c2p-cmd/Good-Quotes-Authors huggingface dataset:
The object isn't to make art, it's to be in that wonderful state which makes art inevitable.
— Robert Henri
Nothing exists until or unless it is observed. An artist is making something exist by observing it. And his hope for other people is that they will also make it exist by observing it. I call it 'creative observation.' Creative viewing.
— William S. Burroughs, Ports of Entry: William S. Burroughs and the Arts
Do whatever you do intensely.
— Robert Henri
The business of art lies just in this, -- to make that understood and felt which, in the form of an argument, might be incomprehensible and inaccessible.
— Leo Tolstoy, What Is Art?
Art, in itself, is an attempt to bring order out of chaos. 
— Stephen Sondheim
Artists who seek perfection in everything are those who cannot attain it in anything. 
— Eugène Delacroix
Art never comes from happiness.
— Chuck Palahniuk, Choke
You've always lived a life of pretense, not a real life-- a simulated existence, not a genuine existence. Everything about you, everything you are, has always been pretense, never genuine, never real.
— Thomas Bernhard, Woodcutters
I thought clay must feel happy in the good potter's hand.
— Janet Fitch, White Oleander
When any civilization is dust and ashes," he said, "art is all that's left over. Images, words, music. Imaginative structures. Meaning—human meaning, that is—is defined by them. You have to admit that.
— Margaret Atwood, Oryx and Crake
One wanted, she thought, dipping her brush deliberately, to be on a level with ordinary experience, to feel simply that's a chair, that's a table, and yet at the same time, It's a miracle, it's an ecstasy.
— Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse
It is obvious that art cannot teach anyone anything, since in four thousand years humanity has learnt nothing at all. We should long ago have become angels had we been capable of paying attention to the experience of art, and allowing ourselves to be changed in accordance with the ideals it expresses. Art only has the capacity, through shock and catharsis, to make the human soul receptive to good. It’s ridiculous to imagine that people can be taught to be good…Art can only give food – a jolt – the occasion – for psychical experience.
— Andrei Tarkovsky
Only in art will the lion lie down with the lamb, and the rose grow without thorn.
— Martin Amis
Q: Do you feel concerned that after all this work, people won't treat [Starship Titanic] with the gravity of, say, a movie or a book? That they won't treat it as an art form?D.A.: I hope that's the case, yes. I get very worried about this idea of art. Having been an English literary graduate, I've been trying to avoid the idea of doing art ever since. I think the idea of art kills creativity. ... [I]f somebody wants to come along and say, "Oh, it's art," that's as may be. I don't really mind that much. But I think that's for other people to decide after the fact. It isn't what you should be aiming to do. There's nothing worse than sitting down to write a novel and saying, "Well, okay, I'm going to do something of high artistic worth." ... I think you get most of the most interesting work done in fields where people don't think they're doing art, but merely practicing a craft, and working as good craftsmen. ... I tend to get very suspicious of anything that thinks it's art while it's being created.
— Douglas Adams
Everyone wants to understand art. Why not try to understand the song of a bird? Why does one love the night, flowers, everything around one, without trying to understand them? But in the case of a painting people have to understand. If only they would realize above all that an artist works of necessity, that he himself is only a trifling bit of the world, and that no more importance should be attached to him than to plenty of other things which please us in the world, though we can't explain them. People who try to explain pictures are usually barking up the wrong tree.
— Pablo Picasso
Though I am often in the depths of misery, there is still calmness, pure harmony and music inside me. I see paintings or drawings in the poorest cottages, in the dirtiest corners. And my mind is driven towards these things with an irresistible momentum.
— Vincent van Gogh
Art begins . . . when someone interprets, when someone sees the world through his own eyes. Art happens when what is seen becomes mixed with the inside of the person who is seeing it.
— Chaim Potok, The Gift of Asher Lev
Long looking at paintings is equivalent to being dropped into a foreign city, where gradually, out of desire and despair, a few key words, then a little syntax make a clearing in the silence. Art... is a foreign city, and we deceive ourselves when we think it familiar... We have to recognize that the language of art, all art, is not our mother-tongue.
— Jeanette Winterson, Art Objects: Essays on Ecstasy and Effrontery
You want to know how I think art should be taught to children? Take them to a museum and say, 'This is art, and you can't do it.
— Steve Martin, An Object of Beauty
The artist, and particularly the poet, is always an anarchist in the best sense of the word. He must heed only the call that arises within him from three strong voices: the voice of death, with all its foreboding, the voice of love and the voice of art.
— Federico García Lorca
When I am working on a problem, I never think about beauty........ but when I have finished, if the solution is not beautiful, I know it is wrong.
— R. Buckminster Fuller
There is no place for grief in a house which serves the Muse.
— Sappho
It is in dialogue with pain that many beautiful things acquire their value. Acquaintance with grief turns out to be one of the more unusual prerequisites of architectural appreciation. We might, quite aside from all other requirements, need to be a little sad before buildings can properly touch us.
— Alain de Botton, The Architecture of Happiness
He who loves practice without theory is like the sailor who boards ship without a rudder and compass and never knows where he may cast.
— Leonardo da Vinci
It's a pity one can't imagine what one can't compare to anything. Genius is an African who dreams up snow. 
