c2p-cmd/Good-Quotes-Authors huggingface dataset:
It is the form that allows a writer the greatest opportunity to explore human experience...For that reason, reading a novel is potentially a significant act. Because there are so many varieties of human experience, so many kinds of interaction between humans, and so many ways of creating patterns in the novel that can’t be created in a short story, a play, a poem or a movie. The novel, simply, offers more opportunities for a reader to understand the world better, including the world of artistic creation. That sounds pretty grand, but I think it’s true.
— Don DeLillo
Perfection seems sterile; it is final, no mystery in it; it's a product of an assembly line.
— Dejan Stojanovic
...What I depend on is a vigorous audience that can discover sweetness and light, beauty and truth, beyond the ability of the artist, on his own, to create them.
— Orson Scott Card
Language has time as its element
—  all other media have space as their element.
From recovery to rags and rags to recovery symbolizes art - a perfect compilation of human imperfections.
— Criss Jami, Salomé: In Every Inch In Every Mile
If there’s a thing, a scene, maybe, an image that you want to see real bad, that you need to see but it doesn’t exist in the world around you, at least not in the form that you envision, then you create it so that you can look at it and have it around, or show it to other people who wouldn’t have imagined it because they perceive reality in a more narrow, predictable way. And that’s it. That’s all an artist does.
— Tom Robbins, Skinny Legs and All
That's the beauty of art--we strive for perfection but never achieve it. The journey is everything.
— Rafe Esquith, Teach Like Your Hair's on Fire: The Methods and Madness Inside Room 56
So. Lie there, my art.
— William Shakespeare, The Tempest
Colors are light's suffering and joy
— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Color which, like music, is a matter of vibrations, reaches what is most general and therefore most indefinable in nature: its inner power.
— Paul Gauguin
My father used to say, 'If you want to know the artist, look at the art'. He was usually talking about Stanley Matthews or Don Bradman when he said it.
— David Peace, Nineteen Seventy Four
Modern art has to be what is called ‘intense.’ it is not easy to define being intense; but, roughly speaking, it means saying only one thing at a time, and saying it wrong.
— G.K. Chesterton, Alarms and Discursions
The hare of history once more overtakes the tortoise of art.
— Kurt Vonnegut Jr., Mother Night
All the products of one period have something in common; the artists who illustrate the poetry of their generation are the same artists who are employed by the big financial houses. And nothing reminds me so much of the monthly parts of Notre-Dame de Paris, and of various books by Gérard de Nerval, that used to hang outside the grocer's door at Combray, than does, in its rectangular and flowery border, supported by recumbent river-gods, a 'personal share' in the Water Company.
— Marcel Proust, In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower
There is something about the act of studying an unclothed body, as an artist does, that allows a person to appreciate it as pure form, regardless of the kinds of traits traditionally regarded as imperfections. In a figure drawing class, an obese woman's folds of flesh take on a kind of beauty. You can look at a man's shrunken chest or legs or buttocks with tenderness. Age is not ugly, just poignant.
— Joyce Maynard, The Good Daughters
Life itself has lost its plane reality: it is projected, not along the old fixed points, but along the dynamic coordinates of Einstein, of revolution. In this new projection, the best-known formulas and objects become displaced, fantastic, familiar-unfamiliar. This is why it is so logical for literature today to be drawn to the fantastic plot, or to the amalgam of reality and fantasy. ("The New Russian Prose")
— Yevgeny Zamyatin
Art teaches something we all need to learn, especially about people who are different from ourselves: "To see things the way they truly are, sometimes you have to look more deeply.
— Ron Hall
Art was the very antithesis of crass moralism.
— Alain de Botton, Status Anxiety
Art is creative for the sake of realization, not for amusement: for transfiguration, not for the sake of play. It is the quest of our self that drives us along the eternal and never-ending journey we must all make.
— Max Beckmann
Wonderful art can spring from misery,I'm the last person to deny that.I'd go even further:the best works of art of all time are probably stemmed from the deep human sorrow or hellish frustration,the death of a loved one or a divorce and yes:jealousy.Heartache and impotence as the man-spring for making the unverifiable verifiable and for giving it face.How romantic,beautiful and especially useful pain and misery can be.
— Esther Verhoef, Close-up
Life itself is an art form.
— Tyree Guyton
This place is alive," Sunni said in wonder. "Things are moving. Inside a painting.
— Teresa Flavin
It's freezing up here. What did you use to keep warm?""Indignation," said Michelangelo. "Best fuel I know. Never burns out.
— Irving Stone, The Agony and the Ecstasy
What does one prefer? An art that struggles to change the social contract, but fails? Or one that seeks to please and amuse, and succeeds?
— Robert Hughes, The Shock of the New
A deliberate plan is not always necessary for the highest art
—  it emerges.
Without enthusiasm nothing great can be effected in art.
— Robert Schumann
The flow. Yeah. Knowing you could step on the court and make it happen. You practiced, sure. But then, when you walked out there, you could just go. You could flow, that was it: you created and you didn't totally know how. You just knew you could, so you did. It wasn't thinking and it wasn't imitating somebody else's moves, though you always looked carefully when you watched good players play. But when you played... it was something you couldn't explain. Neal used to know. It didn't come from thinking about it.
