c2p-cmd/Good-Quotes-Authors huggingface dataset:
We're artists too, but we do a good job hiding it, don't we?
— Roberto Bolaño, The Savage Detectives
Find your authentic voice, become vulnerable, and then put yourself out there.
— Meredith Brooks
... an artist is a person first. He is an individual. If there is no person, there is no artist.
— Chaim Potok, My Name Is Asher Lev
Art is a kind of mining," he said. "The artist a variety of prospector searching for the sparkling silver of meaning in the earth.
— Jane Urquhart, The Underpainter
But the very question of whether photography is or is not an art is essentially a misleading one. Although photography generates works that can be called art --it requires subjectivity, it can lie, it gives aesthetic pleasure-- photography is not, to begin with, an art form at all. Like language, it is a medium in which works of art (among other things) are made. Out of language, one can make scientific discourse, bureaucratic memoranda, love letters, grocery lists, and Balzac's Paris. Out of photography, one can make passport pictures, weather photographs, pornographic pictures, X-rays, wedding pictures, and Atget's Paris. Photography is not an art like, say, painting and poetry. Although the activities of some photographers conform to the traditional notion of a fine art, the activity of exceptionally talented individuals producing discrete objects that have value in themselves, form the beginning photography has also lent itself to that notion of art which says that art is obsolete. The power of photography --and its centrality in present aesthetic concerns-- is that it confirms both ideas of art. But the way in which photography renders art obsolete is, in the long run, stronger.
— Susan Sontag, On Photography
The task of a philosophy of photography is to reflect upon this possibility of freedom - and thus its significance - in a world dominated by apparatuses; to reflect upon the way in which, despite everything, it is possible for human beings to give significance to their lives in the face of the chance necessity of death. Such a philosophy is necessary because it is the only form of revolution left open to us.
— Vilém Flusser, Towards a Philosophy of Photography
We don't need more museums that try to construct the historical narratives of a society, community, team, nation, state, tribe, company, or species. We all know that the ordinary, everyday stories of individuals are riches, more humane, and much more joyful.
— Orhan Pamuk, The Innocence of Objects
There are no vital and significant forms of art; there is only art, and precious little of that.
— Raymond Chandler, The Simple Art of Murder
I know the empathy borne of despair; I know the fluidity of thought, the expansive, even beautiful, mind that hypomania brings, and I know this is quicksilver and precious and often it's poison. There has always existed a sort of psychic butcher who works the scales of transcendence, who weighs out the bloody cost of true art.
— David Lovelace, Scattershot: My Bipolar Family
I'm often painted as the bad guy, and the artistic part of me wants to hand out the brush.
— Criss Jami, Killosophy
Drawing is what you see of the world, truly see...And sometimes what you see is so deep in your head you're not even sure of what you're seeing. But when it's down there on paper, and you look at it, really look, you'll see the way things are...that's the world, isn't it? You have to keep looking to find the truth.
— Patricia Reilly Giff, Pictures of Hollis Woods
The architect had not stopped to bother about columns and porticos, proportions or interiors, or any limitation upon the epic he sought to materialize; he had simply made a servant of Nature - art can go no further.
— Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ
Ads are the cave art of the twentieth century.
— Marshall McLuhan
More of me comes out when I improvise.
— Edward Hopper
God and other artists are always a little obscure.....
— Oscar Wilde
Art is the giving by each man of his evidence to the world. Those who wish to give, love to give, discover the pleasure of giving. Those who give are tremendously strong.
— Robert Henri
Pretend you are dancing or singing a picture. A worker or painter should enjoy his work, else the observer will not enjoy it.
— Robert Henri
The only interesting ideas are heresies
— Susan Sontag, Reborn: Journals and Notebooks, 1947-1963
Art is a person's private vision expressed in aesthetic forms.
— Chaim Potok, My Name Is Asher Lev
To make us feel small in the right way is a function of art. 
— E.M. Forster
I abhor the supreme folly of those who blame the disciples of nature in defiance of those masters who were themselves her pupils
— Leonardo da Vinci, Thoughts on Art and Life
The world, every day, is New. Only for those born in, say, 1870 or so, can there be a meaningful use of the term postmodernism, because for the rest of us we are born and we see and from what we see and digest we remake our world. And to understand it we do not need to label it, categorize it. These labels are slothful and dismissive, and so contradict what we already know about the world, and our daily lives. We know that in each day, we laugh, and we are serious. We do both, in the same day, every day. But in our art we expect clear distinction between the two...But we don't label our days Serious Days or Humorous Days. We know that each day contains endless nuances - if written would contain dozens of disparate passages, funny ones, sad ones, poignant ones, brutal ones, the terrifying and the cuddly. But we are often loathe to allow this in our art. And that is too bad...
— Dave Eggers
If there is on earth, and among all these things of nothing, a belief worthy of adoration, if there is anything holy, pure and sublime, anything answering that immoderate desire for the infinite and the vague that we call the soul, it is art.
— Gustave Flaubert, Memoirs of a Madman
Of course they won't bloody remember, they'll be dead.' Then she called him a name in a dead language that translated, roughly, to 'poop on a stick,' but sounded more succinct, like this: 'Of course they won't bloody remember, they'll be dead, Poopstick.
