Quotes About Creativity

Performance art is going to be the future. Plays on Broadway are so restricted. But performance art is like haikus, just one line thing. And it's more casual but more interesting.

Art is like breathing for me. If I don't do it, I start to choke.

I never went to art school and I never thought of going to an art school. It was just a way of manifesting these ideas I had. Ideas came to me that I needed to express.

I never thought, "I'm going to be an artist". When I actually began to become successful in the art world I made it a point to say, 'I am a dilettante, I am not a professional artist", which is true.

If you think art is a competitive forum, then you're going to stop doing it if you're not good. But if it's not competitive, it's something that you'll keep doing.

Most of the more celebrated names among African-American authors, poets, and artists are known to the world because of their association with specific cultural arts movements.

Drawing need not be the bones of art, but skill must always be the skeleton of accomplishment.

Art without accomplishment becomes a form of faith, sustained more by the intensity of its common practice than by the pleasure it gives to its adherents in private.

While art may instruct as well as please, it can nevertheless be true art without instructing, but not without pleasing.

[Shanghai Biennale] has been my attitude for as long as I've been practicing art and other cultural-related activities.

I'm most embarrassed at my art shows, even though I don't show it.

Art should stimulate.

I understand that people are afraid. Because I think censorship is about fear. It's just fear being projected onto art.

Art and resistance are great together. That's what art's made for. Look at Vincent van Gogh: He didn't cut off his ear because he was selling well.

Without freedom there is no art.

In art, I think it's not useful to be a professional of the profession. It will not give you something new.

Art, I suppose, is only for beginners, who have made up in their minds to be content with symbols rather than with what they signify, with the elegantly composed recipe in lieu of actual dinner.

Since Mozart's day composers have learned the art of making music throatily and palpitatingly sexual.

Religion is always a patron of the arts, but its taste is by no means impeccable.

I am not a commercial industry creator. I don't believe in making art to make money.

I do believe - and I know I shouldn't - that art transcends money and success and any of that. You can still do it if you're not clinging to the notion of nobility.

Despite all that I know rationally, and everything that I can put into words, I can say that I have difficulty giving up the notion of the nobility of art.

Rilke said that art can come only out of inner necessity. I write because I must. Or because I cannot not write.

We will die, but art will remain.