— Vladimir Nabokov
Art is science made clear.
— Jean Cocteau
Now art should never try to be popular. The public should try to make itself artistic.
— Oscar Wilde
Practicing an art, no matter how well or badly, is a way to make your soul grow, for heaven's sake. Sing in the shower. Dance to the radio. Tell stories. Write a poem to a friend, even a lousy poem. Do it as well as you possibly can. You will get an enormous reward. You will have created something.
— Kurt Vonnegut Jr., A Man Without a Country
Without culture, and the relative freedom it implies, society, even when perfect, is but a jungle. This is why any authentic creation is a gift to the future.
— Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays
Basically there can be no categories such as 'religious' art and 'secular' art, because all true art is incarnational, and therefore 'religious.
— Madeleine L'Engle
You are born an artist or you are not. And you stay an artist, dear, even if your voice is less of a fireworks. The artist is always there.
— Maria Callas
The only honest art form is laughter, comedy. You can't fake it...try to fake three laughs in an hour -- ha ha ha ha ha -- they'll take you away, man. You can't.
— Lenny Bruce
Art is whether or not there is a scream in him wanting to get out in a special way.
— Chaim Potok, My Name Is Asher Lev
A week after my drugs ran out, I left my bed to perform at the college, deciding at the last minute to skip both the doughnut toss and the march of the headless plush toys. Instead, I just heated up a skillet of plastic soldiers, poured a milkshake over my head and called it a night.
— David Sedaris
A man who works with his hands is a laborer
—  a man who works with his hands and his brain is a craftsman
It is necessary to keep one's compass in one's eyes and not in the hand, for the hands execute, but the eye judges.
— Michelangelo Buonarroti
Creating is living doubly. The groping, anxious quest of a Proust, his meticulous collecting of flowers, of wallpapers, and of anxieties, signifies nothing else.
— Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays
We feel lonely now and then and long for friends and think we should be quite different and happier if we found a friend of whom we might say: “He is the one.” But you, too, will begin to learn that there is much self-deception behind this longing; if we yielded too much to it, it would lead us from the road.
— Vincent van Gogh, Complete Letters of Vincent Van Gogh
Art evokes the mystery without which the world would not exist
— René Magritte
If you could say it in words, there would be no reason to paint.
— Edward Hopper
A picture is worth a thousand words.
— Napoléon Bonaparte
There must always be two kinds of art: escape-art, for man needs escape as he needs food and deep sleep, and parable-art, that art which shall teach man to unlearn hatred and learn love.
— W.H. Auden
Every act of creation is first of all an act of destruction." ― Pablo Picasso
— Pablo Picasso
An artist is someone who produces things that people don't need to have but that he - for some reason - thinks it would be a good idea to give them.
— Andy Warhol
It was odd to have something so personal out there in that way, but the good thing about art is that no one necessarily knows what you mean by it anyway.
— Gabrielle Zevin, Memoirs of a Teenage Amnesiac
and half of learning to play is learning what not to playand she's learning the spaces she leaves have their own things to sayand she's trying to sing just enough so that the air around her movesand make music like mercy that gives what it is and has nothing to proveshe crawls out on a limb and begins to build her homeand it's enough just to look around and to know that she's not aloneup up up up up up up points the spire of the steeplebut god's work isn't done by godit's done by people
— Ani DiFranco
Poets are not so scrupulous as you are. They know how useful passion is for publication. Nowadays a broken heart will run to many editions.""I hate them for it," cried Hallward. "An artist should create beautiful things, but should put nothing of his own life into them. We live in an age when men treat art as if it were meant to be a form of autobiography. We have lost the abstract sense of beauty. Some day I will show the world what is it; and for that the world shall never see my portrait of Dorian Gray.
— Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray
When bankers get together for dinner, they discuss Art. When artists get together for dinner, they discuss Money
— Oscar Wilde
Be natural my children. For the writer that is natural has fulfilled all the rules of
— Charles Dickens, Five Novels: Oliver Twist, A Christmas Carol, David Copperfield, A Tale of Two Cities, Great Expectations
Not marble nor the gilded monumentsOf princes, shall outlive this powerful rhyme,But you shall shine more bright in these contentsThan unswept stone, besmeared with sluttish time.When wasteful war shall statues overturnAnd broils roots out the work of masonry,Nor mars his sword nor war's quick fire shall burnThe living record of your memory.'Gainst death and all-oblivious enmityShall you pace forth; your praise shall still find roomEven in the eyes of all posterityThat wear this world out to the ending doom.So, till judgement that yourself arise,You in this, and dwell in lovers eyes.
— William Shakespeare, Shakespeare's Sonnets
Watch a French housewife as she makes her way slowly along the loaded stalls… searching for the peak of ripeness and flavor… What you are seeing is a true artist at work, patiently assembling all the materials of her craft, just as the painter squeezes oil colors onto his palette ready to create a masterpiece.
— Keith Floyd
All real works of art look as though they were done in joy.
— Robert Henri
To consult the rules of composition before making a picture is a little like consulting the law of gravitation before going for a walk.
— Edward Weston
Every now and then one paints a picture that seems to have opened a door and serves as a stepping stone to other things.