— Christopher Moore, Sacré Bleu: A Comedy d'Art
I feel like I'm in a film about a struggling artist who keeps getting up at all hours of the night to look at his big, blank empty canvas. And in a way I am. Except that i'm not struggling. I'm Hector Kipling. I might be getting up at all hours of the night to look at my big, blank, empty canvas, but I am not fucking struggling.
— David Thewlis, The Late Hector Kipling
I say that good painters imitated nature
—  but that bad ones vomited it.
In the fullness of artistic life there is, and remains, and will always come back at times, that homesick longing for the truly ideal life that can never come true.
— Vincent van Gogh
You can't help it. An artist's duty, as far as I'm concerned, is to reflect the times.
— Nina Simone
I regard the theatre as the greatest of all art forms, the most immediate way in which a human being can share with another the sense of what it is to be a human being.
— Oscar Wilde
every portrait that is painted with feeling is a portrait of the artist, not of the sitter. The sitter is merely the accident, the occasion. It is not he who is revealed by the painter; it is rather the painter who, on the coloured canvas, reveals himself.
— Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray
Art always serves beauty, and beauty is the joy of possessing form, and form is the key to organic life since no living thing can exist without it.
— Boris Pasternak, Doctor Zhivago
Dancing is surely the most basic and relevant of all forms of expression. Nothing else can so effectively give outward form to an inner experience. Poetry and music exist in time. Painting and architecture are a part of space. But only the dance lives at once in both space and time. In it the creator and the thing created, the artist and the expression, are one. Each participates completely in the other. There could be no better metaphor for an understanding of the mechanics of the cosmos.
— Lyall Watson, Gifts of Unknown Things: A True Story of Nature, Healing, and Initiation from Indonesia's Dancing Island
The critic has to educate the public
—  the artist has to educate the critic.
Works of art make rules
—  rules do not make works of art.
You have to be willing to spend time making things for no known reason.
— Lynda Barry, Picture This: The Near-sighted Monkey Book
This, then, is the ultimate, that is only, consolation: simply that someone shares some of your own feelings and has made of these a work of art which you have the insight, sensitivity, and — like it or not — peculiar set of experiences to appreciate. Amazing thing to say, the consolation of horror in art is that it actually intensifies our panic, loudens it on the sounding-board of our horror-hollowed hearts, turns terror up full blast, all the while reaching for that perfect and deafening amplitude at which we may dance to the bizarre music of our own misery.
— Thomas Ligotti, The Nightmare Factory
What has our culture lost in 1980 that the avant-garde had in 1890? Ebullience, idealism, confidence, the belief that there was plenty of territory to explore, and above all the sense that art, in the most disinterested and noble way, could find the necessary metaphors by which a radically changing culture could be explained to its inhabitants.
— Robert Hughes, The Shock of the New
When we did art with the kids, the demons would lie down.
— Anne Lamott, Plan B: Further Thoughts on Faith
No amount of skillful invention can replace the essential element of imagination.
— Edward Hopper
The lonesome and desperate kids out there, that pain will translate﻿ to magic perhaps.
— Tenacious D
Anyone can put paint on a canvas, but only a true master can bring the painting to life. Anyone can kill, but only a genius can make murder an art.
— Shaun Jeffrey, The Kult
Art breaks open a dimension inaccessible to other experience, a dimension in which human beings, nature, and things no longer stand under the law of the established reality principle...The encounter with the truth of art happens in the estranging language and images which make perceptible, visible, and audible that which is no longer, or not yet, perceived, said, and heard in everyday life.
— Herbert Marcuse
There's a very fine line between being artistic and being a dickhead - it's like love and hate.
— Peter Hook
Art goes into the world unarmed, vulnerable to every quirk of fate, and it must survive only by its power to move men not to destroy it.
— Chelsea Quinn Yarbro, The Palace
Color is the keyboard, the eyes are the hammers, the soul is the piano with its many chords. The artist is the hand that, by touching this or that key, sets the soul vibrating automatically.
— Vasily Kandinsky
That is an artist as I love artists, modest in his needs: he really wants only two things, his bread and his art - panem et Circen.
— Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols
I do an awful lot of thinking and dreaming about things in the past and the future - the timelessness of the rocks and the hills - all the people who have existed there. I prefer winter and fall, when you feel the bone structure of the landscape - the loneliness of it, the dead feeling of winter. Something waits beneath it, the whole story doesn't show.
— Andrew Wyeth
Mastering the art of seduction gives one a great power, and like any power, it's to be wielded with responsibility; a man who wields the art of seduction without a sense of responsibility and restraint is a walking proximity bomb of viral epidemics, needless procreation, heartbroken families, and shattered dreams.
— Mike  Norton
Intentional living is the art of making our own choices before others' choices make us.
— Richie Norton
All great art is a form of complaint
— John Cage
It is an example of what films can do, how they can slip past your defenses and really break your heart.
— David Gilmour
Nothing is a mistake. There’s no win and no fail. There’s only make.
