Quotes About Art

I always joke that everything else that I do is to support my theater habit.

I like to create stuff. I like to express myself through jokes.

I think all art - even one as lowly as making jokes about celebrities - is there to make a connection.

Writing and telling jokes is my favorite thing to do, and I want to be able to do that forever.

Just like any woman,...we weave our stories out of our bodies. Some of us through our children, or our art; some do it just by living. It's all the same.

Faced with the numbering logic of neoliberal regimes, literature offers an intervention in order to consider identity and voice, to consider representation in both the political and artistic sense of the term... [Literature and art] cultivate tension between an unresolved past and present, between invisibility and exposure, showing the dualities of face and mask that leave their trace on identitarian struggles today.

Reading Chekhov, I felt not happy, exactly, but as close to happiness as I knew I was likely to come. And it occurred to me that this was the pleasure and mystery of reading, as well as the answer to those who say that books will disappear. For now, books are still the best way of taking great art and its consolations along with us on a bus.

So it may be that reading your work aloud will not only improve its quality but save your life in the process.

Conception, my boy, fundamental brain work, is what makes all the difference in art. The job of the artist is always to deepen the mystery.

poesy is the wine of demons...

I would like my pictures to look as if a human being had passed between them, like a snail, leaving a trail of the human presence and memory of the past events as the snail leaves its slime. Francis Bacon in conversation in Daniel Farson

When talking about the violence of paint, it's nothing to do with the violence of war. It's to do with an attempt to remake the violence of reality iteslf.

One of the fathers, in great severity, called poesy vinum doemonum, because it filleth the imagination; and yet, it is but with the shadow of a lie. But it is not the lie that passeth through the mind, but the lie that sinketh in, and settleth in it, that doth the hurt; such as we spake of before.

Many secrets of art and nature are thought by the unlearned to be magical.

Oh, love will make a dog howl in rhyme.

All pictorial form begins with the point that sets itself in motion… The point moves … and the line comes into being—the first dimension. If the line shifts to form a plane, we obtain a two-dimensional element. In the movement from plane to spaces, the clash of planes gives rise to body (three-dimensional) … A summary of the kinetic energies which move the point into a line, the line into a plane, and the plane into a spatial dimension.

Art depends on luck and talent.

museums have never existed when art is in good health and creative vitality flourishes. Museums are no more than cemeteries of art, catacombs in which the remains of what were once living things are arranged in sepulchral promiscuity (...) - Théophile Thoré (1861)

Photographers often speak of subjects in the 'foreground' of a landscape scene. Has any famous photographer ever dared to venture to refer to a five, six or more 'grounds' in one of their developments?

Appalling numbers of youth have been led into a cynical ultra-sophisticated attitude which regards drinking as a badge of social aptitude, which makes a fetish of sport and professes eroticism as a way of life. A perverted and insane pictorial art, lewd exhibitionistic dancing and jungle music form the spiritual norm of this sector of America's youth.

Between my head and my hand, there is always the face of death.

My painting is a contest between life and sleep.

Cubism is a Cathedral of shit.

Art is a pharmaceutical product for imbeciles.