— Pablo Picasso
Art is not a thing
—  it is a way.
I'm tired of feeling like I'm fucking crazy.I'm tired of driving till I see stars in my eyes.
— Lana Del Rey
It is a mistake to think that the practice of my art has become easy to me. I assure you, dear friend, no one has given so much care to the study of composition as I. There is scarcely a famous master in music whose works I have not frequently and diligently studied.
— Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
The aim of language...is to communicate...to impart to others the results one has obtained...As I talk, I reveal the situation...I reveal it to myself and to others in order to change it.
— Jean-Paul Sartre
Art is, after all, only a trace – like a footprint which shows that one has walked bravely and in great happiness.
— Robert Henri
It's a good thing you and your pills weren't around a few hundred years ago or there never would have been a Vermeer or a Caravaggio. You'd have drugged "Girl with a Pearl Earring" and "The Taking of Christ" right the hell out of them.
— Jennifer Donnelly, Revolution
The greatest artist does not have any conceptWhich a single piece of marble does not itself containWithin its excess, though onlyA hand that obeys the intellect can discover it.
— Michelangelo Buonarroti, I Sonetti Di Michelangelo: The 78 Sonnets of Michelangelo with Verse Translation
Lies are the religion of slaves and masters. Truth is the god of the free man.
— Maxim Gorky, The Lower Depths, And Other Plays
Artists are those who can evade the verbose.
— Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore
I have things in my head that are not like what anyone taught me — shapes and ideas so near to me, so natural to my way of being and thinking.
— Georgia O'Keeffe
An artist should create beautiful things, but should put nothing of his own life into them.
— Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray
The tools are real. The viewer is real, you, the artist, is real and a part of everything you paint. You connect yourself to the viewer by sharing something that is inside of you that connects with something inside of him. All you have as your guide is that you know what moves you. All you have to do it with is a brush, some chemical and canvas, and technique.
— Steven Brust
Humans make art to remember and be remembered,” said Caius. “Art is their weapon against forgetting.
— Melissa Grey, The Girl at Midnight
Art is vice. You don't wed it, you rape it.
— Edgar Degas
Now take a human body. Why wouldn't you like to see a human body with a curling tail with a crest of ostrich feathers at the end? And with ears shaped like acanthus leaves? It would be ornamental, you know, instead of the stark, bare ugliness we have now. Well, why don't you like the idea? Because it would be useless and pointless. Because the beauty of the human body is that is hasn't a single muscle which doesn't serve its purpose; that there's not a line wasted; that every detail of it fits one idea, the idea of a man and the life of a man.
— Ayn Rand, The Fountainhead
True art awakens theExtraordinaryOvation
— The Gift
If we have no heretics we must invent them, for heresy is essential to health and growth.
— Yevgeny Zamyatin
What is fair in men, passes away, but not so in art
— Leonardo da Vinci
The world doesn't make sense, so why should I paint pictures that do?
— Pablo Picasso
It is in books, poems, paintings which often give us the confidence to take seriously feelings in ourselves that we might otherwise never have thought to acknowledge.
— Alain de Botton, The Architecture of Happiness
The creative act is not performed by the artist alone
—  the spectator brings the work in contact with the external world by deciphering and interpreting its inner qualifications and thus adds his contribution to the creative act.
Forget art. Put your trust in ice cream.
— Charles Baxter, The Feast of Love
Every creator painfully experiences the chasm between his inner vision and its ultimate expression. The chasm is never completely bridged. We all have the conviction, perhaps illusory, that we have much more to say than appears on the paper.
— Isaac Bashevis Singer
...I do not want art for a few
—  any more than education for a few
Provided we can escape from the museums we carry around inside us, provided we can stop selling ourselves tickets to the galleries in our own skulls, we can begin to contemplate an art which re-creates the goal of the sorcerer: changing the structure of reality by the manipulation of living symbols ... Art tells gorgeous lies that come true.
— Hakim Bey, TAZ: The Temporary Autonomous Zone
I am interested in art as a means of living a life
—  not as a means of making a living.
A genuine work of art must mean many things; the truer its art, the more things it will mean. If my drawing, on the other hand, is so far from being a work of art that it needs THIS IS A HORSE written under it, what can it matter that neither you nor your child should know what it means? It is there not so much to convey a meaning as to wake a meaning. If it do not even wake an interest, throw it aside. A meaning may be there, but it is not for you. If, again, you do not know a horse when you see it, the name written under it will not serve you much. At all events, the business of the painter is not to teach zoology.
— George MacDonald, The Light Princess and Other Fairy Stories
Art arises from loss. I wish this weren't the case. I wish that every time I met a new woman and she rocked my world, I was inspired to write my ass off. But that is not what happens. What happens is we lie around in bed eating chocolate and screwing. Art is what happens when things don't work out, when you're licking your wounds. Art is, to a larger extent than people would like to think, a productive licking of the wounds.
— Steve Almond, Candyfreak: A Journey through the Chocolate Underbelly of America
Art is not about thinking something up. It is the opposite -- getting something down.
— Julia Cameron
People want to be bowled over by something special. Nine times out of ten you might strike out, but that tenth time, that peak experience, is what people want. That's what can move the world. That's art.
