c2p-cmd/Good-Quotes-Authors huggingface dataset:
The artistic life is a long and lovely suicide precisely because it involves the negation of self; as Highsmith imagined herself as her characters, so Ripley takes on the personae of others and in doing so metamorphoses himself into a 'living' work of art. A return to the 'real life' after a period of creativity resulted in a fall in spirits, an agony Highsmith felt acutely. She voiced this pain in the novel via Bernard's quotation of an excerpt from Derwatt's notebook: 'There is no depression for the artist except that caused by a return to the self'.
— Andrew Wilson, Patricia Highsmith, Ζωή στο σκοτάδι
We write to go on living, after we have died.
— Jenim Dibie, The Calligraphy of God
I’m doing the absolute opposite of giving myself away. As far as I’m concerned, I’ll be completely visible. If the painting sells, I’ll be in Paris, hanging on a wall. If anything, I’m being selfish. It’s perfect; all the freedom of creation, with none of the fuss.
— Jessie Burton, The Muse
Timid young artists, adding parental fears to their own, often give up their sunny dreams of artistic careers, settling into the twilight world of could-have-beens and regrets.
— Julia Cameron, The Artist's Way
That doesn't mean that I would destroy those works, or that I'm not proud of having come out the other side. Our past art makes our present art as much as our past life makes us who we are now. In the end, if the art stands up, that's what matters.
— Kat Howard, Roses and Rot
After sex & metaphysics,—… what?What you have made.
— Frank Bidart, Star Dust
Jiu Jitsu uses us to express itself, and the best thing we can do to is to become a vehicle capable of expressing Jiu Jitsu with all of its perfection minus our imperfections.
— Chris Matakas, The Tao of Jiu Jitsu
Truth in art is the unity of a thing with itself
— Oscar Wilde, De Profundis
Art is not about thinking something up. It is about the opposite—getting something down.
— Julia Cameron, The Artist's Way
Yet torture is above all an art, an artistic discipline just like literature , cinema, or contemporary dance. All detained in the City-State ghettos bitterly missed the torturers of yesteryears, those monsters who worked with the precision of a Swiss watch-maker.
— Fiston Mwanza Mujila, Tram 83
Artists are often repulsed by the anti-human values and commercialized culture of their society, but they are also aware that they have a unique status within it that allows them to express their creative individuality - as long as it sells. They fear that socialism would strip them of that status and reduce them to the level of mere workers, because they are unable to imagine a world that values and encourages the artistic expression of all of its members.
— Danny Katch, ABC's of Socialism
Mankind will begin to recover the moment we take art as seriously as physics, chemistry, or money.
— Ernst Levy
Say it new or say it straight.
— Sol Stein, Stein On Writing: A Master Editor of Some of the Most Successful Writers of Our Century Shares His Craft Techniques and Strategies
A very fine artist can take something quite ordinary and, through sheer artistry and willpower, turn it into a work of art.
— Truman Capote
I don't like shit too perfect. I want some human stake in my shit. If it's too perfect I ain't really with it. If it's too clean I ain't really with it. If it's too polished I don't really like it.
— Madlib
She was a poem and a painting too. Everything she said sounded like a song, every silence was the music too.
— Akshay Vasu
You’ve got sadness in you, I’ve got sadness in me – and my works of art are places where the two sadnesses can meet, and therefore both of us need to feel less sad.
— Mark Rothko
The true artist is not proud, he unfortunately sees that art has no limits; he feels darkly how far he is from the goal; and though he may be admired by others, he is sad not to have reached that point to which his better genius only appears as a distant, guiding sun. I would, perhaps, rather come to you and your people, than to many rich folk who display inward poverty.
— Ludwig van Beethoven, Beethoven's Letters
Not every artistic person should have to be a photographer, but every photographer should be artistic.
— Pradeepa Pandiyan
A photograph is the pause button on life.
— Various
Every piece of art has a buyer. Only Time decides when the right buyer will see it.
— Suzy Kassem, Rise Up and Salute the Sun: The Writings of Suzy Kassem
Exactly. The dots guy. I've always thought getting older was a bit like looking at those paintings. You're born, and that's when you're standing right up next to the canvas. Nothing makes any sense. There's just a lot of light and color. But as you get older, you begin to back away, and that's when the image starts to cohere. All those little spots of color turn into flowers, or people, or dogs. You gain perspective.
— Tommy Wallach, Thanks for the Trouble
Art frees us from our prejudices and gives us the chance to become our best selves, individuals who dare to dream. And even if those dreams aren’t always as pretty as we’d like, or don’t conform, or frighten us, it is our duty to encourage art to flourish. All art. Every kind.
— M.J. Rose, The Secret Language of Stones
If God could transcribe my heart, it'd still read "I love you".
— Jenim Dibie, The Calligraphy of God
Photoghraphic projects can be as short as an afternoon or as long as a lifetime.
— George Barr
You are perfectly right in objecting to them [modern art], for this one great fault - that they have not yet had time to become old.
— Alexandre Dumas, The Count of Monte Cristo
A world that won't forget is a world drowned in its not forgetting. Do we want a world full of unedited memory? To be human is to be finite.
— Tacita Dean, Film: Tacita Dean
You look like a lesbian artist fairy.