— Doug Wilhelm, Falling
I spent an hour looking at pots and carpets in the museums the other day, until the desire to describe them became like the desire for the lusts of the flesh.
— Virginia Woolf, The Question of Things Happening: The Letters of Virginia Woolf, Volume 2: 1912-1922
Color is the keyboard, the eyes are the harmonies, the soul is the piano with many strings. The artist is the hand that plays, touching one key or another, to cause vibrations in the soul.
— Wassilly Kandinsky
But nobody is visually naive any longer. We are cluttered with images, and only abstract art can bring us to the threshold of the divine.
— Dominique De Menil, The Rothko Chapel: Writings on Art and the Threshold of the Divine
We must change life,' the poet [Rimbaud] had written, and so the Situationists set out to transform everyday life in the modern world through a comprehensive program that included above all else the construction of 'situations' -- defined in 1958 as moments of life 'concretely and deliberately constructed by the collective organization of a unitary ambiance and a play of events' -- but that also necessary entailed the supersession of philosophy, the realization of art, the abolition of politics, and the fall of the 'spectacle-commodity economy.
— Tom McDonough, The Situationists and the City: A Reader
There's no retirement for an artist, it's your way of living so there's no end to it.
— Henry Moore
One picks one's way about through the glass and aluminum doors, the receptionists' smiles, the lunches with too much alcohol, the openings with more, the mobs of people desperately trying to define good taste in such loud voices one can hardly hear oneself giggle, while the shebang is lit by flashes and flares through the paint-stained window, glimmers under the police-locked door, or, if one is taking a rare walk outside that day, by a light suffusing the whole sky, complex as the northern aurora.
— Samuel R. Delany, Dhalgren
The truth is, anyone who puts so much of herself and her life into art as you do must naturally fear any failure in that art as a potential threat to your life. And so you protect your art more than you protect your health or the common forms of happiness the rest of us have. And you probably have this in common with every artist you admire.
— Arthur Phillips, The Song Is You
Talent consists not in inventing shapes but in causing those that were invisible to emerge.
— Muriel Barbery, Gourmet Rhapsody
The snapshots in CHINA: Portrait of a People are not meant to be works of art. I was too preoccupied with participating, with reveling in the moment, to worry about their perfection. Their purpose, then, is to form a candid portrait of China exactly as China presented itself to me.
— Tom  Carter, China: Portrait of a People
The closer and more completely you can come to explaining what a work of art means, the less like art it seems.
— Laura Miller, The Magician's Book: A Skeptic's Adventures in Narnia
A metamorphosis... The shining butterfly of the soul from the pupa of the body. Larva, pupa, imago. An image of art.
— A.S. Byatt, The Virgin in the Garden
He has no talent at all, that boy! You, who are his friend, tell him, please, to give up painting.–--Manet to Monet, on Renoir---
— Edouard Manet
If an artist wants to use his mind for creative work, cutting oneself off from society is a necessary thing
— Glenn Gould
... Have you ever reflected that posterity may not be the faultless dispenser of justice that we dream of? One consoles oneself for being insulted and denied, by reyling on the equity of the centuries to come; just as the faithful endure all the abominations of this earth in the firm belief of another life, in which each will be rewarded according to his deserts. But suppose Paradise exists no more for the artist than it does for the Catholic, suppose that future generations prolong the misunderstanding and prefer amiable little trifles to vigorous works! Ah! What a sell it would be, eh? To have led a convict's life - to have screwed oneself down to one's work - all for a mere delusion!..."Bah! What does it matter? Well, there's nothing hereafter. We are even madder than the fools who kill themselves for a woman. When the earth splits to pieces in space like a dry walnut, our works won't add one atom to its dust.
— Émile Zola
Works of art imitate and provoke other works of art, the process is the source of art itself.
— Edward Hirsch
Art is affirmation.
— N. Scott Momaday, Ancient Child
A storyteller who provided us with such a profusion of details would rapidly grow maddening. Unfortunately, life itself often subscribes to this mode of storytelling, wearing us out with repetition, misleading emphases and inconsequential plot lines. It insists on showing us Bardak Electronics, the saftey handle in the car, a stray dog, a Christmas card and a fly that lands first on the rim and then in the centre of the ashtray.Which explains how the curious phenomenon whereby valuable elements may be easier to experience in art and in anticipation than in reality. The anticipatory and artistic imaginations omit and compress; they cut away the periods of boredom and direct our attention to critical moments, and thus, without either lying or embellishing, they lend to life a vividness and a coherence that it may lack in the distracting wooliness of the present.
— Alain de Botton, The Art of Travel
Art isn't a product. It's an experience
— Lori Lansens, The Girls
It's impossible for a creative artist to be either a Puritan or a Fascist, because both are a negation of the creative urge. The only things a creative artist can be opposed to are ugliness and injustice.
— Liam O'Flaherty
There are only two styles of portrait painting: the serious and the smirk.
— Charles Dickens
The arts can sharpen the vision, quicken the intellect, preserve the memory, activate the conscience, enhance the understanding and refresh the language.