— Haruki Murakami
I do not have many things that are meaningful to me. Except my doubts and my fears. And my art.
— Chaim Potok, My Name Is Asher Lev
This is Art holding a Mirror up to Life. That’s why everything is exactly the wrong way around.
— Terry Pratchett, Wyrd Sisters
Perhaps everything lies in knowing what words to speak, what actions to perform, and in what order and rhythm; or else someone's gaze, answer, gesture is enough; it is enough for someone to do something for the sheer pleasure of doing it, and for his pleasure to become the pleasure of others: at that moment, all spaces change, all heights, distances; the city is transfigured, becomes crystalline, transparent as a dragonfly.
— Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities
Art is not, as the metaphysicians say, the manifestation of some mysterious idea of beauty or God; it is not, as the aesthetical physiologists say, a game in which man lets off his excess of stored-up energy; it is not the expression of man's emotions by external signs; it is not the production of pleasing objects; and, above all, it is not pleasure; but it is a means of union among men, joining them together in the same feelings, and indispensable for the life and progress toward well-being of individuals and of humanity.
— Leo Tolstoy, What Is Art?
This is the time for every artist in every genre to do what he or she does loudly and consistently. It doesn't matter to me what your position is. You've got to keep asserting the complexity and the originality of life, and the multiplicity of it, and the facets of it. This is about being a complex human being in the world, not about finding a villain. This is no time for anything else than the best that you've got.
— Toni Morrison
For me, Art is the restoration of order. It may discuss all sort of terrible things, but there must be satisfaction at the end. A little bit of hunger, but also satisfaction.
— Toni Morrison
It is through living that we discover ourselves, at the same time as we discover the world around us.
— Henri Cartier-Bresson, Henri Cartier-Bresson: The Modern Century
A guilty conscience needs to confess. A work of art is a confession.
— Albert Camus
I want to be famous but unknown!
— Edgar Degas
All art is propaganda. It is universally and inescabably propaganda; sometimes unconsciously, but often deliberately, propaganda.
— Upton Sinclair
I have forced myself to contradict myself in order to avoid conforming to my own taste.
— Marcel Duchamp
If you don't want a generation of robots, fund the arts!
— Cath Crowley, Graffiti Moon
The arts are not just a nice thing to have or to do if there is free time or if one can afford it. Rather, paintings and poetry, music and fashion, design and dialogue, they all define who we are as a people and provide an account of our history for the next generation.
— Michelle Obama
Fashion is ephemeral, dangerous and unfair.
— Karl Lagerfeld
The art of life is not controlling what happens to us, but using what happens to us
— Gloria Steinem
The great artists of the world are never Puritans, and seldom even ordinarily respectable.
— H.L. Mencken
Observation is a dying art.
— Stanley Kubrick, Stanley Kubrick: Interviews
I’ve decided the act that cannot wait / is the important will to create / But, ah, if my belly is ignored / the pantry door I shall implore / But I’ve been known to reach the bed / ideas still famished in my head.
— Roman Payne, Cities & Countries
To discover the mode of life or of art whereby my spirit could express itself in unfettered freedom.
— James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
What art seeks to disturb is monotony of type, slavery of custom, tyranny of habit, and the reduction of man to the level of a machine.
— Oscar Wilde
In the traditional Islamic world, the hierarchy of the arts was not based on whether they were "fine" or "industrial" or "minor". It was based upon the effect of art on the soul of the human being.
— Seyyed Hossein Nasr, A Young Muslim's Guide to the Modern World
One thing that struck me early is that you don’t put into a photograph what’s going to come out. Or, vice versa, what comes out is not what you put in.
— Diane Arbus
Bring together things that have not yet been brought together and did not seem predisposed to be so.
— Robert Bresson, Notes on the Cinematographer
The term bohemian has a bad reputation because it's allied to myriad clichés, but Parisians originally adopted the term, associated with nomadic Gypsies, to describe artists and writers who stayed up all night and ignored the pressures of the industrial world.
— Sarah Thornton, Seven Days in the Art World
If London is a watercolor, New York is an oil painting.
— Peter Shaffer
Maybe you are a poet and a dreamer, but don't you realize that those two species are extinct now?
— J.G. Ballard
Art is communication.
— Madeleine L'Engle, Walking on Water: Reflections on Faith and Art
Only the very greatest art invigorates without consoling.
— Iris Murdoch
Not all are called to be artists in the specific sense of the term. Yet, as Genesis has it, all men and women are entrusted with the task of crafting their own life: in a certain sense, they are to make of it a work of art, a masterpiece.
— John Paul II
It is really a matter of ending this silence and solitude, of breathing and stretching one's arms again.
— Mark Rothko
But then, that’s the beauty of writing stories—each one is an exploratory journey in search of a reason and a shape. And when you find that reason and that shape, there’s no feeling lik
— T.C. Boyle
A work of art which did not begin in emotion is not art.
— Paul Cézanne
Serious art is born from serious play.
— Julia Cameron, The Artist's Way
If you cannot please everyone with your deeds and your art, please a few. To please many is bad.
— Friedrich Schiller
The individual, man as a man, man as a brain, if you like, interests me more than what he makes, because I've noticed that most artists only repeat themselves. 