— Corita Kent
Nobody has ever taken a photograph of something they want to forget. We can build a wall of happy Kodak moments around ourselves, a wall of our Christmases, birthdays, baby showers and weddings, but we can never forget that celluloid film is see-through, that behind it, all the misery of real life waits for our wall to collapse someday.
— Rebecca McNutt
If you participate in life, you don’t see it clearly: you suffer from it too much or enjoy it too much. The artist, to my way of thinking, is a monstrosity, something outside nature. All the misfortunes Providence inflicts on him come from his stubborness in denying that maxim.
— Gustave Flaubert
...how absurd human beings are and how magnificent.
— Benjamin Zander
To the man who loves art for its own sake, it is frequently in its least important and lowliest manifestations that the keenest pleasure is to be derived.
— Arthur Conan Doyle, The Adventure of the Copper Beeches
A really well-made buttonhole is the only link between Art and Nature.
— Oscar Wilde, Complete Works of Oscar Wilde
To evoke in oneself a feeling one has once experienced, and having evoked it in oneself, then by means of movements, lines, colors, sounds, or forms expressed in words, so to transmit that feeling that others may experience the same feeling - this is the activity of art.
— Leo Tolstoy, What Is Art?
Old art offers just as good a criticism of new art as new art offers of old.
— Jasper Johns
I like a girl with a substantial bottom,' said Renoir, drawing in the air the size bottom he preferred.
— Christopher Moore, Sacré Bleu: A Comedy d'Art
I have treated many artists. There are among them many neurotics, so many that one finally comes to believe that one cannot be an artist without being neurotic. Again I found in them that inner conflict which is characteristic of modern man: the conflict between a right intuition (namely, that their vocation has fundamental importance for the destiny of humanity) and a false idea (namely, that art is superfluous luxury).
— Paul Tournier, The Whole Person in a Broken World
Sometimes it is better not to talk about art by using the word "art". If we just act with awareness and integrity, our art will flower, and we don't have to talk about it at all.
— Thich Nhat Hanh, Peace Is Every Step: The Path of Mindfulness in Everyday Life
His judgement demonstrates that one can be a genius and understand nothing of an art that is not one's own.
— Victor Hugo, The Hunchback of Notre-Dame
Artistic symbols and myths speak out of the primordial, preconscious realm of the mind which is powerful and chaotic. Both symbol and myth are ways of bringing order and form into this chaos.
— Rollo May, My Quest for Beauty
Our vanity, our passions, our spirit of imitation, our abstract intelligence, our habits have long been at work, and it is the task of art to undo this work of theirs, making us travel back in the direction from which we have come to the depths where what has really existed lies unknown within us.
— Marcel Proust, Time Regained
No respect for beauty – that was characteristic of today’s society. The works of the great masters were at most employed as ironic references, or used in advertising. Michelangelo’s ‘The Creation of Adam’, where you see a pair of jeans in place of the spark. The whole point of the picture, at least as he saw it, was that these two monumental bodies each came to an end in two index fingers that almost, but not quite, touched. There was a space between them a millimetre or so wide. And in this space – life. The sculptural size and richness of detail of this picture was simply a frame, a backdrop, to emphasise the crucial void in its centre. The point of emptiness that contained everything. And in its place a person had superimposed a pair of jeans.
— John Ajvide Lindqvist, Let the Right One In
Art—the meaning of the pattern of our common actions in reality. The cloth-of-gold that hides behind the sackcloth of reality, forced out by the pain of human memory.
— Lawrence Durrell, Justine
Just as when we step into a mosque and its high open dome leads our minds up , up , to greater things , so a great carpet seeks to do the same under the feet .Such a carpet directs us to the magnificence of the infinite , veiled , yet never near , closer than the pulse of jugular , the sunburst that explodes at the center of a carpet signals this boundless radiance . Flowers and trees evoke the pleasures of paradise, and there is always a spot at the center of the carpet that brings calm to the heart. A single white lotus flower floats in a turquoise pool , and in this tiniest of details, there it is : a call to the best within , summoning us to the joy of union .in carpets , I now saw not just intricacies of nature and color , not just mastery of space , but a sign of the infinite design . In each pattern lay the work of a weaver of the world, complete and whole ; and in each knot of daily existence lay mine .
— Anita Amirrezvani, The Blood of Flowers
He had found the thing which the modern people call Impressionism, which is another name for that final scepticism which can find no floor to the universe.
— G.K. Chesterton, The Man Who Was Thursday
(speaking of Ann Radcliffe) A work of art worthy of the name is one which gives us back the freshness of the emotions of childhood.
— André Breton
I've been told my old city possesses a 'thriving arts scene,' whatever that is; personally, I think artists should lie low and stick to their work, not line-dance through the parks.
— Walter Kirn, Up in the Air
I think comedy as an art involves the audience as a participant as much as is involves the artist.
— Craig Ferguson
Although the art world reveres the unconventional, it is rife with conformity. Artists make work that "looks like art" and behave in ways that enhance stereotypes. Curators pander to the expectations of their peers and their museum boards. Collectors run in herds to buy work by a handful of fashionable painters. Critics stick their finger in the air to see which way the wind is blowing so as to "get it right". Originality is not always rewarded, but some people take real risks and innovate, which gives a raison d'être to the rest.