— Steve Turner, Imagine: A Vision for Christians in the Arts
I asked Geertrui the other day what she thought love is-real love, true love. She said that for her real love is observing another person and being observed by another person with complete attention. If she's right, you only have to look at the pictures Rembrandt painted of Titus, and there are quite a lot, to see that they loved each other. Because that is what you're seeing. Complete attention, one of the other..."but in that case," he said, speaking the words as the thought came to him, "all art is love, because all art is about looking closely, isn't it? Looking closely at what's being painted.""The artist looking closely while he paints, the viewer looking closely at what has been painted. I agree. All true art, yes. Painting, Writing-literature-also. I think it is. And bad art is a failure to observe with complete attention. So, you see why I like the history of art. It's the study of how to observe life with complete attention. It's the history of love.
— Aidan Chambers
Art tends toward balance, order, judgment of relative values, the laws of growth, the economy of living – very good things for anyone to be interested in.
— Robert Henri
If you find yourself pulled beyond all practicality toward doing something -- writing poetry, building a business, restoring old cars, planting a secret garden; if at four in the morning the right word comes to you, the perfect flower to plant in that particular spot -- you are playing your invisible instrument.
— Joan Oliver Goldsmith, How Can We Keep from Singing: Music and the Passionate Life
Every great artist has the sense of provocation.
— Arthur Cravan
It comforted him because it could not be called suffering if it was a sign of Art.
— Hermann Bahr
Be yourself. An original is worth more than a copy.
— Suzy Kassem, Rise Up and Salute the Sun: The Writings of Suzy Kassem
Through our own creative experience we came to know that the real tradition in art is not housed only in museums and art galleries and in great works of art; it is innate in us and can be galvanized into activity by the power of creative endeavor in our own day, and in our own country, by our own creative individuals in the arts. We also came to realize that we in Canada cannot truly understand the great cultures of the past and of other peoples, until we ourselves commence our own creative life in the arts. Until we do so, we are looking at these from the outside.
— Lawren Harris, The Best of the Group of Seven
Art’s only concern with the real is to abolish it, and to substitute for it a new reality
— Jean Rousset
A not complete unit or a new unit. The elements in the 3 parts should neither fit nor not fit together.One would like not to be led. Avoid the idea of a puzzle which could be solved. Remove the signs of thought. It is not thought which needs showing.
— Jasper Johns
Young Bindo Altovini, looking out from time, made a perfect coalition with the mountains, the sky, and the tall redheaded woman who had bent over just slightly to examine a raging battle that was long over. Alessandro imagined that Bindo Altovini was saying, half with longing, half with delight, "These are the things in which I was so helplessly caught up, the waves that took me, what I loved. When light filled my eyes and I was restless and could move, I knew not what all the color was about, but only that I had a passion to see. And now that I am still, I pass on to you my liveliness and my life, for you will be taken, as once I was, and although you must fight beyond your capacity to fight and feel beyond your capacity to feel, remember that it ends in perfect peace, and you will be as still and content as am I, for whom centuries are not even seconds."In the eyes of Bindo Altoviti, Alessandro saw wisdom and amusement, and he knew why the subjects of paintings and photographs seemed to look from the past as if with clairvoyance. Even brutal and impatient men, when frozen in time, assumed expressions of extraordinary compassion, as if they had reflected the essence of their redemption back into the photograph. In a sense they were still living. 
— Mark Helprin, A Soldier of the Great War
The most vital things in the look of a landscape endure only for a moment. Work should be done from memory
—  memory of that vital moment.
In trying to be perfect, He perfected the art of anonymity, Became imperceptible And arrived nowhere from nowhere.
— Dejan Stojanovic
In the arts, as in life, everything is possible provided it is based on love.
— Marc Chagall
Technique is just a means of arriving at a statement.
— Jackson Pollock
All art constantly aspires towards the condition of music. For while in all other kinds of art it is possible to distinguish the matter from the form, and the understanding can always make this distinction, yet it is the constant effort of art to obliterate it.
— Walter Pater
An artist that makes art merely to meet a demand is a slave to what his patrons wants to see, or, hear.
— Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Art is nothing more than creating an emotion in your own form.
— Shannon L. Alder
He wrote me a note to say we would create art together and we would make it, with or without the rest of the world.
— Patti Smith, Just Kids
Lines are results, do not draw them for themselves. ... Lines give birth to lines. Drawing is not following a line on the model, it is drawing your sense of the thing. ... Make a drawing flow, stopping sometimes, and going on. ... Search for the simple constructive forces, line the lines of a suspension bridge. Get the few main lines and see what lines they call out. ... Have purpose in the places where lines stop.
— Robert Henri
The typical English painting is narrative in character. The English are a nation of diarists.
— Neville Weston, The Reach of Modern Art: A Concise History
Our mind is the canvas on which the artists lay their colour; their pigments are our emotions; their chiaroscuro the light of joy, the shadow of sadness. The masterpiece is of ourselves, as we are of the masterpiece.
— Kakuzō Okakura, The Book of Tea
We can forgive a man for making a useful thing as long as he does not admire it. The only excuse for making a useless thing is that one admires it intensely.All art is quite useless.
— Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray
Every artist has thousands of bad drawings in them and the only way to get rid of them is to draw them out.
— Chuck Jones
Art is not in some far-off place.
— Lydia Davis, The Collected Stories
I think that is what film and art and music do
—  they can work as a map of sorts for your feelings.
In Japan, a number of time-honored everyday activities (such as making tea, arranging flowers, and writing) have traditionally been deeply examined by their proponents. Students study how to make tea, perform martial arts, or write with a brush in the most skillful way possible to express themselves with maximum efficiency and minimum strain. Through this efficient, adroit, and creative performance, they arrive at art. But if they continue to delve even more deeply into their art, they discover principles that are truly universal, principles relating to life itself. Then, the art of brush writing becomes shodo—the “Way of the brush”—while the art of arranging flowers is elevated to the status of kado—the “Way of flowers.” Through these Ways or Do forms, the Japanese have sought to realize the Way of living itself. They have approached the universal through the particular.
— H.E. Davey, Japanese Yoga: The Way of Dynamic Meditation
Art does not reproduce what is visible, it makes things visible.
— Paul Klee
Since art is considered a noble field, art should be used to promote all that is good and noble, and in a noble fashion.
— E.A. Bucchianeri, Brushstrokes of a Gadfly
All great art has madness, and quite a lot of bad art has it, too.
— William Saroyan, My Heart's in the Highlands
If seeing her an hour before her lastWeak cough into all blackness I could yetBe held by chalk-white
— Mervyn Peake, Collected Poems
A great spirit has been amongst us, and a great artist is gone.
— Ezra Pound, Gaudier-Brzeska: A Memoir
Culture jamming is enjoying a resurgence, in part because of technological advancements but also more pertinently, because of the good old rules of supply and demand. Something not far from the surfaces of the public psyche is delighted to see the icons of corporate power subverted and mocked. There is, in short, a market for it. With commercialism able to overpower the traditional authority of religion, politics and schools, corporations have emerged a the natural targets for all sorts of free-floating rage and rebellion. The new ethos that culture jamming taps into is go-for-the-corporate-jugular.
— Naomi Klein, No Logo
Art in relation to life is nothing more than a glove turned inside out. It seems to have the same shapes and contours, but it can never be used for the same purpose. Art teaches nothing about life, just as life teaches us nothing about art.
— Morton Feldman, Give My Regards to Eighth Street: Collected Writings
You know one thing that Mr. Powell taught me? He taught me that sometimes, art can make you forget everything else all around you. That's what are can do.
— Gary D. Schmidt
Music is art, and art is an integral part of the human experience.
— Anne Frasier, Hush
I intend to destroy, destroy everything that exists in painting. I have utter contempt for painting.
— Juan Miro
O Divine Poesy, goddess, daughter of Zeus, sustain for me this song of the various-minded man who, after he had plundered the innermost citadel of hallowed Troy, was made to stay grievously about the coasts of men, the sport of their customs, good and bad, while his heart, through all the sea-faring, ached with an agony to redeem himself and bring his company safe home. Vain hope – for them. The fools! Their own witlessness cast them aside. To destroy for meat the oxen of the most exalted Sun, wherefore the Sun-god blotted out the day of their return. Make this tale live for us in all its many bearings, O Muse.” – from Homer’s Odyssey, translation by T.E. Lawrence (Lawrence of Arabia)
— Steven Pressfield, The War of Art: Break Through the Blocks & Win Your Inner Creative Battles
For the first time in his life, he stopped worrying about results, and as a consequence the terms “success” and “failure” had suddenly lost their meaning for him. The true purpose of art was not to create beautiful objects, he discovered. It was a method of understanding, a way of penetrating the world and finding one’s place in it, and whatever aesthetic qualities an individual canvas might have were almost an incidental by-product of the effort to engage oneself in this struggle, to enter into the thick of things.
— Paul Auster, Moon Palace
I think that's what art is: art is communication made in the hope that interesting miscommunications will arise.
— Misha Glouberman
Photography is like stealing.You rob someone of a moment that exposes something essential about their character,their soul if you like.there are people who are very conscious of that,who find that terrifying.The thought that everyone,friend of foe,can get so close to you,look you straight in the eye and judge you without having any control over it or being able to respond.A part of them has become the property of the photographer.
— Esther Verhoef, Close-up
...to make art is to realize another's sadness within, realize the hidden sadness in other people's lives, to feel sad with and for a stranger.
— Marianne Wiggins, The Shadow Catcher
Like the sundial, my paint box counts no hours but sunny ones.
— Arthur Rackham
Art always penetrates the particular fissures in one's psychic life.
— Stephen Greenblatt, The Swerve: How the World Became Modern
Don't we all know that art is dangerous. You play it - then you live it.
— Stefan Balint
Art is why I get up in the morning, but my definition ends there. You know, it doesn't seem fair that I'm living for something I can't even define, but there you are, right there, in the meantime.