— Marcel Duchamp
A work that aspires, however humbly, to the condition of art should carry its justification in every line...To snatch in a moment of courage, from the remorseless rush of time, a passing phase of life is only the beginning of the task. The task approached in tenderness and faith is to hold up unquestioningly, without choice and without fear, the rescued fragment before all eyes and in the light of a sincere mood. It is to show its vibration, its colour, its form; and through its movement, its form, and its colour, reveal the substance of its truth -- disclose its inspiring secret: the stress and passion within the core of each convincing moment. In a single-minded attempt of that kind, if one be deserving and fortunate, one may perchance attain to such clearness of sincerity that at last the presented vision of regret or pity, of terror or mirth, shall awaken in the hearts of the beholders that feeling of unavoidable solidarity; of the solidarity in mysterious origin, in toil, in joy, in hope, in uncertain fate, which binds men to each other and all mankind to the visible world.
— Joseph Conrad
I want to overhear passionate arguments about what we are and what we are doing and what we ought to do. I want to feel that art is an utterance made in good faith by one human being to another. I want to believe there are geniuses scheming to astonish the rest of us, just for the pleasure of it.
— Marilynne Robinson, The Death of Adam: Essays on Modern Thought
The point of art is to inspire you to create your own.
— Misha Collins
Those who do not want to imitate anything, produce nothing.
— Salvador Dalí
...sometimes we enter art to hide within it. It is where we can go to save ourselves, where a third-person voice protects us.
— Michael Ondaatje, Divisadero
As humanity perfects itself, man becomes degraded. When everything is reduced to the mere counter-balancing of economic interests, what room will there be for virtue? When Nature has been so subjugated that she has lost all her original forms, where will that leave the plastic arts? And so on. In the mean time, things are going to get very murky.
— Gustave Flaubert
This grandiose tragedy that we call modern art.
— Salvador Dalí
Tattooing, when understood in its entirety, must be seen as a religious act. The human being brings forth images from the center of the self and communicates them to the world. Fantasy is embodied in reality and the person is made whole.
— Spider Webb
When the work takes over, then the artist is enabled to get out of the way, not to interfere. When the work takes over, then the artist listens.
— Madeleine L'Engle, Walking on Water: Reflections on Faith and Art
Art is what gets us beyond what is real. It makes reality more real. It also shortens the distance we gotta travel to see how connected we are. 
— Laura Pritchett, Sky Bridge
Art is literacy of the heart.
— Elliot Eisner
I'm an observer. I read about life. I research life. I find a corner in a room and melt into it. I can become invisible. It's an art, and I am a wonderful practitioner.
— Christine Feehan, The Twilight Before Christmas
Great art is the outward expression of an inner life in the artist, and this inner life will result in his personal vision of the world.
— Edward Hopper
I try to apply colors like words that shape poems, like notes that shape music. 
— Joan Miró
For all the pain you suffered, my mama. For all the torment of your past and future years, my mama. For all the anguish this picture of pain will cause you. For the unspeakable mystery that brings good fathers and sons into the world and lets a mother watch them tear at each other’s throats. For the Master of the Universe, whose suffering world I do not comprehend. For dreams of horror, for nights of waiting, for memories of death, for the love I have for you, for all the things I remember, and for all the things I should remember but have forgotten, for all these I created this painting—an observant Jew working on a crucifixion because there was no aesthetic mold in his own religious tradition into which he could pour a painting of ultimate anguish and torment.
— Chaim Potok, My Name Is Asher Lev
There is no art without contemplation.
— Robert Henri
Color is only beautiful when it means something.
— Robert Henri
The professional has learned that success, like happiness, comes as a by-product of work. The professional concentrates on the work and allows rewards to come or not come, whatever they like.
— Steven Pressfield, The War of Art: Break Through the Blocks & Win Your Inner Creative Battles
Whatever the source of emotion that drives me to create, I want to give it a form which has some connection with the visible world, even if it is only to wage war on that world....I want my paintings to be able to defend themselves to resist the invader, just as though there were razor blades on all surfaces so no one could touch them without cutting his hands.
— Pablo Picasso
Art's cruel. You can get away with murder with words. But a picture is like a window straight through to your inmost heart.
— John Fowles, The Collector
Where does contagion end and art begin?
— Neil Gaiman, M Is for Magic
I will always know the glory of the beautiful and rare, as they will know security from labour and prayer. As they will hear the laughter of the children they gave life, I will know the torments of the song born under knife.
— Roman Payne
I realized that the longing for art, like the longing for love, is a malady that blinds us, and makes us forget the things we already know, obscuring reality.
— Orhan Pamuk, The Museum of Innocence
I hope to depart in no other way than looking back with love and wistfulness and thinking, oh paintings that I would have made..
— Vincent van Gogh
Consider everything an experiment.
— Corita Kent
Mockingbirds are the true artists of the bird kingdom. Which is to say, although they're born with a song of their own, an innate riff that happens to be one of the most versatile of all ornithological expressions, mocking birds aren't content to merely play the hand that is dealt them. Like all artists, they are out to rearrange reality. Innovative, willful, daring, not bound by the rules to which others may blindly adhere, the mockingbird collects snatches of birdsong from this tree and that field, appropriates them, places them in new and unexpected contexts, recreates the world from the world. For example, a mockingbird in South Carolina was heard to blend the songs of thirty-two different kinds of birds into a ten-minute performance, a virtuoso display that serve no practical purpose, falling, therefore, into the realm of pure art.
