c2p-cmd/Good-Quotes-Authors huggingface dataset:
Great paintings—people flock to see them, they draw crowds, they’re reproduced endlessly on coffee mugs and mouse pads and anything-you-like. And, I count myself in the following, you can have a lifetime of perfectly sincere museum-going where you traipse around enjoying everything and then go out and have some lunch. But if a painting really works down in your heart and changes the way you see, and think, and feel, you don’t think, ‘oh, I love this picture because it’s universal.’ ‘I love this painting because it speaks to all mankind.’ That’s not the reason anyone loves a piece of art. It’s a secret whisper from an alleyway. Psst, you. Hey kid. Yes you. An individual heart-shock. Your dream, Welty’s dream, Vermeer’s dream. You see one painting, I see another, the art book puts it at another remove still, the lady buying the greeting card at the museum gift shop sees something else entire, and that’s not even to mention the people separated from us by time—four hundred years before us, four hundred years after we’re gone—it’ll never strike anybody the same way and the great majority of people it’ll never strike in any deep way at all but—a really great painting is fluid enough to work its way into the mind and heart through all kinds of different angles, in ways that are unique and very particular. Yours, yours. I was painted for you. And—oh, I don’t know, stop me if I’m rambling… but Welty himself used to talk about fateful objects. Every dealer and antiquaire recognizes them. The pieces that occur and recur. Maybe for someone else, not a dealer, it wouldn’t be an object. It’d be a city, a color, a time of day. The nail where your fate is liable to catch and snag.
— Donna Tartt, The Goldfinch
Concentrate on a single feature – as, build all toward one eye – make all lines lead toward that eye. (Robert Henri)
— Robert Henri
Love is an art and this love lacks artists.
— Javaria Waseem, You and Her
Music is the 'pure' art par excellence. It says nothing and has nothing to say. Never really having an expressive function, it is opposed to drama, which even in its most refined forms still bears a social message and can only be 'put over' on the basis of an immediate and profound affinity with the values and expectations of its audience. The theatre divides its public and divides itself. The Parisian opposition between right-bank and left-bank theatr, bourgeois theatre and avant-garde theatre, is inextricably aesthetic and political.
— Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste
as if it were a point of honor—which, indeed, a point of art often is.
— Vladimir Nabokov
The only benefit of a Campbell's soup can by Andy Warhol (and it is an immense benefit) is that it releases us from the need to decide between beautiful and ugly, between real and unreal, between transcendence and immanence.
— Jean Baudrillard, The Transparency of Evil: Essays in Extreme Phenomena
I've become like one of those people I hate, the sort who go to the museum and, instead of looking at the magnificent Brueghel, take a picture of it, reducing it from art to proof. It's not "Look what Brueghel did, painted this masterpiece" but "Look what I did, went to Rotterdam and stood in front of a Brueghel painting!
— David Sedaris, Let's Explore Diabetes with Owls
We love the imperfect shapes in nature and in the works of art, look for an intentional error as a sign of the golden key and sincerity found in true mastery.
— Dejan Stojanovic
I'm never proud of my old work. I always feel as though my skills have since improved.
— Criss Jami, Killosophy
The work of the art student is no light matter. Few have the courage and stamina to see it through. You have to make up your mind to be alone in many ways. We like sympathy and we like to be in company. It is easier than going it alone. But alone one gets acquainted with himself, grows up and on, not stopping with the crowd. It costs to do this. If you succeed somewhat you may have to pay for it as well as enjoy it all your life.
— Robert Henri, The Art Spirit: Notes, Articles, Fragments of Letters and Talks to Students, Bearing on the Concept and Technique of Picture Making, the Study of Art
Through art they confuse us and blind us to our enslavement. Art adorns our prison walls, keeps us silent and diverted and indifferent.
— Jim Morrison, The Lords and the New Creatures
The problem with a popular art form is that those who want something more are in a hopeless minority compared with the millions who are always seeing it for the first time, or for the reassurance and gratification of seeing the conventions fulfilled again.
— Pauline Kael, Going Steady: Film Writings, 1968-1969
Sound unbound by nature becomes bounded by art.
— Dejan Stojanovic
Magic is the stunning art of surprising your audience, so that nothing else surprises them.
— Amit Kalantri
However, as words become particularized, and as men begin - in however small a way - to use them in personal, arbitrary ways, so their transformation into art begins.
— Yukio Mishima, Sun and Steel
An artist can respect the backfield of fact before which every human being stands and choose not to address those facts.
— Tom Bissell, Magic Hours: Essays on Creators and Creation
Only after seeing the winter, do you comprehend the richness of summer. This was a big theme, and one I could confidently do: the infinite variety of nature.
— Martin Gayford, A Bigger Message: Conversations with David Hockney
Art is my Life.
— Olivia Sinaga
Would Turner have slept through such terrific drama? Absolutely not! Anyone in my business who slept through that would be a fool. I don't keep office hours.
— Martin Gayford, A Bigger Message: Conversations with David Hockney
We always search for the signature of God to prove His existence. And now I say unto you that Art is His very signature!
— Mehmet Murat ildan
Everything, indeed, in a work of art should be unedited,--and even the words, by the manner of grouping them, of shaping them to new meanings,--and one often regrets having an alphabet familiar to too many half-lettered persons.