— Ani DiFranco, Ani Difranco: The Complete Lyrics
The thing is, and here we come to E. Gorey's Great Simple Theory About Art (which he has never tried to communicate to anybody else until now, so prepare for Severe Bafflement), that on the surface they are so obviously those situations that it is very difficult to see that they really are about something else entirely. This is the theory, incidentally, that anything is art, and it's the way I tell, 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 have the something it is boring and if you just have the something else it's irritating.
— Edward Gorey, Floating Worlds: The Letters of Edward Gorey & Peter F. Neumeyer
I have, for my own projected works and ideas, only the silliest and dewiest of hopes; no matter what, I am romantic enough or sentimental enough to wish to contribute something to life’s fabric, to the world’s beauty.... [S]imply to live does not justify existence, for life is a mere gesture on the surface of the earth, and death a return to that from which we had never been wholly separated; but oh to leave a trace, no matter how faint, of that brief gesture! For someone, some day, may find it beautiful!
— Frank O'Hara
Art is an act of the soul, not the intellect. When we are dealing with people's dreams - their visions, really - we are in the realm of the sacred. We are involved with forces and energies larger than our own. We are engaged in a sacred transaction of which we know only a little: the shadow, not the shape.
— Julia Cameron
A comparably capacious embrace of beauty and pleasure - an embrace that somehow extends to death as well as life, to dissolution as well as creation - characterizes Montaigne's restless reflections on matter in motion, Cervantes's chronicle of his mad knight, Michelangelo's depiction of flayed skin, Leonardo's sketches of whirlpools, Caravaggio's loving attention to the dirty soles of Christ's feet.
— Stephen Greenblatt, The Swerve: How the World Became Modern
On the opposite wall was a Damien Hirst spot painting, bought by Arabella after a decent bonus season. Roger's considered view of the painting, looking at it from aesthetic, art-historical, interior-design, and psychological points of view, was that it had cost forty-seven thousand pounds, plus VAT.
— John Lanchester, Capital
For the canons of good society are, or should be, the same as the canons of art. Form is absolutely essential to it. It should have the dignity of a ceremony, as well as its unreality, and should combine the insincere character of a romantic play with the wit and beauty that make such plays delightful to us.
— Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray
Art does not reproduce the visible; rather, it makes visible.
— Paul Klee Foundation
Storytelling--that's not the future. The future, I'm afraid, is flashes and impulses. It's mode up of moments and fragments, and stories won't survive.
— Dexter Palmer, The Dream of Perpetual Motion
I know I will always be attracted to the unknown as it does often verify what I am or what else I could be.
— Hollace M. Metzger
Most great artists define a new and unique region of hell.
— Scott Miller, Music: What Happened?
In art one idea is as good as another.
— Willem De Kooning
WE ARE the PULSE of the TIMES!
— Carrie White
If you have a rifle, hanging on the wall in the first act, it should fire in the last act”.
— Konstantin Stanislavski
Fantasy, abandoned by reason, produces impossible monsters; united with it, she is the mother of the arts and the origin of marvels.
— Francisco de Goya
Color has got me. I no longer need to chase after it. It has got me for ever. I know it. That is the meaning of this happy hour.
— Paul Klee
This is a perfectly good picture. And if I didn't know you, I would be impressed and charmed. But I do know you."He thought some more, wondering whether he dared say precisely what he felt, for he knew he could never explain exactly why the idea came to him. "It's the painting of a dutiful daughter," he said eventually, looking at her cautiously to see her reaction. "You want to please. You are always aware of what the person looking at this picture will think of it. Because of that you've missed something important. Does that make sense?"She thought, then nodded. "All right," she said grudgingly and with just a touch of despair in her voice. "You win."Julien grunted. "Have another go, then. I shall come back and come back until you figure it out.""And you'll know?""You'll know. I will merely get the benefit of it.
— Iain Pears, The Dream of Scipio
Painting completed my life. I lost three children and a series of other things that would have fulfilled my horrible life. My painting took the place of all this. I think work is the best. (Frida Kahlo, p. 157)
— Martha Zamora, The Letters of Frida Kahlo: Cartas Apasionadas
The only thing--I tell you this straight from the heart--that disgusts me in Salzburg is that one can't have any proper social intercourse with those people--and that music does not have a better reputation...For I assure you, without travel, at least for people from the arts and sciences, one is a miserable creature!...A man of mediocre talents always remains mediocre, may he travel or not--but a man of superior talents, which I cannot deny myself to have without being blasphemous, becomes--bad, if he always stays in the same place. If the archbishop would trust me, I would soon make his music famous; that is surely true.
— Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
I looked on astounded as from his ordinary life he made his art. We were both ordinary men, he and I. Yet from the ordinary he created Legends--and I from Legends created only the ordinary!
— Peter Shaffer, Amadeus
Pornography won’t be enough. Because it never is. Sooner or later, all niggers want to touch the real thing. All dogs want to smell and taste the true information. All artists want to make their fantasies reality. And everyone with a cock wants to use it to fall in love.