— Tom Robbins, Skinny Legs and All
Art is a corner of creation seen through a temperament.
— Émile Zola
Lying, the telling of beautiful untrue things, is the proper aim of Art.
— Oscar Wilde
The good qualities in our soul are most successfully and forcefully awakened by the power of art. Just as science is the intellect of the world, art is its soul.
— Maxim Gorky, Untimely Thoughts: Essays on Revolution, Culture, and the Bolsheviks, 1917-1918
Art is essentially the affirmation, the blessing, and the deification of existence.
— Friedrich Nietzsche
With respect to the requirement of art, the probable impossible is always preferable to the improbable possible.
— Aristotle, Poetics
It is art that makes life, makes interest, makes importance, and I know of no substitute for the force and beauty of it's process.
— Henry James
When the artist finds himself he is lost. The fact that he has succeeded in never finding himself is regarded by Max Ernst as his only lasting achievement. 
— Max Ernst
Art does not reproduce the visible
—  it makes visible.
If it sells, it's art.
— Frank Lloyd Wright
A tree growing out of the ground is as wonderful today as it ever was. It does not need to adopt new and startling methods.
— Robert Henri
A common defect of modern art study is that too many students do not know why they draw.
— Robert Henri
Genius is not a possession of the limited few, but exists in some degree in everyone. Where there is natural growth, a full and free play of faculties, genius will manifest itself.
— Robert Henri
How to Draw a Picture (XII)Know when you're finished, and when you are, put your pencil or your paintbrush down. All the rest is only life.
— Stephen King
It was a miserable machine, an inefficient machine, she thought, the human apparatus for painting or for feeling; it always broke down at the critical moment; heroically, one must force it on.
— Virginia Woolf
Modern art is what happens when painters stop looking at girls and persuade themselves that they have a better idea.
— John Ciardi
I really, sincerely believe that one should trust the work, and not the author.
— Peter Greenaway
Well, life isn't a cakewalk, is it?! Eighty-nine percent of the world's most valuable art was created by men living in rat-infested flats. You think Velásquez wore Adidas? You think he enjoyed the luxuries of central heating and twenty-four-hour pizza delivery?!
— Marisha Pessl
I would rather fail as an artist than succeed as anything else.
— Robert Dowling
Curiosity is the main energy...
— Robert Rauschenberg
What's with the serum?"I don't know, but it sounds ominous. We better put a telepathic direction finder on Benway. The man's not to be trusted. Might do almost anything...Turn a massacre into a sex orgy..."Or a joke."Precisely. Arty type...No principles...
— William S. Burroughs, Naked Lunch
One of the most valuable things one of my art teachers said to me was, ‘Don’t get upset by criticism. Value the fact that at least someone noticed what you did.
— Chris Ware
You must write as if Dostoyevsky himself will be reading your novel, and Shakespeare will be acting it out.
— Christina Westover, Precipice
The modern artist is working with space and time and expressing his feelings rather than illustrating.
— Jackson Pollock
The world before us is a postcard, and I imagine the story we are writing on it.
— Mary E. Pearson, The Miles Between
The artistic image is not intended to represent the thing itself, but, rather, the reality of the force the thing contains.
— James     Baldwin, Nobody Knows My Name
What do you think an artist is? An imbecile who only has eyes, if he is a painter, or ears if he is a musician, or a lyre in every chamber of his heart if he is a poet, or even, if he is a boxer, just his muscles? Far from it: at the same time he is also a political being, constantly aware of the heartbreaking, passionate, or delightful things that happen in the world, shaping himself completely in their image. How could it be possible to feel no interest in other people, and with a cool indifference to detach yourself from the very life which they bring to you so abundantly? No, painting is not done to decorate apartments. It is an instrument of war.
— Pablo Picasso
To draw something is to try to capture it FOREVER, if you really love something, you never try to keep it the way it is forever. You have to let it be free to change
— Cassandra Clare, City of Ashes
I'm not an abstractionist. I'm not interested in the relationship of color or form or anything else. I'm interested only in expressing basic human emotions: tragedy, ecstasy, doom, and so on.
— Mark Rothko
Art does not reproduce what we see. It makes us see.
— Paul Klee
Art is a marriage of the conscious and the unconscious.
— Jean Cocteau
We need our Arts to teach us how to breathe
— Ray Bradbury, Zen in the Art of Writing
Spontaneity is a meticulously prepared art
— Oscar Wilde
I am an obscure and patient pearl-fisherman who dives into the deepest waters and comes up with empty hands and a blue face. Some fatal attraction draws me down into the abysses of thought, down into those innermost recesses which never cease to fascinate the strong. I shall spend my life gazing at the ocean of art, where others voyage or fight; and from time to time I’ll entertain myself by diving for those green and yellow shells that nobody will want. So I shall keep them for myself and cover the walls of my hut with them.
— Gustave Flaubert
Art transcends its limitations only by staying within them.
— Flannery O'Connor
A Curve does not exist in its full power until contrasted with a straight line.
