Quotes About Art

I'm not a politician; I am a singer. Long ago, they said, 'That one, she sings politics.' I don't sing politics; I merely sing the truth.

The most important thing about music that I've learned after all this time is that to me, it's a way of reaching the truth.

The truth is that no matter how many retakes you do, each will be different and that is the nature of any creative medium. There's no such thing as perfection.

An artist's job is to captivate… if we stumble into truth, we got lucky.

The solemn pledge to abstain from telling the truth was called socialist realism.

The truth is that works of art test the spectator much more than the spectator tests them.

When it came to art, desire was a big part of it. Not sexual desire, but the desire to create, to produce, to explore the world around oneself. Without the desire . . . an artist had nothing.

Have you contracted that special illness of the ear — verse?

Poetry = Anger x Imagination

I draw because words are too unpredictable. I draw because words are too limited. If you speak and write in English, or Spanish, or Chinese, or any other language, then only a certain percentage of human beings will get your meaning. But when you draw a picture everybody can understand it. If I draw a cartoon of a flower, then every man, woman, and child in the world can look at it and say, "That's a flower.

Art—and it is art you'll be doing—is subjective.

We live today in the era not of the art of dying, but of the art of saving life

The art of dying is the art of living. The honesty and grace of the years of life that are ending is the real measure of how we die. It is not in the last weeks or days that we compose the message that will be remembered, but in all the decades that proceeded them. Who has lived in dignity, dies in dignity.

Leonardo, with his profound knowledge of art, commenced various undertakings, many of which he never completed, because it appeared to him that the hand could never give due perfection to the object or purpose which he had in his thoughts, or beheld in his imagination - since in his mind he frequently formed some difficult conception, so subtle and so wonderful that no hands, however excellent or able, could ever give it expression

I am pregnant with song. My body aches but do not betray me. I will sing songs and hide them away. I will tear them into bits and throw them in the street. The streets of my city are full of dark holes. I will hide my songs in the holes of the streets.

The object of art is not to make salable pictures. It is to save yourself.

If you are to become a writer you'll have to stop fooling with words.

Those who are to follow the arts should have a training in what is called poverty. Given a comfortable middle-class start in life, the artist is almost sure to end up by becoming a bellyacher, constantly complaining because the public does not rush forward at once to proclaim him.

Would it not be better to have it understood that realism, in so far as the word means reality to life, is always bad art -- although it may possibly be very good journalism?

On the walls were pictures he had made, crude things, half finished. His friends talked of these. Leaning back in their chairs, they talked and talked with their heads rocking from side to side. Words were said about line and values and composition, lots of words, such as are always being said.

If our family was poor, of what did our poverty consist? If our clothes were torn the torn places only let in the sun and wind. In the winter we had no overcoats, but that only meant that we ran rather than loitered. Those who are to follow the arts should have a training in what is called poverty.

Everyone knows of the talking artists. Throughout all of the known history of the world they have gathered in rooms and talked. They talk of art and are passionately,almost feverishly, in earnest about it. They think it matters much more than it does.

Your art kind of changes as you get older, by nature of the fact that you're hopefully gaining wisdom and you're starting to watch things with a better overview.

Comics, for me, is being able to sing alone in the shower. I find it freeing. You just pick up a pen and get to it.