— Peter Sotos
Gormenghast. Withdrawn and ruinous it broods in umbra: the immemorial masonry: the towers, the tracts. Is all corroding? No. Through an avenue of spires a zephyr floats; a bird whistles; a freshet beats away from a choked river. Deep in a fist of stone a doll's hand wriggles, warm rebellious on the frozen palm. A shadow shifts its length. A spider stirs... And darkness winds between the characters.- Gormenghast
— Mervyn Peake
Keep music and art alive in our schools because the greatness of a country is not measured by wars that are won, by territory annexed or even the size of a deficit. It is measured by the beauty of the art work by talented hands, the sounds of the music created from the heart and by the wonder of the eyes and ears beholding them in joy. Art and music are the windows of the soul of any country. The greater the art created, the greater the country.
— Clarrissa Lee Moon
The Baron told her that only art meant anything.
— Edward Gorey, The Gilded Bat
A hundred francs! Oh, dear me! It is worth millions of francs, my child. But my -- dealer -- here tells me that in fact a picture is worth only what someone will give for it. How much money do you have?"Julia took out her purse and counted. "Four francs and twenty sous," she said, looking up at him sadly."Is that all the money you have in the world?"She nodded."Then four francs and twenty sous it is.
— Iain Pears, The Dream of Scipio
Boomer had asked her once, in a telephone call from Virginia, “Why does this stuff, these hand-painted hallucinations that don’t do nothin’ but confuse the puddin’ out of a perfectly reasonable wall, why does it mean so much to you?” It was a poor connection, but he could have sworn he heard her say, “In the haunted house of life, art is the only stair that doesn’t creak.
— Tom Robbins, Skinny Legs and All
What modern art required was an imagination drawn to possibilities, rather than braced by smug presumptions.
— Meredith Duran, Wicked Becomes You
..if I dont do something on the grand scale, it is that my genius is altogether imitative, and that I have nor recently encountered any very striking models of grandeur.
— Henry James, Roderick Hudson
Art cannot be bought or sold. It can only be created or destroyed.
— Iimani David
Art does not have to be dull, to be effective; the artist does not have to be a bore, to be real.
— Burton Raffel, 41 Stories
There was the honour and austerity of money as he walked through art galleries, as he saw around him the collections of oil paintings by dead men, lit so carefully that warmth seemed to emanate from within - and not because their art was loved or understood but because it could be sold and bought for handsome sums.
— Lydia Millet, How the Dead Dream
Nothing is new anymore. We're living in a post-everything society and "art" itself has become satire.
— Ruadhán J. McElroy
It's fun to be on the edge. I think you do your best work when you take chances when you're not safe when you're not in the middle of the road...
— Danny De Vito
There is no such thing as a perfect drawing, especially if you're ametur.
— Mark Crilley, Miki Falls, Volume 3: Autumn
A work of art wastes away and becomes lustreless in surroundings where it has a price but not a value. It radiates only when surrounded by love. It is bound to wilt in a world where the rich have no time and the cultivated no money. But it never harmonizes with borrowed greatness.
— Ernst Jünger, The Glass Bees
Please DO waste art materials. Use paper. Empty paint jars. Deplete pens. if it's teaching you stuff, it's not being wasted.
— Danny Gregory
Human perfection and technical perfection are incompatible. If we strive for one, we must sacrifice the other: there is, in any case, a parting of the ways. Whoever realises this will do cleaner work one way or the other.Technical perfection strives towards the calculable, human perfection towards the incalculable. Perfect mechanisms - around which, therefore, stands an uncanny but fascinating halo of brilliance - evoke both fear and Titanic pride which will be humbled not by insight but only by catastrophe.The fear and enthusiasm we experience at the sight of perfect mechanisms are in exact contrast to the happiness we feel at the sight of a perfect work of art. We sense an attack on our integrity, on our wholeness. That arms and legs are lost or harmed is not yet the greatest danger.
— Ernst Jünger, The Glass Bees
Think it a vile habit to alter works of good composers, to omit parts of them, or to insert new-fashioned ornaments. This is the greatest insult you can offer to Art.
— Robert Schumann, Advice to Young Musicians
Art creates an incomparable and unique effect, and, having done so, passes on to other things. Nature, upon the other hand, forgetting that that imitation can be made the sincerest form of insult, keeps on repeating this effect until we all become absolutely wearied of it.
— Oscar Wilde, The Decay of Lying
In its confounding of the logic that maintains terms like high and low, or base and sacred as polar opposites, it is this play of the contradictory that allows one to think the truth that Bataille never tired of demonstrating: that violence has historically been lodged at the heart of the sacred; that to be genuine, the very thought of the creative must simultaneously be an experience of death; and that it is impossible for any moment of true intensity to exist apart from a cruelty that is equally extreme.
— Rosalind E. Krauss, The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths
Art makes the spirit soar. And when the spirit is lifted, life follows.
— Adriana Trigiani, Don't Sing at the Table: Life Lessons from My Grandmothers
Art changes posture and posture changes innocent bystanders.
— Seth Godin, Linchpin: Are You Indispensable?
The verb 'to darn' is explained in my pocket dictionary as follows: 'To mend by imitating the texture of the stuff, with thread and needle.' But this definition does not correspond to the work accomplished by good Chinese housewives. When they mend a sock, they do not try 'to imitate the texture of the stuff'. Their art makes no attempt at concealment: it even takes a certain pride in revealing itself.