— Rémy de Gourmont, The Book of Masks
The more successful the work, the more people will step in to try to influence and manipulate the work for their own benefit.
— Michael Gungor, The Crowd, The Critic And The Muse: A Book For Creators
Art, as I see it, is any human activity which doesn’t grow out of either of our species’ two basic instincts: survival and reproduction.
— Scott McCloud, Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art
I've been 40 years discovering that the queen of all colors was black.
— Pierre-Auguste Renoir
Art has nothing to do with taste. Art is not there to be tasted
— Max Ernst
Approach a great painting as thou wouldst approach a great prince.
— Kakuzō Okakura, The Book of Tea
Look, I don't see why bad artists - I mean artists who are obviously incompetent... - why they should be presented hypocritically as good artists just because they're supposed to be advancing the frontiers of freedom of expression or... ...demonstrating that there should be no limit on subject matter.
— Anthony Burgess, Earthly Powers
The true artist plays mad with his soul, labors at the very lip of the volcano, but remembers and clings to his purpose, which is as strong as the dream. He is not someone possessed, like Cassandra, but a passionate, easily tempted explorer who fully intends to get home again, like Odysseus.
— John Gardner
Too Clear, too clean. The problem was precision, perfection; the problem was "digitization" which sucked the life out of everything that got smeared through its microscopic mesh. Film, photography, music: dead. "An aesthetic holocaust!
— Jennifer Egan, A Visit from the Goon Squad
Because the world has gone nutty and art always paints the spirit of its times
— Robert A. Heinlein, Stranger in a Strange Land
This is the only real concern of the artist, to recreate out of the disorder of life that order which is art.
— James     Baldwin
Carrie felt this as a personal reproof. She read "Dora Thorne," or had a great deal in the past. It seemed only fair to her, but she supposed that people thought it very fine. Now this clear- eyed, fine-headed youth, who looked something like a student to her, made fun of it. It was poor to him, not worth reading. She looked down, and for the first time felt the pain of not understanding.
— Theodore Dreiser, Sister Carrie
I'm a peasantI'm the muzhikA pest you're destined to play the musicAnd yes it's pleasant to say it's beauty I'mIndebted to rest respecting it truly
— Criss Jami, Diotima, Battery, Electric Personality
But maybe that's how it is with art. You suffer, and in the end, everyone thinks it's cool.
— Tom Dolby
Painting relates to both art and life. Neither can be made - I try to act in the gap.
— Robert Rauschenberg
gurl,if you were a flower I will plant you in heart,watering you with my blood and cover you with my body.
— knight mayor
Art and life are seen to be rich and mutually enriching
— Neville Weston, The Reach of Modern Art: A Concise History
One must give himself completely to his art and not hold back. Throw caution to the wind. Embrace the muse. Make love to your art.
— Harley King
practice makes better
— Brian Lies
... food is not simply organic fuel to keep body and soul together, it is a perishable art that must be savoured at the peak of perfection.
— E.A. Bucchianeri, Brushstrokes of a Gadfly
It was amazing what an hour with her sketchpad could do for her mood. She was sure that the lines she drew with her black marker were going to save her years of worry lines in the future.
— Victoria Kahler, Their Friend Scarlet
That is one of the functions of art: to present what the narrow and desperately practical perspectives of real life exclude.
— C.S. Lewis, On Stories: And Other Essays on Literature
drugged to sleep by repetition of the diurnalround, the monotonous sorrow of the finite,within       I am awakerepairing in dirt the frayed immaculate threadforced by being to watch the birth of suns
— Frank Bidart, Star Dust
Whistler,' Manet called. 'How's your mother?
— Christopher Moore, Sacré Bleu: A Comedy d'Art
I haven't the slightest idea what art is, but to be a painter is something of which you have to prove.
— Wayne Thiebaud
How can you tell when a piece is finished?'I asked.'You can't,' he said flatly. 'All you can tell is when you can't do any more to it. And then you need to stop because if you don't, you will spoil it.
— Mary Hoffman, David
Jack was too absorbed in his work to hear the bell. He was mesmerized by the challenge of making soft, round shapes of hard rock. The stone had a will of its own, and if he tried to make it do something it did not want to do, it would fight him, and his chisel would slip, or dig in too deeply, spoiling the shapes. But once he had got to know the lump of rock in front of him he could transform it. The more difficult the task, the more fascinated he was. He was beginning to feel that the decorative carving demanded by Tom was too easy. Zigzags, lozenges, dogtooth, spirals and plain roll moldings bored him, and even these leaves were rather stiff and repetitive. He wanted to curve natural-looking foliage, pliable and irregular, and copy the different shapes of real leaves, oak and ash and birch.
— Ken Follett, The Pillars of the Earth
Parameters are the things you bounce off to create art.
— Neil Gaiman
I sat there and my love to him poured out more and more, and, lo, he flew down to a stump, and then to my knee. I knew beyond a shadow of doubt that the important thing is the love that goes out from oneself.
— Agnes Grinstead Anderson, Approaching the Magic Hour: Memories of Walter Anderson
Some part of me knew that I could play this part well, or better than well. But I was almost afraid to play it. The line between stage and life was so fragile here that I felt a risk of losing myself somehow.
— J.B. Cheaney
And that, I guessed, was the aim of the Lord Chamberlain's Men: to serve up rich helpings of life to their audiences, to introduce them to people they would never otherwise meet, to stretch their minds and heart to fill a greater world.