— Robert Henri
If you can sustain your interest in what you’re doing, you’re an extremely fortunate person. What you see very frequently in people’s professional lives, and perhaps in their emotional life as well, is that they lose interest in the third act. You sort of get tired, and indifferent, and, sometimes, defensive. And you kind of lose your capacity for astonishment — and that’s a great loss, because the world is a very astonishing place. What I feel fortunate about is that I’m still astonished, that things still amaze me. And I think that that’s the great benefit of being in the arts, where the possibility for learning never disappears, where you basically have to admit you never learn it.
— Milton Glaser
...The efficacy of psychedelics with regard to art has to do with their ability to render language weightless, as fluid and ephemeral as those famous "bubble letters" of the sixties. Psychedelics, I think, disconnect both the signifier and the signified from their purported referents in the phenomenal world - simultaneously bestowing upon us a visceral insight into the cultural mechanics of language, and a terrifying inference of the tumultuous nature that swirls beyond it. In my own experience, it always seemed as if language were a tablecloth positioned neatly upon the table until some celestial busboy suddenly shook it out, fluttering and floating it, and letting it fall back upon the world in not quite the same position as before - thereby giving me a vertiginous glimpse into the abyss that divides the world from our knowing of it. And it is into this abyss that the horror vacui of psychedelic art deploys itself like an incandescent bridge. Because it is one thing to believe, on theoretical evidence, that we live in a prison-house of language. It is quite another to know it, to actually peek into the slippery emptiness as the Bastille explodes around you. Yet psychedelic art takes this apparent occasion for despair and celebrates our escape from linguistic control by flowing out, filling that rippling void with meaningful light, laughter, and a gorgeous profusion.
— Dave Hickey, Air Guitar: Essays on Art and Democracy
Grey has no agenda. . . . Grey has the ability, that no other colour has, to make the invisible visible.
— Roma Tearne, Mosquito
Remember, light and shadow never stand still.
— Benjamin West
A picture might be worth a thousand words but a good sentence is worth a thousand windows
— Mati Klarwein
Don't make it new
—  make it whole.
The need to be a great artist makes it hard to be an artist. The need to produce a great work of art makes it hard to produce any art at all.
— Julia Cameron
Art isn't meaningless... It is in itself. It isn't in that it tries to make life less so.
— F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Beautiful and Damned
Perhaps it's good for one to suffer. Can an artist do anything if he's happy? Would he ever want to do anything? What is art, after all, but a protest against the horrible inclemency of life?
— Aldous Huxley, Antic Hay
The basic project of art is always to make the world whole and comprehensible, to restore it to us in all its glory and its occasional nastiness, not through argument but through feeling, and then to close the gap between you and everything that is not you, and in this way pass from feeling to meaning. It's not something that committees can do. It's not a task achieved by groups or by movements. It's done by individuals, each person mediating in some way between a sense of history and an experience of the world.
— Robert Hughes, The Shock of the New
Glitter is the herpes of craft supplies.
— Demetri Martin
In a world of lies and liars, an honest work of art is always an act of social responsibility.
— Robert McKee, Story: Substance, Structure, Style, and the Principles of Screenwriting
Why shouldn’t art be pretty? There are enough unpleasant things in the world.
— Pierre-Auguste Renoir
Innovation is an evolutionary process, so it's not necessary to be radical all the time.
— Marc Jacobs
Art is my life and my life is art.
— Yoko Ono
Art is not about itself but the attention we bring to it.
— Marcel Duchamp
Photography is essentially an act of recognition by street photographers, not an act of invention. Photographers might respond to an old man’s face, or an Arbus freak, or the way light hits a building—and then they move on. Whereas in all the other art forms, take William Blake, everything that came to that paper never existed before. It’s the idea of alchemy, of making something from nothing.
— Duane Michals
We are not being true to the artist as a man if we consider his art work junk simply because we differ with his outlook on life. Christian schools, Christian parents, and Christian pastors often have turned off young people at just this point. Because the schools, the pastors, and the parents did not make a distinction between technical excellence and content, the whole of much great art has been rejected with scorn and ridicule. Instead, if the artist's technical excellence is high, he is to be praised for this, even if we differ with his world view. Man must be treated fairly as man.
— Francis A. Schaeffer, Art & the Bible
As an artist you organize your life so that you get a chance to paint, a window of time, but that's no guarantee you'll create anything worth all your effort. You're always haunt by the idea you're wasting your life.
— Chuck Palahniuk, Diary
Art is partly communication, but only partly. The rest is discovery.
— William Golding, Free Fall
I don't want my work to be an exposure of my feelings.
— Jasper Johns
The Painting is not shit,' said Lucien.'I know,' said Henri. 'That was just part of the subterfuge. I am of royal lineage; subterfuge is one of the many talents we carry in our blood, along with guile and hemophilia.
— Christopher Moore, Sacré Bleu: A Comedy d'Art
The artist committing himself to his calling has volunteered for hell, whether he knows it or not. He will be dining for the duration on a diet of isolation, rejection, self-doubt, despair, ridicule, contempt, and humiliation.