— Sarah Thornton, Seven Days in the Art World
Art is anything you can get away with.
— Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man
The burden God places on each of us is to become who we are meant to be. We are most fully ourselves when Christ most fully lives in us and through us. The mother shines brightest with her child in her arms, the father when he forgives his wandering son, and the artist when he or she is drawing attention to grace, by showing the pinprick of light overcoming the darkness in the painting, or the story, or the song. The world knows darkness. Christ came into the world to show us light. I have seen it, have been blinded by it, invaded by it. I will tell its story.
— Andrew Peterson
I do not know anything about Art with a capital A. What I do know about is my art. Because it concerns me. I do not speak for others. So I do not speak for things which profess to speak for others. My art, however, speaks for me. It lights my way.
— Mark Z. Danielewski, House of Leaves
Find a place you trust and then try trusting it for a while.
— Corita Kent
He had been standing still; for an artist, one of the more painful forms of death.
— Irving Stone
To be disciplined is to follow in a good way. To be self disciplined is to follow in a better way.
— Corita Kent
If art is to nourish the roots of our culture, society must set the artist free to follow his vision wherever it takes him.
— John F. Kennedy
It is a thing of no great difficulty to raise objections against another man's oration, it is a very easy matter; but to produce a better in it's place is a work extremely troublesome.
— Plutarch, Parallel Lives
Art like life is an open secret.
— Lawrence Durrell, The Alexandria Quartet
I’m always thinking about creating. My future starts when I wake up in the morning and see the light.
— Miles Davis
Art is neither a profession nor a hobby. Art is a Way of being.
— Frederick Franck, A Passion for Seeing: On Being an Image Maker
As an artist, if your work doesn't inflame at least part of the audience, then you might as well call it quits and sell insurance... The world needs more boundary pushers, not more boundary creators.
— Alys Arden, The Casquette Girls
But however good you get at translating personality into line or paint it's no go if your personality isn't worth translating.
— John Fowles, The Collector
Art for art's sake, with no purpose, for any purpose perverts art. But art achieves a purpose which is not its own. (1804)
— Benjamin Constant
Because we are saturated with life, because we are human, our strongest motive is life, humanity; and the stronger the motive back of the line the stronger, and therefore more beautiful, the line will be.
— Robert Henri
I am for an art that imitates the human, that is comic, if necessary, or violent, or whatever is necessary. I am for an art that takes its form from the lines of life itself, that twists and extends and accumulates and spits and drips, and is heavy and coarse and blunt and sweet and stupid as life itself.
— Claes Oldenburg
We can never be entirely original, as artists or as people. The genius and vision of those who came before us is too great for us to digress from entirely. Though, as creatures that are compelled to test and surpass our own creative abilities, we must always strive for that originality in everything we do in order to move the world forward.
— Jessica Lave
He expected pages and pages of bright pictures of pancakes of every variety shown in plain stacks, or built into castles or bridges or igloos, or shaped like airplanes or rowboats or fire engines. And pitchers of syrup to choose from -- partridge berry syrup, thimbleberry syrup, huckleberry syrup, bosenberry syrup, and raspberry syrup. Then there would be cheese plates and cheeses a la carte. Creamy cheeses, crumbly cheeses, and peculiar little cheeses in peculiar little clay pots.
— Michael Hoeye, Time Stops for No Mouse
...but you are too much for them: the weak in courage are strong in cunning; and one by one, you have absorbed and have captured and dishonored, and have distilled of your deliverers the most ruinous of all poisons; people hear Beethoven in concert halls, or over a bridge game, or to relax; Cézannes are hung on walls, reproduced, in natural wood frames; van Gogh is the man who cut off his ear and whose yellows became recently popular in window decoration.
— James Agee
Art is either a complaint or appeasement.
— Jasper Johns
Seriously, I think it is a grave fault in life that so much time is wasted in social matters, because it not only takes up time when you might be doing individual private things, but it prevents you storing up the psychic energy that can then be released to create art or whatever it is. It's terrible the way we scotch silence & solitude at every turn, quite suicidal. I can't see how to avoid it, without being very rich or very unpopular, & it does worry me, for time is slipping by , and nothing is done. It isn't as if anything was gained by this social frivolity, It isn't: it's just a waste.
— Philip Larkin, Philip Larkin: Letters to Monica
The painter will produce pictures of little merit if he takes the works of others as his standard.
— Leonardo da Vinci
I wanted to paint a picture some day that people would stand before and forget that it was made of paint. I wanted it to creep into them like a bar of music and mushroom there like a soft bullet.