— LaCour Nina
We learn so that we may succeed, and that goes for anything in life, including the arts. It’s a falsity that the moment we earn money or wish to earn money for our creations that it ceases to become art.
— Karina Halle, Smut
art is a mode of stalking
— Ron Silliman, Revelator
Grant me the following in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ. Like a leper rotting in flesh, let all avoid me. Like a cripple without limbs, let me not move freely. Remove my cheeks, the tears may not roll down them. Crush my lips and tongue, that I may not sin with them. Pull out my nails, that I may not grasp nothing. Let my shoulders and back be bent, that I may carry nothing. Like a man with tumor in the head let me lack judgment. Ravage my body sworn to chastity leave me with no pride, and have me live in shame. Let no one pray for me. But only the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ have mercy on me.
— Sang-Hyun, Thirst
Art is whatever makes you proud to be human.
— LeRoi Jones
Feel My Heart: A Collection of Poem and Art WWW( DOT)amazon(DOT)in/Feel-My-Heart-Collection-Poem/dp/1535431601
— sandeep kumar mishra
That kind of pursuit is not beneficial to mankind: art for self aggrandizement at the cost of love.
— Anuradha Bhattacharyya, One Word
Your art is so abstract that I can only see it through my mind’s eye and touch it through my heart.
— Debasish Mridha
I've found that people reveal nothing of their true selves except within their art and their sin." ~ Dacey Sinnett, 'ROAM
— Dez Schwartz, Roam
When she started with the first empty canvas, she didn’t know what she was going to paint, she just let her paint brushes glide and they religiously followed the trajectory of her angst; the choice of colours and the strokes, they were all a reflection of what was going through her mind. The reds were the embers within her that refused to die. The blues were the rare instances when she was spent by her grief. The blacks were her moments of absolute weakness, the colour of the bottomless pit within her that she had plunged into, falling through and through. The brush strokes moved around blank canvases like snakes with fangs of elixir that filled her scars with a deluge of hope and a gale of faith in herself. The colours spoke to her in whispers, narrating their own tale while she poured out hers to them. They allowed her to channel her life through them. They listened. They cared. They laughed. They cried. They reassured her that there was life waiting ahead, staring at her past, urging her forward with eager arms. And Preeti rushed into them with her brush in hand that rose along with her and fell along with her.
— Faraaz Kazi, More Than Just Friends
One is reminded in this connection of a story concerning Kobori-Enshiu. Enshiu was complimented by his disciples on the admirable taste he had displayed in the choice of his [art] collection. Said they, "Each piece is such that no one could help admiring. It shows that you had better taste than had Rikiu, for his collection could only be appreciated by one beholder in a thousand." Sorrowfully Enshiu replied: "This only proves how commonplace I am. The great Rikiu dared to love only those objects which personally appealed to him, whereas I unconsciously cater to the taste of the majority. Verily, Rikiu was one in a thousand among tea-masters.
— Kakuzō Okakura, The Book of Tea
Some thoughts you underestimate but may be capable of energizing the world. Never delay to put your thoughts into words.
— Bikash Bhandari
Find a beautiful piece of art. If you fall in love with Van Gogh or Matisse or John Oliver Killens, or if you fall love with the music of Coltrane, the music of Aretha Franklin, or the music of Chopin - find some beautiful art and admire it, and realize that that was created by human beings just like you, no more human, no less.
— Maya Angelou
Artists, as a rule, understand nothing about business, or, for some reason or other, they aren’t allowed to understand anything about it.
— Robert Walser, The Walk
I create beautiful art, so I can look back on the life my body fell short of in such a way that it brings me peace.
— Nikki Rowe
Art is the whisper of history, heard above the noise of time. Art does not exist for art's sake: it exists for people's sake.
— Julian Barnes, The Noise of Time
Behind every creative act is a statement of love. Every artistic creation is a statement of gratitude.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
Any person whom seeks to live a historical existence must devote their efforts to learning about the world, care about people and nature, and seek to express their thoughts in the artistic methodology most appropriate to their particular talent. A person cannot fake self-awareness or imitate an artistic nature. A person must honestly earn a heightened level of conscious awareness.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
It was shameless how life made fun of one; it was a joke, a cause for weeping! Either one lived and let one's senses play, drank full at the primitive mother's breast—which brought great bliss but was no protection against death; then one lived like a mushroom in the forest, colorful today and rotten tomorrow. Or else one put up a defense, imprisoned oneself for work and tried to build a monument to the fleeting passage of life—then one renounced life, was nothing but a tool; one enlisted in the service of that which endured, but one dried up in the process and lost one's freedom, scope, lust for life...Ach, life made sense only if one achieved both, only if it was not split by this brittle alternative! To create, without sacrificing one's senses for it. To live, without renouncing the mobility of creating. Was that impossible?
— Hermann Hesse
In each painting, I think, it’s as if  God were giving up on finishing the world.
— Yves Bonnefoy
Great artists need great clients.
— I.M. Pei
I believe that architecture is a pragmatic art. To become art it must be built on a foundation of necessity.
— I.M. Pei
The greatest events of life often leave one unmoved; they pass out of consciousness, and, when one thinks of them, become unreal. Even the scarlet flowers of passion seem to grow out in the same meadow as the poppies of oblivion. We reject the burden of their memory, and have anodynes against them. But the little things, the things of no moment, remain with us.