— J.B. Cheaney, The Playmaker
It's ugly, but is it art?
— Randall Jarrell, Pictures from an Institution
the great is seldom a deterrent to the mediocre
— Elizabeth Hardwick, Seduction and Betrayal: Women and Literature
This is the essence of Rembrandt's advice to Van Hoogstraten: the authentic craft develops naturally from one's own experience.So, it seems reasonable to suggest that the search should not be for the lost secrets, but for one's own practice. This is in fact easy, you start making things. At first they might not be perfect, but the information here should provide you with a running start. And, if you are cut out for this the learning curve will not be daunting, because you will realize that you are finally headed in the right direction: towards the living craft.
— Tad Spurgeon
Man screams from the depths of his soul; the whole era becomes a single, piercing shriek. Art also screams, into the deep darkness, screams for help, screams for the spirit. This is Expressionism.
— Hermann Bahr
I pastiche, I quote, I lie. Fake, forge, forage, fabricate, copy, borrow, transform, steal. I illusion. I’m a genuine deceiver, a shy sham artist.
— Shawna Lemay
The painted aircraft took on sunlight and pulse. Sweeps of color, bands and spatters, airy washes, the force of saturated light—the whole thing oddly personal, a sense of one painter’s hand moved by impulse and afterthought as much as by epic design. I hadn’t expected to register such pleasure and sensation. The air was color-scrubbed, coppers and ochers burning off the metal skin of the aircraft to exchange with the framing desert.
— Don DeLillo
The notes I can handle no better than many pianists. But the pauses between the notes-ah, that is where the art resides.
— Artur Schnabel
Dignity is not a symbol bestowed on man, nor does the word itself possess force. Man's dignity is a force and the only modus vivendi by which man and his history survive. When mid-twentieth century Germany did not let man live and die with this right, man became an animal. No matter how technologically advanced or sophisticated, when man negates this divine right, he not only becomes self-destructive, but castrates his history and poisons our future. This is what 'The Nazi Drawings' are about.
— Mauricio Lasansky, The Nazi Drawings
There were profound reasons for his attachment to the sea: he loved it because as a hardworking artist he needed rest, needed to escape from the demanding complexity of phenomena and lie hidden on the bosom of the simple and tremendous; because of a forbidden longing deep within him that ran quite contrary to his life's task and was for that very reason seductive, a longing for the unarticulated and immeasurable, for eternity, for nothingness. To rest in the arms of perfection is the desire of any man intent upon creating excellence; and is not nothingness a form of perfection?
— Thomas Mann, Death in Venice and Other Tales
Form follows emotion
— Walter Isaacson, Steve Jobs
Even in a personal sense, after all, art is an intensified life. By art one is more deeply satisfied and more rapidly used up. It engraves on the countenance of its servant the traces of imaginary and intellectual adventures, and even if he has outwardly existed in cloistral tranquility, it leads in the long term to overfastidiousness, over-refinement, nervous fatigue and overstimulation, such as can seldom result from a life of the most extravagant passions and pleasures.
— Thomas Mann, Death in Venice and Other Tales
Real mathematics must be justified as art if it can be justified at all.
— G.H. Hardy, A Mathematician's Apology
The art historians are the real wreckers of art, Reger said. The art historians twaddle so long about art until they have killed it with their twaddle. Art is killed by the twaddle of the art historians. My God, I often think, sitting here on the settee while the art historians are driving their helpless flocks past me, what a pity about all these people who have all art driven out of them, driven out of them for good, by these very art historians. The art historians’ trade is the vilest trade there is, and a twaddling art historian, but then there are only twaddling art historians, deserves to be chased out with a whip, chased out of the world of art, Reger said, all art historians deserve to be chased out of the world of art, because art historians are the real wreckers of art and we should not allow art to be wrecked by the art historians who are really art wreckers. Listening to an art historian we feel sick, he said, by listening to an art historian we see the art he is twaddling about being ruined, with the twaddle of the art historian art shrivels and is ruined. Thousands, indeed tens of thousands of art historians wreck art by their twaddle and ruin it, he said. The art historians are the real killers of art, if we listen to an art historian we participate in the wrecking of art, wherever an art historian appears art is wrecked, that is the truth.
— Thomas Bernhard, Old Masters: A Comedy
It often seems to me that art conceals the artist far more completely than it ever reveals him.
— Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray
When someone between twenty and forty says, apropos of a work of art, 'I know what I like,' he is really saying 'I have no taste of my own but accept the taste of my cultural milieu.
— W.H. Auden, The Dyer's Hand
Design is a fundamental human activity, relevant and useful to everyone. Anything humans create—be it product, communication or system—is a result of the process of making inspiration real. I believe in doing what works as circumstances change: quirky or unusual solutions are often good ones. Nature bends and so should we as appropriate. Nature is always right outside our door as a reference and touch point. We should use it far more than we do.
— Maggie Macnab, Design by Nature: Using Universal Forms and Principles in Design
In the history of art there are periods when bread seems so beautiful that it nearly gets into museums.
