Quotes About Art

Poliziano translated Homer. He wrote a great poem on Simonetta Vespucci, you know her?

It was always raining and cold, and there was no order but for the great maps of art that showed judgement, piety and sacrifice. The Eighth Army came upon river after river of destroyed bridges, and their sapper units clambered down banks on ladders of rope within enemy gunfire and swam or waded across.

We have art, Nietzsche says, so that we shall not be destroyed by the truth.

Everything is biographical, Lucian Freud says. What we make, why it is made, how we draw a dog, who it is we are drawn to, why we cannot forget. Everything is collage, even genetics. There is the hidden presence of others in us, even those we have known briefly. We contain them for the rest of our lives, at every border that we cross.

As I've heard some bakers say, baking takes a lot of time, but for the most part it's not YOUR time.

nowhere in nature is their contest as plain or as poignant as it is in the beauty of a flower and its rapid passing. There, the achievement of order against all odds and its blithe abandonment. There, the perfection of art and the blind flux of nature. There, somehow, both transcendence and necessity. Could that be it—right there, in a flower—the meaning of life?

Writing is about music...finding the music of a sentence....

Simply put, I'm glad that manga as an expressive form is expanding.

Don't put my name on it. These are simply documents I make.

Artists such as Lorna Simpson, Zoe Leonard, Byron Kim and Stephen Andrews and I are around the same age, and I know them personally. The discussions I have had with them over the years have influenced the work that I have made throughout my career.

Music is a simulation of something, but language is the greatest thing we possess.

I feel that performing is its own art form, and recording is its own art form, and writing is its own art form, and that they all can happen simultaneously but at different paces.

Having a memoir and a retrospective of your work running almost simultaneously when you're still alive does feel a bit posthumous.

It's hard to do fiction and nonfiction simultaneously.

The faking of feelings is a sin against the imagination.

Now, I recognize that there are certain postures and angles that make people see red, which are evidence of original sin or something, and I avoid that. I don't shoot that any more.

I didn't think there was anything more or less obscene about any part of the body. Now, I recognize that there are certain postures and angles that make people see red, which are evidence of original sin or something, and I avoid that.

It's a sin to have your films not to make money.

You don't show respect to Frank Sinatra and his great example by trying to sound exactly like him. You show it by sounding exactly like you, and that's the way jazz has always progressed as an art form.

I listen to a lot of jazz. I'm a big Sinatra geek. I love Chet Baker.

Ever since I was a kid, I've always been interested in the poetry of melancholy, if you like.

My mom is actually a former prima ballerina, and all the women in my family are associated either with dance or choreography or acting, so I'm very lucky in a way because I grew up in a family of artists. I've been dancing since I was a little kid.

The only instrument I know how to really play, and the instrument that I absolutely love, is the piano. I have been playing piano ever since I have been 9.

The only way to develop your talent is to build it inside you, how sincere you are to the art.