensitivity and violent changeability of temperament. A philosophical crisis, or simply boredom of inactivity, could send [Holmes] spinning into a paralysed gloom from which [I] could not retrieve him.
— Bonnie MacBird, Art in the Blood
Art expresses those unexplainable thoughts of our soul.
— Debasish Mridha
Great art, she felt, had a calming effect on the viewer; it made one stop in awe, which is exactly what Damien Hirst and Andy Warhol did not do. You did not stop in awe. They stopped you in your tracks, perhaps, but that was not the same thing; awe was something quite different
— Alexander McCall Smith, The Sunday Philosophy Club
That a work of creation struggles and insistently demands to be brought into being is a fact that no genuine artist would think of denying.
— Dorothy L. Sayers
No apprenticeship has ever been thought necessary to qualify for husbandry, the great trade of the country. After what are called the fine arts, and the liberal professions, however, there is perhaps no trade which requires so great a variety of knowledge and experience.
— Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations
Some things are meant to live and die with an artist
— J.R. Stewart
Winter brings a colder palette with more heavy blue and violet, Fall has substantial more reddish and brown, Summer brings a variation of pastel colours and Spring fresh green and tangerine.
— Siren Waroe
A reader lives a thousand lives before he dies, said Jojen. The man who never reads lives only one.
— George R.R. Martin, A Dance with Dragons
We read to know we're not alone.
— William Nicholson, Shadowlands
The more that you read, the more things you will know. The more that you learn, the more places you'll go.
— Dr. Seuss, I Can Read With My Eyes Shut!
Until I feared I would lose it, I never loved to read. One does not love breathing.
— Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird
You don't have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them.
— Ray Bradbury
Let us read, and let us dance; these two amusements will never do any harm to the world.
— Voltaire
A good library will never be too neat, or too dusty, because somebody will always be in it, taking books off the shelves and staying up late reading them.
— Lemony Snicket, Horseradish
Today a reader, tomorrow a leader.
— Margaret Fuller
Reading is escape, and the opposite of escape; it's a way to make contact with reality after a day of making things up, and it's a way of making contact with someone else's imagination after a day that's all too real.
— Nora Ephron
People can lose their lives in libraries. They ought to be warned.
— Saul Bellow
Reading brings us unknown friends
— Honoré de Balzac
No. I can survive well enough on my own— if given the proper reading material.
— Sarah J. Maas, Throne of Glass
Literature is the most agreeable way of ignoring life.
— Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet
Reading is the sole means by which we slip, involuntarily, often helplessly, into another's skin, another's voice, another's soul.
— Joyce Carol Oates
I am too fond of reading books to care to write them.
— Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray
I think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound or stab us. If the book we're reading doesn't wake us up with a blow to the head, what are we reading for? So that it will make us happy, as you write? Good Lord, we would be happy precisely if we had no books, and the kind of books that make us happy are the kind we could write ourselves if we had to. But we need books that affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, like being banished into forests far from everyone, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us. That is my belief.
— Franz Kafka
Reading was a joy, a desperately needed escape -- I didn't read to learn, I was reading to read.
— Christian Bauman
After all, reading is arguably a far more creative and imaginative process than writing; when the reader creates emotion in their head, or the colors of the sky during the setting sun, or the smell of a warm summer's breeze on their face, they should reserve as much praise for themselves as they do for the writer - perhaps more.
— Jasper Fforde, The Well of Lost Plots
No matter who you are, no matter where you live, and no matter how many people are chasing you, what you don't read is often as important as what you do read.
— Lemony Snicket
Take a good book to bed with you—books do not snore.
— Thea Dorn
You’ve read the books?”“I’ve seen the movies.”Cath rolled her eyes so hard, it hurt. (Actually.) (Maybe because she was still on the edge of tears. On the edge, period.) “So you haven’t read the books.”“I’m not really a book person.”“That might be the most idiotic thing you’ve ever said to me
— Rainbow Rowell, Fangirl
Peeing is like a good book in that it is very, very hard to stop once you start.
— John Green, Paper Towns
A good bookshop is just a genteel Black Hole that knows how to read.
— Terry Pratchett, Guards! Guards!
Show me a family of readers, and I will show you the people who move the world.
— Napoléon Bonaparte
Let others pride themselves about how many pages they have written
—  I'd rather boast about the ones I've read.
No matter how busy you may think you are, you must find time for reading, or surrender yourself to self-chosen ignorance.
— Atwood H. Townsend
My personal hobbies are reading, listening to music, and silence.
— Edith Sitwell
Belikov is a sick, evil man who should be thrown into a pit of rabid vipers for the great offense he commited against you this morning.""Thank you." I said primly. Then, I considered. "Can vipers be rabid?""I don't see why not. Everything can be. I think. Canadian geese might be worse than vipers, though.""Canadian geese are deadlier than vipers?""You ever try to feed those little bastards? They're vicious. You get thrown to vipers, you die quickly. But the geese? That'll go on for days. More suffering.""Wow. I don't know whether I should be impressed or frightened that you've thought about all of this.
— Richelle Mead, Frostbite
Read the best books first, or you may not have a chance to read them at all.
— Henry David Thoreau, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers
A library is a place where you can lose your innocence without losing your virginity.
— Germaine Greer
That perfect tranquility of life, which is nowhere to be found but in retreat, a faithful friend and a good library.