— Janet Flanner, Paris Was Yesterday, 1925-1939
Rumfoord had known that Constant would try to debase the picture by using it in commerce. Constant's father had done a similar thing when he found he could not buy Leonardo's "Mona Lisa" at any price. The old man had punished Mona Lisa by having her used in an advertising campaign for suppositories. It was the free-enterprise way of handling beauty that threatened to get the upper hand.
— Kurt Vonnegut Jr., The Sirens of Titan
Art is excitement which if we can't create ourselves, we can at least, through love of it, make available to others.
— Vincent Price, Collecting Original Art
What did one see if one looked in any depth into the world of this writer's fiction? Elegant self-control concealing from the world's eyes until the very last moment a state of inner disintegration and biological decay; sallow ugliness, sensuously marred and worsted, which nevertheless is able to fan its smouldering concupiscence to a pallid impotence, which from the glowing depths of the spirit draws strength to cast down a whole proud people at the foot of the Cross and set its own foot upon them as well; gracious poise and composure in the empty austere service of form; the false, dangerous life of the born deceiver, his ambition and his art which lead so soon to exhaustion ---
— Thomas Mann, Death in Venice and Other Tales
Art forms that appeal to [leftists] tend to focus on ... defeat and despair ... as if there were no hope of accomplishing anything through rational calculation.
— Theodore J. Kaczynski
Hopefully, you will glimpse something of your own life’s journey and with Elemental’s Power of Illuminated Love, possibly recognize and celebrate something you had not been able to recognize or celebrate before.
— Luther E. Vann, Elemental: The Power of Illuminated Love
In the twentieth century, one encounters artworks that seek to cancel the difference between a real and an imagined reality by presenting themselves in ways that make them indistinguishable from real objects. Should we take this trend as an internal reaction of art against itself? … No ordinary object insists on being taken for an ordinary thing, but a work that does so betrays itself by this very effort. The function of art in such a case is to reproduce the difference of art. But the mere fact that art seeks to cancel this difference and fails in its effort to do so perhaps says more about art than could any excuse or critique.
— Niklas Luhmann, Art as a Social System
My art is the result of a deeply personal, infinitely complex, and still essentially mysterious, exploration of experience. No words will ever touch it.
— George Brecht
Hey, Meg," she said without preamble. I need you to write a letter of recommendation for me. I'm applying for grad sc
— Kristin Hannah, Distant Shores
The survival of my own ideas may not be as important as a condition I might create for others’ ideas to be realized.
— Mel Chin
My liege, and madam, to expostulateWhat majesty should be, what duty is, Why day is day, night night, and time is time,Were nothing but to waste night, day and time.Therefore, since brevity is the soul of wit,And tediousness the limbs and outward flourishes,I will be brief.
— William Shakespeare, Hamlet
Just as writing can become calligraphy when it’s creatively, skillfully, and consciously performed, so can all other activities become art. In this case, we are reflecting upon life itself as an artistic statement—the art of living.
— H.E. Davey, Japanese Yoga: The Way of Dynamic Meditation
Act of giving something to others is an art of flowering your heart.
— Vinayak
Realizing that our minds control our bodies while our bodies reflect our minds amounts to understanding the most fundamental aspects of ourselves. It further equals a comprehension of the relationship between our “tools.” And since the mind and body are interrelated, this understanding makes it easier to see why coordinating them is a practical way of using these tools to greatest effect—a way of using the mind and body to live our lives as art.
— H.E. Davey, Japanese Yoga: The Way of Dynamic Meditation
The following Discourse [on art, by Sir Joshua Reynolds] is particularly Interesting to Blockheads as it endeavours to prove that There is No such thing as Inspiration & that any Man of a plain Understanding may by Thieving from Others become a Mich Angelo.
— William Blake
In life, as in art, talking vitiates doing.
— Philip Larkin, Philip Larkin: Letters to Monica
I am for an art that is political-erotical-mystical, that does something more than sit on its ass in a museum.
— Claes Oldenburg
Tortured Soul 101: The depth of despair one experiences during the creative process (as experienced say, in an abysmally blank page or canvas) is directly proportional to the scope and power of the work that emerges when it breaks.
— F.T. McKinstry
An artist must either give up art or develop.
— Pauline Kael, I Lost it at the Movies: Film Writings, 1954-1965
Art then becomes a safety valve for the expression of individual and collective neuroses originating in the inability of coping with the environment. Its products serve as a retarded correction of perception braked by the system of conventions and stereotypes that stabilize society. They create a slightly updated system which, eventually assimilated by history, will require a new system and so on without end. Art objects serve as points of identification alienated from the consumer, requiring more sympathy than empathy.
— Luis Camnitzer
The merging of characteristics between different species creates a very powerful language, one that I love to explore through my art, enabling me to tap into the unconscious.
— Virginia Lee
It's the only dish I serve my craziness for color in.
— Josef Albers, An Eye for Color: The Story of Josef Albers
Of course Tucker Crowe was in pain when he made [the record], but he couldn't just march into a recording studio and start howling. He'd have sounded mad and pathetic. He had to calm the rage, tame it and shape it so that it could be contained in the tight-fitting songs. Then he had to dress it up so that it sounded more like itself.
— Nick Hornby, Juliet, Naked
For ages past the Genius of Literature and the Genius of Art have walked together hand in hand. For the Goddess of letters is blind, and only she of Art can lend her sight.
— Howard Pyle
No one but another painter could know the delicacy required to balance the complexities, to keep reality at bay in order to remain in the innermost center of his work.