— Daniele Varè, The Maker of Heavenly Trousers
After two or three stanzas and several images by which he was himself astonished, his work took possession of him and he experienced the approach of what is called inspiration. At such moments the correlation of the forces controlling the artist is, as it were, stood on its head. The ascendancy is no longer with the artist or the state of mind which he is trying to express, but with language, his instrument of expression. Language, the home and dwelling of beauty and meaning, itself begins to think and speak for man and turns wholly into music, not in the sense of outward, audible sounds but by virtue of the power and momentum of its inward flow. Then, like the current of a mighty river polishing stones and turning wheels by its very movement, the flow of speech creates in passing, by the force of its own laws, rhyme and rhythm and countless other forms and formations, still more important and until now undiscovered, unconsidered and unnamed.At such moments Yury felt that the main part of his work was not being done by him but by something which was above him and controlling him: the thought and poetry of the world as it was at that moment and as it would be in the future. He was controlled by the next step it was to take in the order of its historical development; and he felt himself to be only the pretext and the pivot setting it in motion....In deciphering these scribbles he went through the usual disappointments. Last night these rough passages had astonished him and moved him to tears by certain unexpectedly successful lines. Now, on re-reading these very lines, he was saddened to find that they were strained and glaringly far-fetched.
— Boris Pasternak, Doctor Zhivago
Like punk rock, like Jackson Pollock, like Jack Kerouac, it was truly human, a mix of perfect beauty and cathartic error.
— Yann Martel, The Facts Behind the Helsinki Roccamatios
Part came from Lane, and part from D.H. Lawrence;Gide, though I didn't know it then, gave part.They taught me to express my deep abhorrenceIf I caught anyone preferring ArtTo Life and Love and being Pure-in-heart.I lived with crooks but seldom was molested;The Pure-in-heart can never be arrested.
— W.H. Auden, Letters from Iceland
cease to regard the canvas as a surface on which to paint a picture, but instead as a surface on which to record an event
— Harold Rosenberg
I have learned that what I have not drawn I have never really seen, and that when I start drawing an ordinary thing, I realize how extraordinary it is, sheer miracle.
— Frederick Frank
While art should never become exclusionary and elitist, any culture which fails to support its artists is only contributing to its own impoverishment. (Beyond Religion, p. 122)
— David N. Elkins
For me, this is when the act of watching transforms into the act of witnessing.To witness something implies a responsiveness, the response/ability of the viewer toward the performer. It is radically different from what we might call the 'consuming' gaze that says 'here, you entertain me, I bought a ticket, and I'm going to sit back and watch.' This traditional gaze doesn't want to get involved, doesn't want to give anything back.
— Ann Cooper Albright, Choreographing Difference: Body and Identity in Contemporary Dance
The 'Renaissance' West Butchered the Rest.If I had to choose between an erudite Aristotle and an unknown ‘soulless’ black slave I would choose the latter. The ascendancy of the West was on a heap of bodies of slaves and trampled humanity through colonization
— Viktor Vijay Kumar, Mona Lisa does not smile anymore
Truly, art is embedded in nature; he who can extract it, has it.
— Albrecht Dürer
Then Martine said: "So yuo will be poor now all your life, Babette?"Poor?" said Babette. She smiled as if to herself. "No, I shall never be poor. I told you that I am a great artist. A great artist, Mesdames, is never poor.We have something, Mesdames, of which other people know nothing.
— Karen Blixen
In a cement park across the street is this giant sculpture. It is a giant umbrella frame lying on its side. It's green. Stand under it, during a rainstorm, you'll still get wet - that's why it's art.
— Peter Hedges, What's Eating Gilbert Grape
Like symbolism, decadence puts forth the idea that the function of literature is to evoke impressions and 'correspondences', rather than to realistically depict the world. ... the decadent aestheticized decay and took pleasure in perversity. In decadent literature, sickness is preferable to health, not only because sickness was regarded as more interesting, but because sickness was construed as subversive, as a threat to the very fabric of society. By embracing the marginal, the unhealthy and the deviant, the decadents attacked bourgeois life, which they perceived as the chief enemy of art.
— Asti Hustvedt
He doesn't believe in talking too much about art, especially while you're looking at it. The pressure to appreciate is the great enemy of actual enjoyment. Most people don't know what they like because they feel obligated to like so many different things. They feel they're supposed to be overwhelmed, so instead of looking, they spend their time thinking up something to say, something intelligent, or at least clever.
— Robert Hellenga, The Sixteen Pleasures
Entertainment is business: the business of fucking art in the face.
— Eugene Mirman, The Will to Whatevs: A Guide to Modern Life
Sculpture is what you bump into when you back up to see a painting.
— Barnett Newman
What are works of art for? to educate, to be standards. To produce is of little use unless what we produce is known, is widely known, the wider known the better, for it is by being known that it works, it influences, it does its duty, it does good. We must try, then, to be known, aim at it, take means to it. And this without puffing in the process or pride in the success.