— O. Henry, The Complete Works of O. Henry
The true artist will let his wife starve, his children go barefoot, his mother drudge for his living at seventy, sooner than work at anything but his art. To women he is half vivisector, half vampire. He gets into intimate relations with them to study them, to strip the mask of convention from them, to surprise their inmost secrets, knowing that they have the power to rouse his deepest creative energies, to rescue him from his cold reason, to make him see visions and dream dreams, to inspire him, as he calls it. He persuades women that they may do this for their own purpose whilst he really means them to do it for his. He steals the mother’s milk and blackens it to make printer’s ink to scoff at her and glorify ideal women with. He pretends to spare her the pangs of child-bearing so that he may have for himself the tenderness and fostering that belong of right to her children. Since marriage began, the great artist has been known as a bad husband. But he is worse: he is a child-robber, a blood-sucker, a hypocrite, and a cheat. Perish the race and wither a thousand women if only the sacrifice of them enable him to act Hamlet better, to paint a finer picture, to write a deeper poem, a greater play, a profounder philosophy! For mark you, Tavy, the artist’s work is to shew us ourselves as we really are. Our minds are nothing but this knowledge of ourselves; and he who adds a jot to such knowledge creates new mind as surely as any woman creates new men. In the rage of that creation he is as ruthless as the woman, as dangerous to her as she to him, and as horribly fascinating. Of all human struggles there is none so treacherous and remorseless as the struggle between the artist man and the mother woman. Which shall use up the other? that is the issue between them. And it is all the deadlier because, in your romanticist cant, they love one another.
— George Bernard Shaw, Man and Superman
The Beautiful is always strange.
— Charles Baudelaire
Art finds her own perfection within, and not outside of, herself.She is not to be judged by any external standard of resemblance.
— Oscar Wilde
Well, Daddy, I used to believe that artists went crazy in the process of creating the beautiful works of art that kept society sane. Nowadays, though, artists make intentionally ugly art that’s only supposed to reflect society rather than inspire it. So I guess we’re all loony together now, loony rats in the shithouse of commercialism.
— Tom Robbins, Skinny Legs and All
An original artist is unable to copy. So he has only to copy in order to be original.
— Jean Cocteau
It's funny how the beauty of art has so much more to do with the frame than the artwork itself.
— Chuck Palahniuk, Choke
Because you live to love and love to live/ And because of what your heardrum will give/ Now we might love to live and live to love.
— Janet Goodfriend, For the Love of Art
every good artist paints what he is
— Jackson Pollock
Forests were the first temples of God and in forests men grasped their first idea of architecture.
— James C. Snyder, Introduction to Architecture
When you do not know what you are doing and what you are doing is the best -- that is inspiration.
— Robert Bresson
Great art is always a way of concentrating, reinventing what is called fact, what we know of our existence- a reconcentration… tearing away the veils, the attitudes people acquire of their time and earlier time. Really good artists tear down those veils
— Francis Bacon
You love your work. God help you, you love it! And thats the curse. That's the brand on your forehead for all of them to see. You love it and they know it, and they know they have you. Do you ever look at the people in the street? Aren't you afraid of them? I am. They move past you and they wear hats and they carry bundles. But that's not the substance of them. The substance of them is hatred for any man who loves his work. That's the only kind they fear. I don't know why
— Ayn Rand
Goodness is nothing in the furnace of art.
— Peter Shaffer, Amadeus
Hidden away behind the closed doors of aristocratic and bourgeois privilege, concealed under those ultra-respectable masks of black frock coat and veil, the green glow of corruption flickers into sight, steadies, and spreads everywhere, fostered by Lorrain's horrified and complicitous gaze. This decadent detective is at one with the criminal he pursues, acknowledging openly that the representation of corruption is one of the most pleasurable forms that corruption can take. In this enterprise, art is the mask that both exposes and conceals culpability.
— Jennifer Birkett
People in coats and ties were milling around the Talley gallery, and on the wall were the minimally rendered still lifes by Giorgio Morandi, most of them no bigger than a tea tray. Their thin browns, ashy grays, and muted blues made people speak softly to one another, as if a shouted word might curdle one of the paintings and ruin it. Bottles, carafes, and ceramic whatnots sat in his paintings like small animals huddling for warmth, and these shy pictures could easily hang next to a Picasso or Matisse without feeling inferior.
— Steve Martin, An Object of Beauty
The notes I handle no better than many pianists. But the pauses between the notes - ah, that is where the art resides.
— Artur Schnabel
To all appearances, the artist acts like a mediumistic being who, from the labyrinth beyond time and space, seeks his way out to a clearing.
— Marcel Duchamp
I wish to confound all these people, to create a work of art of a supernatural realism and of a spiritualist naturalism. I wish to prove... that nothing is explained in the mysteries which surround us.
— Joris-Karl Huysmans
New skin, a new land! And a land of liberty, if that is possible! I chose the geology of a land that was new to me, and that was young, virgin, and without drama, that of America. I traveled in America, but instead of romantically and directly rubbing the snakeskin of my body against the asperities of its terrain, I preferred to peel protected within the armor of the gleaming black crustacean of a Cadillac which I gave Gala as a present. Nevertheless all the men who admire and the women who are in love with my old skin will easily be able to find its remnants in shredded pieces of various sizes scattered to the winds along the roads from New York via Pittsburgh to California. I have peeled with every wind; pieces of my skin have remained caught here and there along my way, scattered through that "promised land" which is America; certain pieces of this skin have remained hanging in the spiny vegetation of the Arizona desert, along the trails where I galloped on horseback, where I got rid of all my former Aristotelian "planetary notions." Other pieces of my skin have remained spread out like tablecloths without food on the summits of the rocky masses by which one reaches the Salt Lake, in which the hard passion of the Mormons saluted in me the European phantom of Apollinaire. Still other pieces have remained suspended along the "antediluvian" bridge of San Francisco, where I saw in passing the ten thousand most beautiful virgins in America, completely naked, standing in line on each side of me as I passed, like two rows of organ-pipes of angelic flesh with cowrie-shell sea vulvas.