— Susan Vreeland, Girl in Hyacinth Blue
Snow-melt in the stream: Mama Nature turning winter's storms into nourishment for the soil, fecundity, and beauty. This is what I must now learn to do with the stormy weather I've been passing through: turn it into beauty, turn it into art, so new life can germinate and bloom.One example of a creative artist who does this is my friend Jane Yolen, who wrote her exquisite book of poems The Radiation Sonnets while her husband was undergoing treatment for the cancer that would eventually claim his life. This is what all artists must do: take whatever life gives us and "alchemize" it into our art (either directly and autobiographically, as in Jane's book, or indirectly; whatever approach works best), turning darkness into light, spinning straw into gold, transforming pain and hardship into what J.R.R. Tolkien called 'a miraculous grace.
— Terri Windling
Passing from legality to subversion, the need of finding a minimum stimulus with a maximum effect appears—an effect that through its impact justifies the risk taken and pays for it. During certain historical periods, at the level of the object, this meant dealing with and creating mysteries. At the level of situations, and in this case, it means the change of social structure.
— Luis Camnitzer
...that out of the quarrel with others we produce rhetoric, matter for the editorial page, while out of the quarrel with ourselves we create art.
— Frank Lentricchia, Crimes of Art and Terror
Because all the brilliant ones- they can sing it and they can paint it, but they can't do it. You can't expect them to love you.
— Dakota Lane, The Orpheus Obsession
We’re all pros already. 1) We show up every day 2) We show up no matter what 3) We stay on the job all day 4) We are committed over the long haul 5) The stakes for us are high and real 6) We accept remuneration for our labor 7) We do not overidentify with our jobs 8 ) We master the technique of our jobs 9) We have a sense of humor about our jobs 10) We receive praise or blame in the real world
— Steven Pressfield, The War of Art: Break Through the Blocks & Win Your Inner Creative Battles
You know it's ART, when the check clears.
— Andy Warhol
All colors are the friends of their neighbors and the lovers of their opposites.
— Marc Chagall
Inking is meditation in liquid form...
— J.H. Everett, Izzy and the Candy Palace
A composition—and every work of art is one—is created in a wondrous interplay between imagination and reason, or between mind and reflection. For there will always be an element of chance in the creative process.
— Jostein Gaarder, Sophie's World
Where there is a true art and genuine virtuosity the artist can paint an incomparable masterpiece without leaving even a trace of his identity.
— Orhan Pamuk, My Name is Red
I will admit that I wanted to shout for standing on the top of a scaffold in front of a good new wall always goes to my head. It is a sensation something between that of an angel let out of his cage into a new sky and a drunkard turned loose in a royal cellar.And after all, what nobler elevation could you find in this world than the scaffold of a wall painter? No admiral on the bridge of a new battleship designed by the old navy, could feel more pleased with himself than Gulley, on two planks, forty feet above dirt level, with his palette table beside him, his brush in his hand, and the draught blowing up his trousers; cleared for action.
— Joyce Cary, The Horse's Mouth
In short, it became possible - never easy, but possible - in the poet Auden's phrase to find the mortal world enough.
— Stephen Greenblatt, The Swerve: How the World Became Modern
B-but, Mr Jimson, I w-want to be an artist.''Of course you do,' I said, 'everybody does once. But they get over it, thank God, like the measles and the chickenpox. Go home and go to bed and take some hot lemonade and put on three blankets and sweat it out.''But Mr J-Jimson, there must be artists.''Yes, and lunatics and lepers, but why go and live in an asylum before you're sent for? If you find life a bit dull at home,' I said, 'and want to amuse yourself, put a stick of dynamite in the kitchen fire, or shoot a policeman. Volunteer for a test pilot, or dive off Tower Bridge with five bob's worth of roman candles in each pocket. You'd get twice the fun at about one-tenth of the risk.
— Joyce Cary, The Horse's Mouth
Goya’s savage verve, his harsh, brutal genius, captivated Des Esseintes. On the other hand, the universal admiration his works had won rather put him off, and for years he had refrained from framing them, for fear that if he hung them up, the first idiot who saw them would might feel obliged to dishonour them with a few inanities and go into stereotyped ecstasies over them.
— Joris-Karl Huysmans, Against Nature
The stratagems by which briefly youameliorated, even seeminglyuntwisted what still twists within you —you loved their taste and lay thereon your sidenursing like a puppy.
— Frank Bidart, Watching the Spring Festival: Poems
All life is death. You don't fool yourself about this anymore. You slash at the perfect canvas with strokes of paint and replace the perfect picture of your imagination with the reality of what you are capable of. From death, and sorrow, and compromise, you create. This is what it means, you finally realize, to be alive. ("The Chambered Fruit")
— M. Rickert, American Fantastic Tales: Terror and the Uncanny from the 1940's Until Now
Art must always stand guard against stirring emotions that lie outside the aesthetic: sexual arousal, terror, disgust, shock.
— Milan Kundera, Encounter
Protect art. It is the antidote to the innate barbarism of the human race.
— Peter Adolphsen, The Brummstein
...I thought, with a certain amount of sorrow, how much enormous talent there must be in the world for nature simply to toss it away so arbitrarily! But nature could not care less what we think about it, and as far as talent is concerned, there is such an excess that our artists will soon become their own audiences, and audiences made up of ordinary people will no longer exist.