— Oscar Wilde, The Portrait of Mr. W. H.
linear brains can't curve a thought.
— douglas m laurent
The contemporary art world is what Tom Wolfe would call a "statusphere." It's structured around nebulous and often contradictory hierarchies of fame, credibility, imagined historical importance, institutional affliction, perceived intelligence, wealth, and attribution such as the size of one's art collection.
— Sarah Thornton, Seven Days in the Art World
Generations cometh and generations passeth, but the earth abideth forever. While successive generations live and die, and all things change, man can never rest until death claims us. I choose to use my time alone to contemplate human existence, probe the human condition, and trace what it means to be one man in our modern world. There can be no profit from my labor, no lasting yield realized from this laborious and painful sojourn. We will leave everything behind. The earth shall dissolve all of our acquisitions and obliterate all traces of our petty affections. Passage of time shall alter, not annihilate the products of any artistic labors. The substance of our artistic enterprises shall continue forward in a renewed and redefined state.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
It is by continuing to put out good work that the artist best shows his gratitude.
— Criss Jami
All forms of art are parallel expressions. Writing is not unlike painting or other artistic endeavors. Each artistic endeavor is an expression of the mystery of the world. The job of the artist is to deepen that mystery, express reverence for the mystery of life, and explore the enigmatic aspects of human nature.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
Creating art is paradoxical because an artist seeks to express truth by penetrating and destroying illusions. Art is always the outpouring of a mind striving to achieve the impossible reconciliation of all the fragmented shards that make people human: frivolous amusements, idle moments, feelings of tenderness and pain, stored memories, future expectations, and unquenchable thirst to experience love and witness beauty.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
An invisible, yet active current of mental energy, underscores any book as well as any other form of artistic creation. A creative burst of psychological energy ignites any creative project. The emotional energy that underlies the artistic work propels it forward endowing it with articulation, texture, rhythm, and movement. When the expressive energy of the artist flags, the work comes to a stopping point and it takes on its final composition.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
However, an artist is limited only by his own skill and imagination. He’s in total control of his art. Whereas nature is the artist here, and I merely try to interpret and manage her design.
— Crit Kincaid, A Wounded World
She puts away four small plastic cups of red wine and then stares at a painting of a topless girl with a large silver sword for a half hour and then she begins to think: You call this art? This isn’t art! This is a joke! All of you are a joke! Fuck you and fuck Jeff Koons and the rest of those ‘80s art-star wannabes. Where’s the art that makes people weep? Where’s the art that makes people want to go to church? None of this is the least bit interesting. All of this stuff, all of this is so self-aware. It’s for ironic art snobs. I want something brilliant. I want something stunning. I want something that makes me look in wonder…
— Joe Meno, Office Girl
Although the art world is frequently characterised as a classless scene where artists from lower-msddle-class backgrounds drink champagne with high-priced hedge-fund managers, scholarly curators, fashion designers and other "creatives," you'd be mistaken if you thought the world was egalitarian or democratic. Art is about experimenting with ideas, but it is also about excellence and exclusion. In a society where everyone is looking for a little distinction, it's an intoxicating combination.
— Sarah Thornton, Seven Days in the Art World
Much of our lives involves the word ‘no.’ In school we are mostly told, ‘Don’t do it this way. Do it that way.’ But art is the big yes. In art, you get a chance to make something where there was nothing.
— Marvin Bell
Thus, for an adequate interpretation of the differences found between the classes or within the same class as regards their relation to the various legitimate arts, painting, music, theatre, literature etc., one would have to analyse fully the social uses, legitimate or illegitimate, to which each of the arts, genres, works or institutions considered lends itself. For example, nothing more clearly affirms one's 'class', nothing more infallibly classifies, than tastes in music.
— Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste
No one cares about the artist Kafka, who troubles us with his puzzling aesthetic, because we'd rather have Kafka as the fusion of experience and work, the Kafka who had a difficult relationship with his father and didn't know how to deal with women.
— Milan Kundera, Testaments Betrayed: An Essay in Nine Parts
I was not out to paint beautiful pictures
—  even painting good pictures was not important to me. I wanted only to help the truth burst forth.
He printed business cards celebrating his shift. They read, 'Ars gratia pecuniae.' Translated, it meant, 'Art for money's sake.
— Kliph Nesteroff, The Comedians: Drunks, Thieves, Scoundrels, and the History of American Comedy
And someday,when the partiesdon’t dazzle you anymore,and when the alcohol failsto amuse your senses,come to me.We’ll lie on the grass,stare at the stars,and talk about Life.Maybe I will become the Momentyou rediscover yourself again.
— Meraaqi, Divine Trouble
Art exists not inside the piece itself, but inside the mind of the viewer.
— Noah Hawley, Before the Fall
The forger was too exacting, too superficial. Only the real artist has the false beginning.
— Dominic Smith, The Last Painting of Sara de Vos
Life imitates art, but clumsily, copying its movements when it thinks it isn't looking.
— Neil Gaiman, Trigger Warning: Short Fictions and Disturbances
Each of our five senses contains an art.
