Quotes About Art

It's easier to paint the angel's feet to another masterwork than to discover where the angels live within yourself.

Making art is difficult. We leave drawings unfinished and stories unwritten. We do work that does not feel like our own. We repeat ourselves. We stop before we have mastered our materials, or continue on long after their potential is exhausted. Often the work we have not done seems more real in our minds than the pieces we have completed. And so questions arise: How does art get done? Why, often, does it not get done? And what is the nature of the difficulties that stop so many who start?

But while talent—not to mention fate, luck and tragedy—all play their role in human destiny, they hardly rank as dependable tools for advancing your own art on a day-to-day basis.

If art is made by ordinary people, then you'd have to allow that the ideal artist would be an ordinary person too, with the whole usual mixed bag of traits that real human beings possess.

Sometimes to see your work's rightful place you have to walk to the edge of the precipice and search the deep chasms. You have to see that the universe is not formless and dark throughout, but awaits simply the revealing light of your own mind. Your art does not arrive miraculously from the darkness, but is made uneventfully in the light. What

Art is human; error is human; ergo, art is error.

To the viewer, who has little emotional investment in how the work gets done, art made primarily to display technical virtuosity is often beautiful, striking, elegant...and vacant.

But while mastering technique is difficult and time-consuming, it's still inherently easier to reach an already defined goal — a "right answer" — than to give form to a new idea. It's easier to paint in the angel's feet to another's master-work than to discover where the angels live within yourself.

Making art precipitates self-doubt, stirring deep waters that lay between what you know you should be, and what you fear you might be.

Life is meaningless, but it also has meaning—or, more accurately, meanings. There is no such thing as the meaning of life. Many different meanings are possible. One can transcend the self and make a positive mark on the lives of others in myriad ways. These include nurturing and teaching the young, caring for the sick, bringing relief to the suffering, improving society, creating great art or literature, and advancing knowledge.

Some people may be more gifted than others, but excellence in writing, as in any art form or craft, involves discipline and practice.

Art is Man's nature. Nature is god's art.

The purpose of art is to lay bare the questions which have been hidden by the answers.

In a way song writing can almost be detrimental, because suddenly you find an outlet that is a kind of cheating. You don't need to have direct communication. You can say, 'I can't describe it to you, but I will record it and send it to you.'

Poetry is man's rebellion against being what he is.

The present supply of realism is nothing but the publisher's answer to a cheap and fickle demand...if realism be a form of art, the newspaper is a permanent contribution to literature.

I can but repeat that art is not a branch of pedagogy!

Dance, vaudeville, drama, movies - as a child I loved everything that went on in a theater.

For me, prose walks, poetry dances.

Today the U.S. is farther from being nourished by poetry than it was a hundred years ago, when books of poems were best-sellers.

It was as important to live poetically as to write poems.

Is there any purpose to translating poetry? A poem does not contain information of importance, like a signpost or a warning notice.

Any music comes from the inner mind and soul, reaching out to the unknown.

The art of communication is the language of leadership.