— Hermann Hesse, The Fairy Tales of Hermann Hesse
As far as he could see, the drawings were simply alive. They might be colored earth on rock, but they were as alive as the kangaroo that'd just hopped away.
— Terry Pratchett, The Last Continent
The riders, clad in crimson and black, stopped to scan the maze. Blaise shrank into the hedge, but one keen-eyed hunter spied him. He raised his crossbow, took careful aim and fired.
— Teresa Flavin, The Blackhope Enigma
The painter must give a completely free rein to any feeling or sensations he may have and reject nothing to which he is naturally drawn.
— Lucian Freud
In an exhibition wherein paintings of nudes were commonplace, that of Madame Gautreau in her black evening dress was considered scandalously erotic. -from The Greater Journey
— David McCullough
Life is very nice, but it has no shape. The object of art is actually to give it some ..." Jean Anouilh, The Rehearsal
— Kate  Taylor
Indeed, the future is signalled in the past, but time has to pass to see it. Art is the witness.BLOG post-Perpetual Beginning-November 14 2011
— Kathryn Brimblecombe-Fox
Design is not really a way for me to express myself. Design is a product that we produce for a client.
— Peleg Top
Because that’s what a comic is, ultimately: a collection of pages. It’s not a flatpanel or a touchscreen, even though that’s where it might eventually be displayed. It’s a page.
— John Heffernan
there is no problems, only solutions".
— Vesa Peltonen
The notion of making money by popular work, and then retiring to do good work, is the most familiar of all the devil's traps for artists.
— Logan Pearsall Smith
I'm completely aware of Matisse and what he said, that painters must begin by cutting out their tongues.
— Don DeLillo, Underworld
Degas is one of the very few painters who have given the floor its true importance.
— Paul Valéry
Dalin must have whiffed the anarch in me, a man with no ties to state or society. Still, he was unable to sense an autonomy that puts up with these forces as objective facts but without recognizing them. What he lacked was a grounding in history.Opposition is collaboration; this was something from which Dalin, without realizing it, could not stay free. Basically, he damaged order less than he confirmed it. The emergence of the anarchic nihilist is like a goad that convinces society of its unity.The anarch, in contrast, not only recognizes society a priori as imperfect, he actually acknowledges it with that limitation. He is more or less repulsed by state and society, yet there are times and places in which the invisible harmony shimmers through the visible harmony. This is obviously chiefly in the work of art. In that case, one serves joyfully.But the anarchic nihilist thinks the exact opposite. The Temple of Artemis, to cite an example, would inspire him to commit arson. The anarch, however, would have no qualms about entering the temple in order to meditate and to participate with an offering. This is possible in any temple worthy of the name.
— Ernst Jünger, Eumeswil
The wood-carver can fashion whatever he will. Yet his products are but toys of the moment, to be glanced at in jest, not fashioned according to any precept or law. When times change, the carver too will change his style and make new trifles to hit the fancy of the passing day. But there is another kind of artist, who sets more soberly about his work, striving to give real beauty to the things which men actually use and to give to them the shape which tradition has ordained. This maker of real things must not for a moment be confused with the maker of idle toys.
— Murasaki Shikibu, The Tale of Genji
This apparent hurly-burly and disorder turn out, after all, to reproduce real life with its fantastic ways more accurately than the most carefully studied out drama of manners. Every man is in himself all humanity, and if he writes what occurs to him he succeeds better than if he copies, with the help of a magnifying glass, objects placed outside of him.
— Théophile Gautier, Mademoiselle de Maupin
After 1980, you never heard reference to space again. Surface, the most convincing evidence of the descent into materialism, became the focus of design. Space disappeared.
— Arthur Erickson
However my mother had once said, ‘When you go to art school, you’ll find everybody sitting around practicing how to do their signature'; and sure enough, there they were, some of them doing just that.
— Richard   Williams
Armus: 'No need for interogation if you'd tell me this earlier.'Samarga: 'You wouldn't buy it if I gave it away without squeal.
— Toba Beta, My Ancestor Was an Ancient Astronaut
He had a sense—honed by experience—that what he’d contrived might achieve something of the effect he wanted. That, Martinius had always said, was the best any man in this fallible world could expect. [p. 67]
— Guy Gavriel Kay, Sailing to Sarantium
The image titled “The Homeless, Psalm 85:10,” featured on the cover of ELEMENTAL, can evoke multiple levels of response. They may include the spiritual in the form of a studied meditation upon the multidimensional qualities of the painting itself; or an extended contemplation of the scripture in the title, which in the King James Bible reads as follows: “Mercy and truth are met together; righteousness and peace have kissed each other.” The painting can also inspire a physical response in the form of tears as it calls to mind its more earth-bound aspects; namely, the very serious plight of those who truly are homeless in this world, whether born into such a condition, or forced into it by poverty or war.
— Aberjhani, Elemental: The Power of Illuminated Love
Painting, it is true, was undergoing a series of -isms reminiscent of the whims of a pregnant woman.