— Lawrence Durrell, Balthazar
Have you ever taken a good look at a public garbage can in Paris, a paving stone in Rio de Janeiro, or a doorway in Dublin? Trust me -- the man or woman responsible for making those utilitarian objects was creating art.
— Shawn Coyne, Turning Pro
My mind is my canvas
—  my thoughts are my color and paintbrush.
And if, as all philosophers on the subject have noted, art is a human activity that relies on the senses to reach the soul, did it not also stand to reason that dogs -- at least dogs of Mr. Bones' caliber -- would have it in them to feel a similar aesthetic impulse? Would they not, in other words, be able to appreciate art? As far as Willy knew, no one had ever thought of this before. Did that make him the first man in recorded history to believe such a thing was possible? No matter. It was an idea whose time had come. If dogs were beyond the pull of oil paintings and string quartets, who was to say they wouldn't respond to an art based on the sense of smell? Why not an olfactory art? Why not an art for dogs that dealt with the world as dogs knew it?
— Paul Auster, Timbuktu
I bring the girl to a museum, try to show her a little culture, and she turns a Chihuly into a giant phallus.
— Nicki Elson, When It Hooks You
Why can't a tree be called Pluplusch?
— Hugo Ball
Why should a real chair be better than an imaginary elephant?
— Virginia Woolf
Schelling's God is the totality of Nature struggling towards consciousness, and Man is as far as the struggle has got, with the animals not too far behind, vegetables somewhat lagging, and rocks nowhere as yet. Do we believe this? Does it matter? Think of it as a poem or a painting. Art doesn't have to be true like a theorem. It can be true in other ways. This truth says there is a meaning to it all, and Man is where the meaning begins to show.
— Tom Stoppard, Voyage
Kate Walker´s attitude is characteristic of contemporary feminists' determination not to reject femininity but to empty the term of its negative connotations, to reclaim and refashion the category: "I have never worried that embroidery's association with femininity, sweetness, passivity and obedience may subvert my work's feminist intention. Femininity and sweetness are part of women's strength. Passivity and obedience, moreover, are the very opposites of the qualities necessary to make a sustained effort in needlework. What's required are physical and mental skills, fine aesthetic judgement in colour, texture and composition; patient during long training: and assertive individuality of design (and consequence disobedience of aesthetic convention). Quiet strength need not be mistaken for useless vulnerability".
— Rozsika Parker, The Subversive Stitch: Embroidery and the Making of the Feminine
If someone says something about your art that makes you feel bad, disregard it and joyfully make more art.
— Gayle Wray
I have occupied this idle, empty winter with writing a story. It has been written to please myself, without thought of my own vanity or modesty, without regard for other people's feelings, without considering whether I shock or hurt the living, without scrupling to speak of the dead.The world, I know, is changing. I am not indifferent to the revolution that has caught us in its mighty skirts, to the enormity of the flood that is threatening to submerge us. But what could I do? In the welter of the surrounding storm, I have taken refuge for a moment on this little raft, constructed with the salvage of my memory. I have tried to steer it into that calm haven of art in which I still believe. I have tried to avoid some of the rocks and sandbanks that guard its entrance.[from the introduction]
— Dorothy Bussy, Olivia
The creative hopeless.
— Pankaj Mishra (#iampm)
Technology is important to Art because it connects creativity with innovation and the spirit of inventiveness. Whether we are using technology to create our art, or to share our art, it challenges artists to explore new realms of aesthetic experience and cultural relevance. But, on the other hand, Art is important to Technology for the most important reason of all. Art gives Technology its humanity. And our humanity is the driving force behind every new technology we design and every product we manufacture. We are all makers. Without creativity, we don’t make anything. If we don’t make anything, we don’t progress.
— Kim Chestney
Art is not democratic. Art is sublime.
— Minae Mizumura, The Fall of Language in the Age of English
He knew Kandinsky by heart: every trickle of red, slash of black ink, and hemorrhage of gold. Each dissonant note in its allegro, the harmony in its adagio, and its deep blue intermezzo, formed a symphony he had memorized in his body. He couldn’t say if Fragment 2 symbolized the Deluge, the Last Judgment, or the Resurrection. But it had become his religion, offering both redemption and pain..
— Kelly  Oliver
Simon Stiegler, Literatur, Belletristik, Crime, Psychology, Philosophy, Art, children, Adult, books, author,Autor
— Simon Stiegler, Cannstatt Burns: Kriminalroman Von Simon Stiegler
Art is not a gift which a few people are given, but rather it is a gift which most people throw away.
— Fred B. Craddock, Overhearing the Gospel: Revised and Expanded Edition
The way to have a good idea is to have a lot of ideas.
— Linus Pauling
I can certainly identify with The Villain. A Villain is someone who has a past, who is strongly opinionated, fearless, doesn't get intimated by anything, and went beyond suffering. It's an empowerment figure.
— Nuno Roque
Sometimes people can be negative, especially about my confidence. I trust myself, I refuse to obey, and I noticed there is a need to punish me for it. But haters are important because they show you you're doing something right. I'm scared of unanimity, artists who everybody likes. When you speak your mind and you're loud, you will attract negativity. But I have thick skin, I think the fact that I was severely bullied in my childhood helped me build strength and believe in my artistic vision. I deal with rejection very well. I have a lifelong vision and an unbreakable spirit.
