Quotes About Art

Life is complicated, and art has the right to be complicated, too. I don't like films that simplify.

For art comes to you proposing frankly to give nothing but the highest quality to your moments as they pass, and simply for those moments' sake.

'Cars' is simply near and dear to my heart.

It's when you begin to lie to yourself in a poem in order to simply make a poem, that you fail.

What is a face, really? Its own photo? Its make-up? Or is it a face as painted by such or such painter? That which is in front? Inside? Behind? And the rest? Doesn't everyone look at himself in his own particular way? Deformations simply do not exist.

Women fail, very simply, if they have no guidance and friendships in art, if they are not perceived as, or permitted to be, artists, and if they have no institutional access.

To labor in the arts for any reason other than love is prostitution.

The song we're composing already exists in potential. Our work is to find it.

The more resistance you experience, the more important your unmanifested art/project/enterprise is to you - and the more gratification you will fell when you finally do it.

You know, Hitler wanted to be an artist. At eighteen he took his inheritance, seven hundred kronen, and moved to Vienna to live and study... Ever see one of his paintings? Neither have I. Resistance beat him. Call it overstatement but I'll say it anyway: it was easier for Hitler to start World War II than it was for him to face a blank square of canvas.

Resistance will tell you anything to keep you from doing your work.

Our job, as souls on this mortal journey, is to shift the seat of our identity from the lower realm to the upper, from the ego to the Self. Art

If the upper realm is, as Plato suggested, the sphere of perfect love, truth, justice, and beauty, then the artist seeks to call down the magic of this world and to create, by dint of labor and luck, the closest-to-sublime simulacra of those qualities that he or she can.

Call it overstatement but I'll say it anyway: it was easier for Hitler to start World War II than it was for him to face a blank square of canvas.

When we raise our game aesthetically, we elevate it morally and spiritually as well.

When inspiration touches talent, she gives birth to truth and beauty.

The amateur has not mastered the technique of his art. Nor does he expose himself to judgment in the real world. If we show our poem to our friend and our friend says, "It's wonderful, I love it," that's not real-world feedback, that's our friend being nice to us. Nothing is as empowering as real-world validation, even if it's for failure.

The acquisition of a condition lends significance to one's existence. An illness, a cross to bear. Some people go from condition to condition; they cure one, and another pops up to take its place. The condition becomes a work of art in itself, a shadow version of the real creative act the victim is avoiding by expending so much care cultivating his condition.

I, on the other hand, believe that the source of creativity is found on the same plane of reality as Resistance.

If Resistance couldn't be beaten, there would be no Fifth Symphony, no Romeo and Juliet, no Golden Gate Bridge. Defeating Resistance is like giving birth. It seems absolutely impossible until you remember that women have been pulling it off successfully, with support and without, for fifty million years.

The Muses were nine sisters, daughters of Zeus and Mnemosyne, which means memory. Their names are Clio, Erato, Thalia, Terpsichore, Calliope, Polyhymnia, Euterpe, Melpomene, and Urania. Their job is to inspire artists.

Eternity is in love with the creations of time. – William Blake

To labor in the arts for any other reason than love, is prostitution.

it was easier for Hitler to start World War II than it was for him to face a blank square of canvas.