— Gerard Manley Hopkins, Letters to Robert Bridges and Correspondence with Richard Watson Dixon
Airplane Dream #13' told the story, more or less, of a dream Rosa had had about the end of the world. There were no human beings left but her, and she had found herself flying in a pink seaplane to an island inhabited by sentient lemurs. There seemed to be a lot more to it -- there was a kind of graphic "sound track" constructed around images relating to Peter Tchaikovsky and his works, and of course abundant food imagery -- but this was, as far as Joe could tell, the gist. The story was told entirely through collage, with pictures clipped from magazines and books. There were pictures from anatomy texts, an exploded musculature of the human leg, a pictorial explanation of peristalsis. She had found an old history of India, and many of the lemurs of her dream-apocalypse had the heads and calm, horizontal gazes of Hindu princes and goddesses. A seafood cookbook, rich with color photographs of boiled crustacea and poached whole fish with jellied stares, had been throughly mined. Sometimes she inscribed text across the pictures, none of which made a good deal of sense to him; a few pages consisted almost entirely of her brambly writing, illuminated, as it were, with collage. There were some penciled-in cartoonish marginalia like the creatures found loitering at the edges of pages in medieval books.
— Michael Chabon, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay
The artist's world is limitless. It can be found anywhere, far from where he lives or a few feet away. It is always on his doorstep. 
— Paul Strand
The popular distinction between 'constructive' and 'destructive' criticism is a sentimentality: the mind too weak to perceive in what respects the bad fails is not strong enough to appreciate in what the good succeeds. To be without discrimination is to be unable to praise. The critic who lets you know that he always looks for something to like in works he discusses is not telling you anything about the works or about art
—  he is saying 'see what a nice person I am.
There is only one thing left for you to do,” John Sloan advised one artist. “Pull off your socks and try with your feet.
— Ross Wetzsteon, Republic of Dreams: Greenwich Village: The American Bohemia 1910-1960
He who wars against the arts, wars not against nations, but against all mankind.
— Arthur Urbane Dilley
In effect, painting is the still memory of [the artist's] human motion, and our individual responses to it depend on who we are, on our character, which underlines the simple truth that no person leaves himself behind in order to look at a painting.
— Siri Hustvedt, Mysteries of the Rectangle: Essays on Painting
The effect of studying masterpieces is to make me admire and do otherwise. So it must be on every original artist to some degree, on me to a marked degree.(from notes on 'Heraclitean Fire')
— Gerard Manley Hopkins, The Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins
Art can only progress towards its own self-annihilation.
— Richard Appignanesi
Some say art is our highest form of hope. . . . Perhaps it's our only hope.
— Roma Tearne, Mosquito
Story is the umbilical cord that connects us to the past, present, and future. Family. Story is a relationship between the teller and the listener, a responsibility. . . . Story is an affirmation of our ties to one another.
— Terry Tempest Williams, Pieces of White Shell
There's a point at which when I start to know a man well--this isn't true of women--I wonder whether there's something in him that's evil. Something that's pure and can't be touched. This quality of evil may be related to the quality of artistry, for an artist has the same characteristics.
— Kathy Acker, My Mother: Demonology
An original is worth more than a copy.
— Suzy Kassem, Rise Up and Salute the Sun: The Writings of Suzy Kassem
You were born an original work of art. Stay original.
— Suzy Kassem
Erik Satie died on July 1, 1925; his last words were 'Ah, the cows...
— John  Richardson, A Life of Picasso: The Triumphant Years: 1917-1932
Art cannot save anybody from anything.
— Gilbert Sorrentino, The Moon in Its Flight
Originals cost more than imitations.
— Suzy Kassem, Rise Up and Salute the Sun: The Writings of Suzy Kassem
The morality of art consists, for everyone, in the side that flatters its own interests. People do not like literature.
— Gustave Flaubert, Bouvard and Pecuchet
SELF PORTRAIT: Throwing Armfuls of Air into the Air
— Jandy Nelson, I'll Give You the Sun
In my box of sound bites there are no jackhammers, no snowmobiles, no Jet Skis, no children wailing. Music but no Muzak.It's my box. Put what you want in yours.
— Joan Oliver Goldsmith, How Can We Keep from Singing: Music and the Passionate Life
No man can roan or inhabit the Canadian North without it affecting him, and the artist, because of his constant habit of awareness and his discipline in expression, is perhaps more understanding of its moods and spirit than others are. He is thus better equipped to interpret it to others, and then, when her has become one with its spirit, to create living works in their own right, by using forms, colors, rhythms and moods, to make a harmonious home for the imaginative and spiritual meaning it has evoked in him. 
— Lawren Harris, The Best of the Group of Seven
Let us seek the respite where it is—in the very thick of battle. For in my opinion, and this is where I shall close, it is there. Great ideas, it has been said, come into the world as gently as doves. Perhaps then, if we listen attentively, we shall hear, amid the uproar of empires and nations, a faint flutter of wings, the gentle stirring of life and hope. Some will say that this hope lies in a nation; others, in a man. I believe rather that it is awakened, revived, nourished by millions of solitary individuals whose deeds and works every day negate frontiers and the crudest implications of history. As a result, there shines forth fleetingly the ever threatened truth that each and every man, on the foundation of his own suffering and joys, builds for all.
— Albert Camus, Resistance, Rebellion and Death: Essays