— Nuno Roque
Sometimes people are shocked by what I do, but I'm not trying to be liked, I speak my mind and I don't care what people think. I truly do not compromise on who I am.
— Nuno Roque
I'm like a circus standing on two legs.
— Nuno Roque
We are living in a very complex society. It puts me in a complex frame of thinking.
— Ai Weiwei
I love the idea of reincarnation, so just in case it doesn't exist, I decided to be different people in the same lifetime.
— Nuno Roque
I'm a Baroque person. More than Baroque, I'm a Rococo person. I don't draw straight lines.
— Nuno Roque
Lee explained to her that art for art’s sake is an upper-class aesthetic. To create art divorced from any purpose, you can’t be living a life driven by need and desire.
— Nell Zink, Mislaid
[N]othing is more easily corrupted than an artist.
— Friedrich Nietzsche
I think we live in a time where artists are very tidy and afraid of what others might think. They hesitate in expressing their views and opinions. So being original is rare. For me, it's about living the life you create for yourself, to create your kingdom. I think we should work on being our unique selves and becoming our greatest versions. I like to remind people to take the power to live their life the way they wish.
— Nuno Roque
In musical performances one can sense that the person on stage is having a good time even if they're singing a song about breaking up or being in a bad way. For an actor this would be anathema, it would destroy the illusion, but with singing one can have it both ways. As a singer, you can be transparent and reveal yourself on stage, in that moment, and at the same time be the person whose story is being told in the song. Not too many kinds of performance allow that.
— David Byrne, How Music Works
I had artistic classical training, and when you learn the classics for so many years, you might gain audacity, power and confidence to subvert everything. I am like the originals buffoons. I love the rules because I can break them.
— Nuno Roque
Some artists benefit less from being interviewed than they do from being left alone.
— Mokokoma Mokhonoana
In addition, I think religion has a chance of a look-in whenever the mind craves solace in music or poetry-- in any form of art at all. Personally, I think it is an art, the greatest one; an extension of the communication all the other arts attempt.
— Dodie Smith, I Capture the Castle
For me, every week is a fashion week.
— Nuno Roque
My childhood was a drag show!
— Nuno Roque
Practice form, recognize forms, hone your natural gift, and let everything you experience teach you to never be a comparison. This is how art lasts, by pulling form first from the past.
— James Emlund
The modern human has mastered the art of building toxic homes and cities.
— Steven Magee
France, stop throwing awards at me! I have so many already, give them to people who need them.
— Nuno Roque
A red nose is the clown's mask and my moustache is mine.
— Nuno Roque
My day begins at dawn as I take my cup of strong black espresso outside to watch the sunrise. I learned this ritual from my mother, who worked in a bread shop. Bakers are the great philosophers of the world, mostly because they have to get up early. When the world is quiet, great art is created - or, at the very least, conceptualized. Now is the moment to sketch, make notes, and dream.
— Adriana Trigiani, Rococo
Paint the sky of life with colors that only you can create!
— H.L. Balcomb, Cinderella In Focus: "Curiosity is the doorway to our personal possibility!" 2nd Edition coming Oct.  31, 2017
Who's the artist?""My favorite." She pauses. "Unknown." Edydie sits cross-legged on the couch. "There is something so pure about an artist creating something for the sheer joy of it, then sharing it with people and claiming no credit. To me that's the height of romance.
— Adriana Trigiani, Rococo
The past does not influence me
—  I influence it.
Realism is criminal.
— Nuno Roque
Words are more thoughts
—  the photographed images always ends up having a romantic gloss about it - no matter how I try to avoid it.
Venice, it's temples and palaces did seem like fabrics of enchantment piled to heaven.
— Percy Bysshe Shelley
what you respond to in any work of art is the artist's struggle against his or her limitations
— Kurt Vonnegut Jr., A Man Without a Country
You can't rush art." I crumpled another lost attempt and tossed it behind me. "Besides, patience is a virtue.""It's a virtue until it's a waste of time," he pointed out.The cello unleashed a few notes that sounded strangely bright for such an instrument, and Hal nodded in its direction. "See; even a musical instrument agrees with me.
— Mirriam Neal, Paper Crowns
... she wore a masterpiece smile with smudges of paint and graphite across her cheek, and her eyes were a Jackson Pollock painting.
— Ellie Lieberman, Solving for X
Art as the single superior counter-force against all will to negation of life, art as the anti-Christian, anti-Buddhist, anti-Nihilist par excellence.
— Friedrich Nietzsche
When I’m passionate about something I strive for excellence, judging whether or not I achieved it is up to the audience.
— Kevin Focke
In my opinion, works of art should be viewed as gifts; something precious given from a point of empathy, where personal enrichment is vastly superior to the value of the gift, and the giver begs for nothing but for the gift to shine on its own.
— Kevin Focke
I've never kissed an art forger before" Lord Huntington to Eliza Somerton in "An Artful Seduction
— Tina Gabrielle, An Artful Seduction
It’s television, after all. No one is dead, even when they die.
— Chris Campanioni, Death of Art
Whether you love Bach or would rather listen to a composition produced by Kulitta Software, Bach has and will continue to demand the we approach and answer the question, 'what is the art, science and language of music?