— Salvador Dalí, The Secret Life of Salvador Dalí
Art is solving problems that cannot be formulated before they have been solved. The shaping of the question is part of the answer.
— Piet Hein
Possible reality [is obtained] by slightly bending physical and chemical laws.
— Marcel Duchamp
All in all, the creative act is not performed by the artist alone.. the spectator brings the work in contact with the external world by deciphering and interpreting its inner qualifications and thus adds his contribution to the creative act.
— Marcel Duchamp
What is art if not a concentrated and impassioned effort to make something with the little we have, the little we see?
— Andre Dubus, Meditations from a Movable Chair
We suffered for our art. You have to suffer for our art as well!
— Terry Gilliam
I wonder how it is we have come to this place in our society where art and nature are spoke in terms of what is optional, the pastime and concern of the elite?
— Terry Tempest Williams, Leap
Minority art, vernacular art, is marginal art. Only on the margins does growth occur.
— Joanna Russ
Art is a harmony parallel with nature
— Paul Cézanne, Cizanne: Mont Sainte Victoire
Good composition is like a suspension bridge
—  each line adds strength and takes none away... Making lines run into each other is not composition. There must be motive for the connection. Get the art of controlling the observer – that is composition.
Art is bad when ‘you see the intent and get put off.’ (Goethe) In Tolstoy one is unaware of the intent, and sees only the thing itself. from the book, On Retranslating A Russian Classic Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
— Joel Carmichael
A face that has the marks of having lived intensely, that expresses some phase of life, some dominant quality or intellectual power, constitutes for me an interesting face. For this reason the face of an older person, perhaps not beautiful in the strictest sense, is usually more appealing than the face of a younger person who has scarcely been touched by life.
— Doris Ulmann
My experience with life is that it's very fragmented. In one place certain kinds of thing occur, and in another place a different kind of thing occurs. I would like my work to have some vivid indication of those differences. I guess, in painting, it would amount to different kinds of space being represented in it.
— Jasper Johns
I love to draw—pencil, ink pen—I love art. When I go on tour and visit museums in Holland, Germany or England—you know those huge paintings?—I’m just amazed. You don’t think a painter could do something like that. I can look at a piece of sculpture or a painting and totally lose myself in it.
— Michael James Jackson
They lived off each other's hypocrisy, fuelling a worthless market of trash.
— E.A. Bucchianeri, Brushstrokes of a Gadfly
Creativity is one of the highest transmissions of love.
— Suzy Kassem, Rise Up and Salute the Sun: The Writings of Suzy Kassem
Humans had built a world inside the world, which reflected it in pretty much the same way as a drop of water reflected the landscape. And yet ... and y
— Terry Pratchett, Wyrd Sisters
It's a very salutary thing to realize that the rather dull universe in which most of us spend most of our time is not the only universe there is. I think it's healthy that people should have this experience.
— Aldous Huxley, Moksha: Writings on Psychedelics & the Visionary Experience
Color is all. When color is right, form is right. Color is everything, color is vibration like music; everything is vibration.
— Marc Chagall
I never paint dreams or nightmares. I paint my own reality.
— Frida Kahlo
There’s a temptation in our networked age to think that ideas can be developed by email and iChat. That’s crazy. Creativity comes from spontaneous meetings, from random discussions. You run into someone, you ask what they’re doing, you say ‘wow,’ and soon you’re cooking up all sorts of ideas.
— Steve Jobs
When you want to make the main color pure and bright, don't just keep adding bright colors on it. Just make the colors around the spot darker and dull. It will give the scene dramatical effects.I think the life is the same.
— Hiroko Sakai
He thought of trying to explain something he had recently noticed about himself: that if anyone insulted him, or one of his friends, he didn't really mind--or not much, anyway. Whereas if anyone insulted a novel, a story, a poem that he loved, something visceral and volcanic occurred within him. He wasn't sure what this might mean--except perhaps that he had got life and art mixed up, back to front, upside down.
— Julian Barnes
Your paintings are staggeringly beautiful. Did I ever tell you that,or was I just too concerned that you weren't going to earn a living? I know the answer...I worried that the paint was so thickly applied that it might snap off and ruin someone's carpet, rather than realizing that you'd made color itself tactile.
— Rosamund Lupton, Sister
Art is merely the refuge which the ingenious have invented, when they were supplied with food and women, to escape the tediousness of life.
— W. Somerset Maugham, Of Human Bondage by Somerset Maugham
The only valid rule for a work of art is that it be true to itself.
— Marty Rubin
Art should make you think and feel. It doesn't have to match your couch.
— damali ayo
You must forget all your theories, all your ideas before the subject. What part of these is really your own will be expressed in your expression of the emotion awakened in you by the subject.