— Steven Pressfield, The War of Art: Break Through the Blocks & Win Your Inner Creative Battles
The same sensitivity that opens artists to Being also makes them vulnerable to the dark powers of non-Being. It is no accident that many creative people--including Dante, Pascal, Goethe, Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, Beethoven, Rilke, Blake, and Van Gogh--struggled with depression, anxiety, and despair. They paid a heavy price to wrest their gifts from the clutches of non-Being. But this is what true artists do: they make their own frayed lives the cable for the surges of power generated in the creative force fields of Being and non-Being. (Beyond Religion, p. 124)
— David N. Elkins
Art is something you choose to make... it's a bringing together of... of everything around you into something that makes you more human, more khepri, whatever. More of a person.
— China Miéville, Perdido Street Station
Begin by learning to draw and paint like the old masters. After that, you can do as you like; everyone will respect you.
— Salvador Dalí
Without atmosphere a painting is nothing.
— Rembrandt
Any great art work … revives and readapts time and space, and the measure of its success is the extent to which it makes you an inhabitant of that world - the extent to which it invites you in and lets you breathe its strange, special air.
— Leonard Bernstein
The artist is a collector of things imaginary or real. He accumulates things with the same enthusiasm that a little boy stuffs his pockets. The scrap heap and the museum are embraced with equal curiosity. He takes snapshots, makes notes and records impressions on tablecloths or newspapers, on backs of envelopes or matchbooks. Why one thing and not another is part of the mystery, but he is omnivorous.
— Paul Rand, Paul Rand: A Designer's Art
It is only in his work that an artist can find reality and satisfaction, for the actual world is less intense than the world of his invention and consequently his life, without recourse to violent disorder, does not seem very substantial. The right condition for him is that in which his work in not only convenient but unavoidable.
— Tennessee Williams
When nations grow old the Arts grow coldAnd commerce settles on every tree
— William Blake
The urge is always with me to retouch yesterday's canvas with today's paintbrush and cover the things that fill me with regret..
— Andrew Davidson
The best art always comes unbidden.
— Christopher Pike, The Red Dice
But an artist, he realized. Or rather so-called artist. Bohemian. That's closer to it. The artistic life without the talent.
— Philip K. Dick, The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch
I believe in walking out of a museum before the paintings you've seen begin to run together. How else can you carry anything away with you in your mind's eye?
— Elizabeth Kostova, The Swan Thieves
Sometimes an artist's first invention is herself.
— Stephanie Vaughn
There’s something about being naïve. Really interesting things come because you don’t know what the rules are, what you can and can’t do.
— Steve Buscemi
She soon learned, though, that giving weight to other people's opinions was creative nihilism; it was like being banished from the Land of No Words and exiled to the Land of All Bullshit.
— Stephanie Kallos, Broken for You
He realised, more vividly than ever before, that art had two constant, two unending preoccupations: it is always meditating upon death and it is always thereby creating life.
— Boris Pasternak, Doctor Zhivago
That's creativity in a nutshell. A messy tug-of-war with imagination to erase that feeling that nothing really matters anyway.
— Zoe Whittall, Holding Still For As Long As Possible
At eight, he had once told his mother that he wanted to paint air.
— Vladimir Nabokov
This is the theory… that anything that is art… is presumably about some certain thing, but is really always about something else, and it’s no good having one without the other, because if you just have the something it is boring and if you just have the something else it’s irritating.
— Edward Gorey
A good picture is equivalent to a good deed.
— Vincent van Gogh
The sculpture is already complete within the marble block, before I start my work. It is already there, I just have to chisel away the superfluous material.
— Michelangelo Buonarroti
The artist is always beginning. Any work of art which is not a beginning, an invention, a discovery is of little worth.
— Ezra Pound
To my mind, a picture should be something pleasant, cheerful, and pretty, yes pretty! There are too many unpleasant things in life as it is without creating still more of them.
— Pierre-Auguste Renoir
A study in scarlet, eh? Why shouldn't we use a little art jargon? There's the scarlet thread of murder running through the colourless skein of life, and our duty is to unravel it, and isolate it, and expose every inch of it.
— Arthur Conan Doyle, Sherlock Holmes: The Complete Novels and Stories, Volume I
An artist is like a woman who can do nothing but love, and who succumbs to every stray male jackass.
— Heinrich Böll, The Clown
After all, what is art? Art is the creative process and it goes through all fields. Einstein’s theory of relativity – now that is a work of art! Einstein was more of an artist in physics than on his violin.Art is this: art is the solution of a problem which cannot be expressed explicitly until it is solved.
— Piet Hein, Grooks 1
I am the foremost collector of velvet Elvii in the city of Chicago," I said at once. "Elvii?" Marcone inquired."The plural would be Elvises, I guess," I said. "But if I say that too often, I start muttering to myself and calling things 'my precious,' so I usually go with the Latin plural.
— Jim Butcher, Death Masks
Do you know that every great thing in the history of art and every beautiful thing in life is actually what you call nasty or has been caused by feelings that you would call nasty? By passion, by love, by hatred, by truth. Do you know that?
— John Fowles, The Collector
And I bet it's harder than people think, isn't it? Everything looks so simple from a distance. Then, the more you look, the more you see. And that's when you have to rise to the challenge.
— Laura Pritchett, Sky Bridge