— Anastasia Lily, Master of the Universe:  Classical Favorites- Ana's Piano- BACH
The future is trash. Recycling it, re-arranging it. Making it beautiful again.
— Chris Campanioni, Death of Art
I have heard of you- a kind of revolutionary. Hard to be a revolutionary in the deadly museum business.
— Thomas Hoving, Making the Mummies Dance: Inside the Metropolitan Museum of Art
… I studied the painting that hangs over the small fireplace. Immerse myself in art, I told myself. Immerse myself in the conversation of those strollers, people who seem to move about more comfortably in their early-evening twilight than I do, people of maybe sixty years ago.
— Diane B. Saxton, Peregrine Island
In reality," he told Paulina, after knowing her a short time, "endings are unworthy of art. Works of art are always unfinished. Whoever creates them is never sure of having finished them. The same is true of all the best things in life. Goethe, even though he was a German, was right about this: 'Every beginning is beautiful, but one must stop on the threshold.
— Ángeles Mastretta, Mujeres de ojos grandes
I preferred an artist who transformed his time, not mirrored it.
— Patti Smith, Just Kids
I had no concept of what life at the Chelsea Hotel would be like when we checked in, but I soon realized it was a tremendous stroke of luck to end up there. We could have had a fair-seized railroad flat in the East Village for what we were paying, but to dwell in this eccentric and damned hotel provided a sense of security as well as a stellar education. The goodwill that surrounded us was proof that the Fates were conspiring to help their enthusiastic children.
— Patti Smith, Just Kids
New artists have been obtained. These do not object to, and indeed argue enthusiastically for, the rationalization process. Production is up. Quality-control devices have been installed at those points where the interests of artists and audiences intersect. Shipping and distribution have been improved out of all recognition. (It is in this area, they say in Paraguay, that traditional practices were most blameworthy.) The rationalized art is dispatched from central art dumps to regional art dumps, and from there into the lifestreams of cities. Each citizen is given as much art as his system can tolerate.
— Donald Barthelme, Sixty Stories
Art lovers ought to be crazy.That's how they see the fun side of everything.
— Saru Singhal
I don't want realism. I want magic. I live magic. I am magic.
— Oksana Rus
To become a work of art is the object of living.
— Oscar Wilde, Only Dull People Are Brilliant at Breakfast
Don't wait for inspiration. It comes while working.
— Henri Matisse
If something cannot be done to check, or at least to modify, our monstrous worship of facts, art will become sterile and beauty will pass away from the land.
— Oscar Wilde, The Decay of Lying
No art is silent! Because art is an original idea and every original idea speaks, every interesting thought screams, every art talks, every art screams! No art is silent! If it is silent, then it is not an art!
— Mehmet Murat ildan
The world concerns me only in so far as I owe it a certain debt and duty, so to speak, because I have walked this earth for 30 years, and out of gratitude would like to leave some memento in the form of drawings and paintings—not made to please this school or that, but to express a genuine human feeling.
— Vincent van Gogh, The Letters of Vincent van Gogh
If you introduce the human figure you at once arouse either disgust or desire.
— E.M. Forster, Maurice
Maybe stories choose how they are told and who tells them.
— Kamand Kojouri
When we create, we become stronger. When we create, we feel better. When we create, we can use our own two hands to create a new world. And this new world will be as we want it to be.
— Valentina Knurova, Finding Yourself in the Town of Geniuses
Nothing seems to me more tragic than the pressures we put on artists to do what we think we'll like, and our refusal to prize what is most ornery and special about them.
— Marcia B. Siegel
OUT of that moment Jesus was nailed to his cross flowed our attempts to represent it, to create a narrative that could contain it. Yet the body, hanging there, is still, simply, terrible. Caravaggio’s genius was to paint Jesus with dirty feet, to bring him back down to earth.
— Nick Flynn, The Reenactments
Everything is art and it's part of the painting. (To talk with somebody it's art, to understand a language is art, to understand a book is art, to understand somebody is art...)
— Deyth Banger
I assert that the art of sculpture, among all the arts connected with design, is at least seven times greater than any other, for the following reason: why, sir, a statue of true sculpture ought to have seven points of view, which ought all to boast equal excellence.
— Benvenuto Cellini, The Autobiography Of Benvenuto Cellini
My friend asked me if it had been cathartic, to write my memoir. I looked down at the sculptures—it was cathartic for me to look at them, but I could imagine it might have been hell to make them (I was cheered / when I came first to know / that there were flowers also / in hell). No, I answered—how was it for you to read it? Aristotle, in his Poetics, never promised catharsis for the makers of art, only for the audience.
— Nick Flynn, The Reenactments
Art might be beautiful even though the artist is not.
— Debasish Mridha
Art is neither a muscle nor a cure for ugliness. Ugliness has its own reasons and convictions to stay here. Art has a patience of a civilized, patience to withhold the gentleness of the civilization.
— Ashutosh Gupta, The Constituents of Virtue
You can't live with literary characters no matter how much you might like to. You can have them as imaginary friends that you can call up when you need to. One of the tasks of art is to provide people with companions.