— Henri Matisse
The purpose of art is to lay bare the questions that have been hidden by the answers.
— James     Baldwin
Art is the imposing of a pattern on experience, and our aesthetic enjoyment is recognition of the pattern.
— Alfred North Whitehead
A picture lives by companionship, expanding and quickening in the eyes of the sensitive observer. It dies by the same token. It is therefore risky to send it out into the world. How often it must be impaired by the eyes of the unfeeling and the cruelty of the impotent.
— Mark Rothko
The mask of art is the means through which corruption is spread. The mask makes vice seem beautiful, turns squalor and nastiness into glamorous thrill, seduces the onlooker into the game – and leaves him or her with the corpse on his hands.
— Jennifer Birkett
Analysis is the art of creation through destruction.
— P.S. Baber, Cassie Draws the Universe
Both those taking snaps and documentary photographers, however, have not understood 'information.' What they produce are camera memories, not information, and the better they do it, the more they prove the victory of the camera over the human being.
— Vilém Flusser, Towards a Philosophy of Photography
Most striking about the traditional societies of the Congo was their remarkable artwork: baskets, mats, pottery, copper and ironwork, and, above all, woodcarving. It would be two decades before Europeans really noticed this art. Its discovery then had a strong influence on Braque, Matisse, and Picasso -- who subsequently kept African art objects in his studio until his death. Cubism was new only for Europeans, for it was partly inspired by specific pieces of African art, some of them from the Pende and Songye peoples, who live in the basin of the Kasai River, one of the Congo's major tributaries.It was easy to see the distinctive brilliance that so entranced Picasso and his colleagues at their first encounter with this art at an exhibit in Paris in 1907. In these central African sculptures some body parts are exaggerated, some shrunken; eyes project, cheeks sink, mouths disappear, torsos become elongated; eye sockets expand to cover almost the entire face; the human face and figure are broken apart and formed again in new ways and proportions that had previously lain beyond sight of traditional European realism.The art sprang from cultures that had, among other things, a looser sense than Islam or Christianity of the boundaries between our world and the next, as well as those between the world of humans and the world of beasts. Among the Bolia people of the Congo, for example, a king was chosen by a council of elders; by ancestors, who appeared to him in a dream; and finally by wild animals, who signaled their assent by roaring during a night when the royal candidate was left at a particular spot in the rain forest. Perhaps it was the fluidity of these boundaries that granted central Africa's artists a freedom those in Europe had not yet discovered. 
— Adam Hochschild, King Leopold's Ghost
You cannot create a piece of art merely for money. Doing it as part of commerce so denudes art of wonder that it ceases to be art.
— Seth Godin, Linchpin: Are You Indispensable?
In eleven or twelve years of writing, Mike, I can lay claim to at least this: I have never written beneath myself. I have never written anything that I didn't want my name attached to. I have probed deeper in some scripts and I've been more successful in some than others. But all of them that have been on, you know, I'll take my lick. They're mine and that's the way I wanted them.
— Rod Serling
My art is an attempt to reach beyond the surface appearance. I want to see growth in wood, time in stone, nature in a city, and I do not mean its parks but a deeper understanding that a city is nature too-the ground upon which it is built, the stone with which it is made.
— Andy Goldsworthy
Art has a voice - let it speak.
— Rochelle Carr
If Art does not enlarge men’s sympathies, it does nothing morally.
— George Eliot
If I didn't start painting, I would have raised chickens.
— Grandma Moses
Take lights and deform them as brutally as you can.
— Kurt Schwitters
Art is not delivered like the morning paper
—  it has to be stolen from Mount Olympus.
Anything that is not necessary to the painting damages it." Henri Matisse
— Volkmar Essers, Matisse
Man, didn't anybody ever tell you that art is propaganda? It doesn't matter whether you think it should be or it shouldn't be, it just is, and motherfucker, like or not, you're sitting on a funky Magna Carta.
— Paul Beatty, Slumberland
I’m going to punch words in your ear holes.
— Christy Leigh Stewart
The one thing you have that nobody else has is you. Your voice, your mind, your story, your vision. So write and draw and build and play and dance and live as only you can. The moment that you feel that just possibly you are walking down the street naked…that’s the moment you may be starting to get it right.
— Neil Gaiman, Make Good Art
...a society without jaywalkers might indicate a society without artists.
— Paul Theroux, The Great Railway Bazaar
An original is a creation motivated by desire. Any reproduction of an originals motivated be necessity. It is marvelous that we are the only species that creates gratuitous forms. To create is divine, to reproduce is human.
— Man Ray
Art is sort of an experimental station in which one tries out living
— John Cage
Now, before you make a movie, you have to have a script, and before you have a script, you have to have a story; though some avant-garde directors have tried to dispense with the latter item, you'll find their work only at art theaters.
— Arthur C. Clarke, 2001: A Space Odyssey
The work of art is a stuffed crocodile.
— Alfred Jarry
Technology adds nothing to art. Two thousand years ago, I could tell you a story, and at any point during the story I could stop, and ask, Now do you want the hero to be kidnapped, or not? But that would, of course, have ruined the story. Part of the experience of being entertained is sitting back and plugging into someone else's vision.