— M.F.K. Fisher, The Art of Eating
We live today amid ritualized anithumanisms. Among those intelligent enough to feel despair, some seek salvation in the literary artist. Artists love flattery; and the scam doesn't work without mystifying the process.The weather is unpredictable, but it is not mysterious.Wall Street is unpredictable, but it is not mysterious. Writing is unpredictable, (like street and sky, there are too many variables.) Its mystery vanishes, like a shadow, the moment the light aimed at your characters turns back upon yourself.
— Doran Larson
But if I am not a criminal, I beg to be permitted to go abroad with my wife temporarily, for at least one year, with the right to return as soon as it becomes possible in our country to serve great ideas in literature without cringing before little men, as soon as there is at least a partial change in the prevailing view concerning the role of the literary artist. (“Letter To Stalin”)
— Yevgeny Zamyatin
What we need in literature today are vast philosophic horizons; we need the most ultimate, the most fearsome, the most fearless 'Why?' and 'What next?'("Literature, Revolution, and Entropy")
— Yevgeny Zamyatin
The scientific spirit, the contempt of tradition, the lack of discipline and the exaltation of the individual have very nearly made an end of art. It can only be restored by the love of beauty, the reverence for tradition, the submission to discipline and the rigor of self-control.
— Kenyon Cox, Classic Point of View: Six Lectures on Painting
The market follows the artist. The artist does not follow the market.
— Iimani David
Jamie came back to the apartment one night to find her spreading a viscous fluid onto a canvas. It was threaded wtih blood. "Good God," he said. "What the hell is that?"  Pia didn't bother to look up but continued to knead the clear slime across the canvas. "It's my new piece." "But what is it?" He kept pointing. He'd never seen something so disgusting in his life. And her hands were completely in it.  "It's Jodie's placenta. She gave it to me. I'm going to tack it up and let it dry on this canvas. Then I'm gonna glue-gun pictures of dead fetuses onto Lucite and make them the centerpeice." "Uh huh." She raised her sticky hands to him. "It's about women, you know? The way that the world opresses them, all right? And it's about babies, and . . . I don't know . . . I just got the placenta today." "Wow, that's wow . . . that's . . ." No words for this. He scratched his chin as she spread her hands in a concentric motion across the canvas. "So, do you really think anyone's gonna want to put that up on their wall when it's done?" he asked.  She scowled, displeased.
— K. Stephens
Some centuries ago they had Raphael and Michael Angelo; now we have Mr. Paul Delaroche, and all because we are progre
— Théophile Gautier, Mademoiselle de Maupin
I set about seeking a thread, a theme, a style, in the realm of legend. Something that might allow me to give free rein to my juvenile sense of romanticism and the beautiful image.
— Leni Riefenstahl
A gypsy girl approached Don Zana and Alfanhui and held out her tambourine. Don Zana said to her, 'You don't pay for art, kid.
— Rafael Sánchez Ferlosio, Adventures of the Ingenious Alfanui
The painting has a life of its own
— Jackson Pollock
In the Somme valley, the back of language broke. It could no longer carry its former meanings. World War I changed the life of words and images in art, radically and forever. It brought our culture into the age of mass-produced, industrialized death. This, at first, was indescribable.
— Robert Hughes, The Shock of the New
The only real influence I've ever had is myself.
— Edward Hopper
Men and women who are lonely create. Those who are gregarious rarely do... Any poet would rather bed with a girl than write a poem about her. All art is the result of frustration. Art is energy deflected from its normal course in action.
— Burton Rascoe, Before I Forget
Drawing is the art of being able to leave an accurate record of the experience of what one isn't, of what one doesn't know. A great drawer is either confirming beautifully what is commonplaceor probing authoritatively the unknown.::: Brett Whiteley :::
— Brett Whiteley
If Wagner lived today, he would probably work with film instead of music. He already knew back then that the Great Art Form would include a sort of fourth dimension; it was really film he was talking about.
— Harmony Korine
To contradict, even in little matters, is the supreme necessity of art today. 
— Witold Gombrowicz, A Kind of Testament
I created an icicle sculpture in the snow. White on white.
— Mary E. Pearson, The Adoration of Jenna Fox
The Fine Arts are five in number: Painting, Music, Poetry, Sculpture, and Architecture--whereof the principle branch is Confectionery.
— Marie-Antoine Carême
Nevertheless, what was made in the hope of transforming the world need not be rejected because it failed to do so – otherwise, one would also have to throw out a good deal of the greatest painting and poetry of the nineteenth century. An objective political failure can still work as a model of intellectual affirmation or dissent.
— Robert Hughes, The Shock of the New
Those words . . . national and portrait. They were both to do with identity: the identity of a culture (place, language and history), the identity of an individual human being as an object for mimetic representation.
— A.S. Byatt, The Virgin in the Garden
Where utility ends and decoration begins is perfection.
— Jack Gardner, Words Are Not Things
Thinking is not a thing that can undo itself. It can never be its own solution.
— Zachary Thomas Dodson, boring boring boring boring boring boring boring
Art serves to confront that which is outside order, to give form to the obscene. In the process, it opens it to transformations that can not only make it safe for public consumption, not a powerful vehicle through which to address the public imagination.
— Jennifer Birkett
We are bored in the city, to still discover mysteries on the signs along the street, latest state of humor and poetry, requires getting damned tired...Gilles Ivain (aka Ivan Chtcheglov)
— Tom McDonough, The Situationists and the City: A Reader
I realized that the "thing" and the "concept" were substituted for feeling and understood the falsity of the world of will and idea
— Kazimir Malevich
Art is what separates us from the animals.