— Henning Mankell
The greatest masters have only made single statues, groups are always inferior; that is why Carpeaux, big though he was, is less so than Rodin, for he never knew how to make single statues. He did not know how to find his rhythm in the arrangement of the shapes of one body, but obtained it by the disposition of several. The great sculptors are there to prove it. Think of the masterpieces which we like most, all standing or seated, and one at a time, and they are not in the least monotonous. The connoisseur loves one spicy cake, but the glutton requires at least six to stimulate his pleasure.
— H.S. Ede, Savage Messiah
A great artist is conscious of the talent and the power he possesses, otherwise he would not see his faults, and so would not be able to improve.
— H.S. Ede, Savage Messiah
We are all of lifewho stepped from the seatrading weightless journeys of the currentsWe are all of lifewho build and tear down and build againto find gold and silverto find scars that weep and bleedto step from the seato stay with the sea
— Tamara Rendell, Mystical Tides
There is no such thing as reproduction, only acts of production.
— Andrew Solomon, 背離親緣（下）：那些與眾不同的孩子，他們的父母，以及他們尋找身分認同的故事
Your art…” I gaped at the field of white. “There was a lovely portrait of me—right there.”I get offended whenever art is damaged, especially if that art features me.
— Rick Riordan, The Hidden Oracle
Sometimes it seems like "pain" is too obvious a place to turn for inspiration. Pain isn't always deep, anyway. Sometimes it's awful and that's it. Or boring. Surely other things can be as profound as pain.
— Ellen Forney
The only road to freedom is self-education in art. Art is not a luxury for any advancedcivilization; it is a necessity, without which creative intelligence will wither and die. Evenin economically troubled times, support for the arts should be a national imperative.Dance, for example, requires funding not only to secure safe, roomy rehearsal space butto preserve the indispensible continuity of the teacher-student link. American culture hasbecome unbalanced by its obsession with the blood sport of politics, a voracious vortexconsuming everything in its path. History shows that, for both individuals and nations,political power is transient. America's true legacy is its ideal of liberty, which has inspiredinsurgencies around the world. Politicians and partisans of both the Right and the Leftmust recognize that art too is a voice of liberty, requiring nurture without intrusion. Artunites the spiritual and material realms. In an age of alluring, magical machines, thesociety that forgets art risks losing its soul.
— Camille Paglia
Making a whole is very important. Most people paint things and forget the whole.
— Tove Jansson
Art is our endless desire to turn the mortal things into the immortal things!
— Mehmet Murat ildan
[David] Salle's earlier work had been marked by a kind of spaciousness, sometimes an emptiness, such as surrealist works are prone to. But here everything was condensed, impacted, mired. The paintings were like an ugly mood.
— Janet Malcolm, Forty-One False Starts: Essays on Artists and Writers
Sadness is a part of life
—  Love is the heart of life
I’ve done everything I wanted to do, writing books, learning about things, but I’ve been swindled all the same because it’s never anything more.
— Simone de Beauvoir
An artist is someone who, needing nothing and no one, wants everything and everyone.
— Neel Burton
It is man who has introduced a little grace, beauty, unknown charm and mystery into creation by singing about it, interpreting it, by admiring it as a poet, idealizing it as an artist and by explaining it through science, doubtless making mistakes, but finding ingenious reasons, hidden grace and beauty, unknown charm and mystery in the various phenomena of Nature. God created only coarse beings, full of the germs of disease, who, after a few years of bestial enjoyment, grow old and infirm, with all the ugliness and all the want of power of human decrepitude.
— Guy de Maupassant
Most humans, it seems, still put up fences around their acts and thoughts – even when these are piles of shit – for they have no other way of delimiting them. Contrast Paleolithic cave paintings, in which animals and magical markings are overlayed with no differentiation or sense of framing. But when some of us have worked in natural settings, say in a meadow, woods, or mountain range, our cultural training has been so deeply ingrained that we have simply carried a mental rectangle with us to drop around whatever we were doing. This made us feel at home. (Even aerial navigation is plotted geometrically, thus giving the air a "shape".)
— Allan Kaprow, Essays on the Blurring of Art and Life
What has seven editions (the book had already gone into no less) got to do with the value of it? Was not writing poetry a secret transaction, a voice answering a voice? So that all this chatter and praise and blame and meeting people who admired one and meeting people who did not admire one was as ill suited as could be to the thing itself — a voice answering a voice.
— Virginia Woolf, Orlando
I hate people who collect things and classify things and give them names and then forget all about them. That’s what people are always doing in art. They call a painter an impressionist or a cubist or something and then they put him in a drawer and don’t see him as a living individual painter any more.
— John Fowles, The Collector
Not only the artist watches his art with admiration but his art also watches his artist with admiration!
— Mehmet Murat ildan
Art has simple founding principles: Less is more, more or less; fill in the blanks with no filler.
— Kevin Focke
I love a good 2,000 year old storytelling fresco!
— Joy Baer, Storytelling Frescoes
With Michelangelo anatomical science is transformed into music. With him the human body is architectonic matter for the construction of dreams.
— Umberto Boccioni
Creativity is a work of the hand of God, and is therefore an art of Love. If we want to create something in our lives, we have to allow God’s hand to weave through our hearts, so we can carry out the work of the soul – our Divine purpose in life.
— Frederick Espiritu, The Path to Awesomeness: Becoming Super, Being Human
Writing is probably the only form of art, through which you can express, which you would otherwise wouldn't dare to say in person....