— Penn Jillette
This is what is known as perspective, and it is a swindle.
— Kurt Schwitters
The figure in the icon is not meant to represent literally what Peter or John or any of the apostles looked like, or what Mary looked like, nor the child, Jesus. But, the orthodox painter feels, Jesus of Nazareth did not walk around Galilee faceless. The icon of Jesus may not look like the man Jesus two thousand years ago, but it represents some *quality* of Jesus, or his mother, or his followers, and so becomes an open window through which we can be given a new glimpse of the love of God. 
— Madeleine L'Engle, Walking on Water: Reflections on Faith and Art
The inner drama is the meaning of the exterior event.
— Aaron Siskind
Though a living cannot be made from art, art makes life worth living. It makes starving, living.
— John Sloan, John Sloan on Drawing and Painting
Get the few main lines and see what lines they call out.
— Robert Henri
Art is only important to the extent that it aids in the liberation of our people.
— Elizabeth Catlett, Traditions And Transformations: Contemporary Afro American Sculpture: The Bronx Museum Of The Arts, February 21 May 27, 1989
The sketch hunter moves through life as he finds it, not passing negligently the things he loves, but stopping to know them, and to note them down in the shorthand of his sketchbook.
— Robert Henri
If a certain activity, such as painting, becomes the habitual mode of expression, it may follow that taking up the painting materials and beginning work with them will act suggestively and so presently evoke a flight into the higher state.
— Robert Henri
I don't have technique because I never learnt any.
— Emma Thompson
Radicals often suspect beauty of corruption. Uptight fuckers though they sometimes are, they're right in one thing: art alone cannot change the world. Pens can't take on swords, let alone Predator drones. But as disappointment and violence spread, the antidote is a generosity that the best art can still inspire.Art is hope against cynicism, creation against entropy. To make art is an act of both love and defiance. Though I'm a cynic, I believe these things are all we have.
— Molly Crabapple, Drawing Blood
I think that one wants from a painting a sense of life. The final suggestion, the final statement, has to be not a deliberate statement but a helpless statement. It has to be what you can't avoid saying.
— Jasper Johns
In my early work, I tried to hide my personality, my psychological state, my emotions. This was partly due to my feelings about myself and party due to my feelings about painting at the time. I sort of stuck to my guns for a while but eventually it seemed like a losing battle. Finally one must simply drop the reserve.
— Jasper Johns
It starts off like climbing a tree or solving a puzzle - poetry, if nothing else, is just fun to write. But deeper into each and every piece, you no longer hesitate to call it work. It's passion. A poet's sense of lyrical accomplishment is then his food and water, his means of survival.
— Criss Jami, Killosophy
The object of the artist is the creation of the beautiful. What the beautiful is is another question.
— James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
For me, the subject of the picture is always more important than the picture.
— Diane Arbus
What I'm trying to describe is that it's impossible to get out of your skin into somebody else's.... That somebody else's tragedy is not the same as your own.
— Diane Arbus
Like a groupie incognito posing as a real singer, life imitates art.
— Lana Del Rey
The holy grail is to spend less time making the picture than it takes people to look at it.
— Banksy
If it is art, it is not for all, and if it is for all, it is not art.
— Arnold Schoenberg, Style and Idea: Selected Writings
I would simply ask why so many critics, so many writers, so many philosophers take such satisfaction in professing that the experience of a work of art is ineffable, that it escapes by definition all rational understanding; why are they so eager to concede without a struggle the defeat of knowledge; and where does their irrepressible need to belittle rational understanding come from, this rage to affirm the irreducibility of the work of art, or, to use a more suitable word, its transcendence.
— Pierre Bourdieu, The Rules of Art: Genesis and Structure of the Literary Field
To become truly immortal, a work of art must escape all human limits: logic and common sense will only interfere. But once these barriers are broken, it will enter the realms of childhood visions and dreams.
— Giorgio de Chirico
[in the true mad north] of introspection,where 'falcons of the inner eye'dive and die, glimpsing in their dying fall, all life's memory of existence.
— Lawrence Ferlinghetti, A Coney Island of the Mind
Art suffers the moment other people start paying for it.
— Hugh MacLeod, Ignore Everybody: and 39 Other Keys to Creativity
Art is a picture of the spirit.
— Marty Rubin
But why didn't you just ask me?" I set down my fork and glare at her. "Because you were sleeping," She says, taking a sip if Chardonnay."I was taking a nap, Mom. It wasn't intended to be some kind of Disney fairy-tale hundred-year snooze.
— Alyson Noel, Art Geeks and Prom Queens
Once upon a time there were mass media, and they were wicked, of course, and there was a guilty party. Then there were the virtuous voices that accused the criminals. And Art (ah, what luck!) offered alternatives, for those who were not prisoners to the mass media.Well, it's all over. We have to start again from the beginning, asking one another what's going on.
— Umberto Eco, Travels in Hyperreality
There is something particularly fascinating about seeing places you know in a piece of art - be that in a film, or a photograph, or a painting.
— Sara Sheridan
Art is sanctioned pornography
— Stewart Home, The Art Strike Papers and Neoist Manifestos: The Years Without Art, 1990-1993