— Iimani David
To talk of a modern work of art enduring is sillier than talking of the eternal values of Standard Oil.
— Raoul Vaneigem
Original art emanates in the mind ... and lessons society's confusion from self indulgence, avarice and greed to trust, hope and love.
— Louis Faurer
The heart of [J.G.] Ballard's vision [is] the object at odds with its function and abandoned by its time.
— Tacita Dean
[I]t was [Barnett] Newman who made the famously wry remark, “Aesthetics is for the artist as ornithology is for the birds,
— Ross Wetzsteon, Republic of Dreams: Greenwich Village: The American Bohemia 1910-1960
On the one hand, it is in and through creative minds that the community fulfils itself at its best and reaches its highest forms; and on the other, it is from them that the community recovers the social substance with which it had nourished them, transfigured by their creative alchemy into a still higher social substance. The creative evolution of his community and his own creative evolution must always be the two earnest purposes of the individual. Its own creative evolution and that of the individuals in its midst must always be the two earnest purposes of the community.
— Salvador de Madariaga, Essays with a Purpose
From space this Earth is incandescent with abominations - the gods write their signature in our entrails
— Steve Aylett
I recognized the great monument from the illustration in the copy of /The Jungle Book/ that my mother kept in the top drawer of my bedside table. When I went with Sophia to the Taj Mahal for the first time, I was not as enchanted by the real mausoleum as I had been by its plaster, paint, and paper replica in the studio; the original posed a dreadfully seductive promise in cool marble of a strangely painful loveliness, a lover's lie that death itself might in some mysterious way, because of love, be lovely.
— Lee Siegel
Colour is a matter of personal opinion.
— Tessa de Loo, A Bed in Heaven
With the plundered people transferring their energies into relaxed and receptive thoughts, degradation and lust for power produced art.
— Peter Weiss, The Aesthetics of Resistance, Vol. 1
~Dance~My fingers danceOn the set Of ivory & black pirouettes.I let goWhile my fingers fly, Making music through the night.This is the best therapy. A place of release, House of freedom & relief.My oasis of redemption.My river of gentle.My ocean of mental. My mind is relieved. My fingers are free To let go, making music sweet.Rache Nicole Wagner Original
— Rachel Nicole Wagner, Yesterday's Coffee
It is the very essence of art,' she [Hallie Flanagan:] told a group gathered in Washington . . ., 'that it exceed bounds, often including those of tradition, decorum, and that mysterious thing called taste. It is the essence of art that it shatter accepted patterns, advance into unknown territory, challenge the existing order. Art is highly explosive. To be worth its salt it must have in that salt a fair sprinkling of gunpowder.
— Susan Quinn, The Furious Improvisation: How the WPA and a Cast of Thousands Made High Art out of Desperate Times
In the past an artist produced things that were necessary socially; they were instruments, albeit of a special kind, that helped the dead reach eternity, spells to be cast, prayers to be liturgically fleshed. . . . The aesthetic component of those instruments enhanced their function but was never central, never an independent, nonutilitarian thing.
— Stanisław Lem, Highcastle: A Remembrance
Early in this century a group of passionate artists in Russia claimed that the essence of art was to make the familiar seem strange. Perhaps this is also one of the roles of the exotic, to alter and sharpen our perceptions.
— SueEllen Campbell, Bringing the Mountain Home
On a cement pediment stands the inevitable bronze statue of a man in a cheap suit.
— Alex Shakar, The Savage Girl
The source of our art then is not in the achievements of other artists in other days and lands, although it has learned a great deal from these, our art is founded on a long and growing love and understanding of the North in an ever clearer experience of oneness with the informing spirit of the whole land and a strange brooding sense of Mother Nature fostering a new race and a new age... So the Canadian artist was drawn North.
— Lawren Harris, The Best of the Group of Seven
I am constantly reminded that we human beings are basically storytellers. More homo narrans than Homo sapiens. We see ourselves in others' stories. Every genuine work of art contains a small fragment of glass from a mirror.
— Henning Mankell, Arenas movedizas
Art cannot save the world, but it does help you understand the world inside of you.
— Krist Pauwels, Your Work and Your Life: Towards a True Win-Win
Art is long, life is short. Unless your funding is f%$ked, in which case all our days are numbered.
— Whoopi Goldberg, Book
Art is long, life is short.
— Whoopi Goldberg, Book
The tragedy of art is the misalignment of merit and the perception thereof. A hype is a classic example of positive (from the creator’s perspective) misalignment. Van Gogh is a classic example of negative misalignment, a poor laggard who may enjoy the fruits of his labour rotting under the ground. Van Gogh went unrecognized, ostracized, and is now celebrated as many who have come before him, and many who will come after him. Therefore, I declare here, the Wisdom of the Crowd does not apply to art.
— Kevin Focke, Tales Untold
It is often said that great works of art are “inexhaustible”—capable, as Stanley Olson put it, of “endless interpretation. But Lubin, the Charlotte C. Weber Professor of Art at Wake Forest University, demonstrates in painful if inadvertently hilarious detail that this does not mean that works of art are immune from - that they are not in fact often subject to—wild and perverse misinterpretation.
— Roger Kimball, The Rape of the Masters: How Political Correctness Sabotages Art