— Ramana Pemmaraju
Don't just create art to make money. Make money so you can create more art. (Exchange any words you want for 'create art' and see if it fits).
— Richie Norton
...it's not what artists touch that counts most. It's what they don't touch.
— Allan Kaprow, Essays on the Blurring of Art and Life
Learn about art, Captain. When you understand a species' art, you understand that species.
— Grand Admiral Thrawn
Having small touches of colour makes it more colourful than having the whole thing in colour
— Dieter Rams
There’s only one way to assure consistently good work. That is consistently thorough preparation.
— Andrew Loomis
When you master the art of work, then your life becomes a work of art...and you're the artist and no one else paints your life for you.
— Sotero M Lopez II
Try and make them understand that while artists can recycle their suffering in their art, I didn't know what to do with mine.
— Viola Di Grado, Hollow Heart
It is this perfect accuracy, this lack of play, of variety, that makes the machine-made article so lifeless. Wherever there is life there is variety, and the substitution of the machine-made for the hand-made article has impoverished the world to a greater extent than we are probably yet aware of. Whereas formerly, before the advent of machinery, the commonest article you could pick up had a life and warmth which gave it individual interest, now everything is turned out to such a perfection of deadness that one is driven to pick up and collect, in sheer desperation, the commonest rubbish still surviving from the earlier period.
— Harold Speed, The Practice and Science of Drawing
It fascinates me that when we lose one of our five senses, the remaining four strengthen and rally to make sense of the world we live in. Even by closing our eyes for a moment, we find ourselves paying closer attention to the sounds around us. Perhaps this is why music can resonate so deeply within us; somehow our isolated senses allow our brains the space and perspective to connect these really beautiful dots of our own hearts and souls. I wonder if the act of giving our other senses a break ca
— Ryan O'Neal
What you felt, the beast that swallowed you all and spat you back out, that is the great big bloody point of all this. If you learn nothing else from this bizarre and awkward experience--this gathering of strangers to blow into horns and pluck catgut--remember that you have the power to feel that. The power to create that. With your hands. Your breath. You are gods, children, and you can make war.
— Kate Racculia, Bellweather Rhapsody
A blackbird doesn't change its tune to suit the times.
— Marty Rubin
Great work is not created for everyone. If it were, it would be average work.
— Seth Godin, Linchpin: Are You Indispensable?
Yes, she is.” His eyes remained on Olivia, but she wasn’t aware he was watching her. “With art, I believe anything created with profound heart is captured compulsively beautifully.
— Maria La Serra, The Proverbial Mr. Universe
ART happens every time we live in the spirit of the moment's greatness.
— H.L. Balcomb, Cinderella In Focus: "Curiosity is the doorway to our personal possibility!" 2nd Edition coming Oct.  31, 2017
Don't raise me up, I am but a messenger.
— Jimi Hendrix
His vision was religious and clean, and therefore his paintings were without decoration or superfluous comment, since a religious man respects the power of God's creation to bear witness for itself.
— Thomas Merton, The Seven Storey Mountain
Criticism is like dissecting a dead frog," Caleb said when the book was published. "They're examining all the guts and shit and organs, when the thing that really matters, whatever it was that animated the body, has long since left. It does nothing for the art.
— Kevin    Wilson
Art, I subsequently realised, is like that. It softens by association and implication. It renders the hard pliable. It creates gaps, gaping holes really, in possibility.
— Andrew     Miller, Dub Steps
In some way, every creative action disturbs the universe.
— E.L. Konigsburg, Talk, Talk : A Children's Book Author Speaks to Grown-Ups
As the philosopher Gilles Deleuze put it, no painter ever stands before a completely blank canvas, no author ever sits before a blank page. In fact, the surface confronting the modern artist is full of inherited images that must first be cleared from the imagination before one can begin to create one's own.
— Marie Luise Knott, Unlearning with Hannah Arendt
And yet, in terms of its emotive potential, I still find art more attractive, currently, than books, which fail at a deeper level.
— Andrew     Miller, Dub Steps
Art symbolizes our perfect ability in the matter of enriching the reality!
— Mehmet Murat ildan
Art that only comes from the head isn't any good.
— Austin Kleon, Steal Like an Artist: 10 Things Nobody Told You About Being Creative
One day a young daughter was watching her mother make a roast for the family. She watched as her mother cut off the two ends of the roast and put it in the pan, along with the potatoes and vegetables. Perplexed by the procedure, the child asked why her mother cut off both ends. The mother smiled and answered, “Because that’s the way grandma always did it.” The next time the child saw her grand- ma, she asked her why she did this. Her grandma answered that she had cut off the ends of her roasts and baked them in a small pan because the stove she had was so small.Like the girl’s mother, many of us do things a certain way be- cause that’s the way they have always been done, and we never nd out if those things are still relevant today. So let’s take a moment and think outside the box of what has been done in the past, asking God to reveal Himself to us afresh.
— Theresa Dedmon, Born to Create: Stepping Into Your Supernatural Destiny
How important are the visual arts in our society? I feel strongly that the visual arts are of vast and incalculable importance. Of course I could be prejudiced. I am a visual art.
— Kermit the Frog
The map is more interesting than the territory.
— Michel Houellebecq