— Aphra Behn, The Lucky Chance, Or, the Alderman's Bargain
Why do I read?I just can't help myself.I read to learn and to grow, to laugh  and to be motivated.I read to understand things I've never  been exposed to.I read when I'm crabby, when I've just  said monumentally dumb things to the  people I love.I read for strength to help me when I  feel broken, discouraged, and afraid.I read when I'm angry at the whole  world.I read when everything is going right.I read to find hope.I read because I'm made up not just of  skin and bones, of sights, feelings,  and a deep need for chocolate, but I'm  also made up of words.Words describe my thoughts and what's hidden in my heart.Words are alive--when I've found a story that I love, I read it again and again, like playing a favorite song  over and over.Reading isn't passive--I enter the story with the characters, breathe their air, feel their frustrations, scream at them to stop when they're about to do something stupid, cry with them, laugh with them.Reading for me, is spending time with a friend.A book is a friend.You can never have too many.
— Gary Paulsen, Shelf Life: Stories by the Book
No entertainment is so cheap as reading, nor any pleasure so lasting.
— Mary Wortley Montagu
Read. Read. Read. Just don't read one type of book. Read different books by various authors so that you develop different style.
— R.L. Stine
I read for pleasure and that is the moment I learn the most.
— Margaret Atwood
When I look back, I am so impressed again with the life-giving power of literature. If I were a young person today, trying to gain a sense of myself in the world, I would do that again by reading, just as I did when I was young.
— Maya Angelou
Reading is everything. Reading makes me feel like I've accomplished something, learned something, become a better person. Reading makes me smarter. Reading gives me something to talk about later on. Reading is the unbelievably healthy way my attention deficit disorder medicates itself. Reading is escape, and the opposite of escape; it's a way to make contact with reality after a day of making things up, and it's a way of making contact with someone else's imagination after a day that's all too real. Reading is grist. Reading is bliss.
— Nora Ephron, I Feel Bad about My Neck: And Other Thoughts on Being a Woman
When the Day of Judgment dawns and people, great and small, come marching in to receive their heavenly rewards, the Almighty will gaze upon the mere bookworms and say to Peter, “Look, these need no reward. We have nothing to give them. They have loved reading.
— Virginia Woolf
He held up a book then. “I'm going to read it to you for relax.”“Does it have any sports in it?”“Fencing. Fighting. Torture. Poison. True Love. Hate. Revenge. Giants. Hunters. Bad men. Good men. Beautifulest Ladies. Snakes. Spiders... Pain. Death. Brave men. Cowardly men. Strongest men. Chases. Escapes. Lies. Truths. Passion. Miracles.”“Sounds okay,” I said and I kind of closed my eyes.
— William Goldman, The Princess Bride
Children are made readers on the laps of their parents.
— Emilie Buchwald
I am reading six books at once, the only way of reading; since, as you will agree, one book is only a single unaccompanied note, and to get the full sound, one needs ten others at the same time.
— Virginia Woolf, The Letters of Virginia Woolf: Volume Three, 1923-1928
I can feel infinitely alive curled up on the sofa reading a book.
— Benedict Cumberbatch
It is well known that reading quickens the growth of a heart like nothing else.
— Catherynne M. Valente, The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making
Everybody is a book of blood; wherever we're opened, we're red.
— Clive Barker, Books of Blood: Volumes One to Three
Keep reading. It's one of the most marvelous adventures that anyone can have.
— Lloyd Alexander
I am a part of everything that I have read.
— Theodore Roosevelt
People wonder why the novel is the most popular form of literature
—  people wonder why it is read more than books of science or books of metaphysics. The reason is very simple
I always read. You know how sharks have to keep swimming or they die? I’m like that. If I stop reading, I die.
— Patrick Rothfuss
Somebody who only reads newspapers and at best books of contemporary authors looks to me like an extremely near-sighted person who scorns eyeglasses. He is completely dependent on the prejudices and fashions of his times, since he never gets to see or hear anything else.
— Albert Einstein
I am an omnivorous reader with a strangely retentive memory for trifles.
— Arthur Conan Doyle, The Complete Sherlock Holmes
That I can read and be happy while I am reading, is a great blessing.
— Anthony Trollope
Perhaps there is some secret sort of homing instinct in books that brings them to their perfect readers. How delightful if that were true.
— Mary Ann Shaffer, The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society
We tell ourselves stories in order to live.
— Joan Didion, The White Album
Reading without reflecting is like eating without digesting.
— Edmund Burke
I intend to put up with nothing that I can put 
— Edgar Allan Poe, The Complete Works of Edgar Allan Poe
To learn to read is to light a fire
—  every syllable that is spelled out is a spark.
Books are not made for furniture, but there is nothing else that so beautifully furnishes a house.
— Henry Ward Beecher
... that when you're buying books, you're optimistically thinking you're buying the time to read them.(Paraphrase of Schopenhauer)
— Arthur Schopenhauer
Oh, magic hour, when a child first knows she can read printed words.
— Betty  Smith, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn
When I read a book, I put in all the imagination I can, so that it is almost like writing the book as well as reading it - or rather, it is like living it. It makes reading so much more exciting, but I don't suppose many people try to do it.
— Dodie Smith, I Capture the Castle
I have good reason to be content,for thank God I can read andperhaps understand Shakespeare to his depths.
— John Keats