Quotes About Art

The first Velvet Underground album only sold 10,000 copies, but everyone who bought it formed a band

I want to make things that put me in the position of innocence, that recreate the feeling of innocence in you.

Tommy Cooper finds a painting and a violin in the attic; takes them to an expert who says, 'You've got a Stradivarius and a Rembrandt. Unfortunately Stradivarius was a terrible painter and Rembrandt made awful violins.

Talking about one's stories is a little too much like nailing a dog to the floor -- you can get it to stay put that way but it doesn't do much for the dog.

There would seem to be a limit, even for an art preoccupied with boundaries and transgressions, beyond which a work reaches its breaking point and becomes an actual failure, a mere experimentation.

I paint the spirit and soul of what I see.

Once upon a time, I thought faeries lived only in books, old folktales, and the past. That was before they burst upon my life as vibrant, luminous beings, permeating my art and my everyday existence, causing glorious havoc.

The mind of man is never so cunning as when it is involved in the art of self-justification.

Drafts would be written out in his hunched cursive, the words growing fatter as his pencil dulled against the page.

There are only three forms of high art: the symphony, the illustrated children's book and the board game.

I had to face the possibility that the art of living in the way of Jesus was no longer carried on in a holistic way by any single tradition.

Schiller had no illusions about the scale of his own achievement, but he had tried, through art, to bring a little more beauty, a little more tolerance, a little more coherence into the world, and now he felt he had earned the right to look back at the statue with an unembarrassed eye.

It reminded her of something she'd once read, about how an artist doesn't really need a great deal of experience. One heartbreak can produce many novels. But you have to have a heart that can break.

I have this old-fashioned idea that art and commerce are at war.

I soon found out that I wasn't the only magician to turn to cinema. Many of us recognized that a new kind of magic had been invented, and we wanted to be part of it.

Like a mermaid rising from an ocean of paper, the girl emerged across the room.

What we see today is the too-easy acceptance of sf. The sharp idiom we created has blurred to become one of the bland flavourings of mass media; the unembarrassed muse we espoused is one of the jades of television. And the younger writers now writing have an entirely different approach to their art. They have found how easy it is to rely on formula, or how simply success can come through self-advertisement.

have seen the heart Move like a doe through the woods, move Like a stunned doe, deeper and deeper, Through trees that turn and close behind her, The way water closes over a dropped stone, Or a torn limb, or a lasting wound … from "Botticelli's St. Sebastian

Sundance is weird. The movies are weird - you actually have to think about them when you watch them.

You can never be done with music. No more than you can be done with breathing. The day you quit is the day you die.

Louis Malle was the best filmmaker I've ever worked with. He was such an artist. He was dealing with the theme of innocence and experience.

I have no little insight into the feelings of furniture, and treat books and prints with a reasonable consideration. How some people use their pictures, for instance, is a mystery to me; very revolting all the same--portraits obliged to face each other for ever--prints put together in portfolios.

For an instructed eye loves to see where the brush has dipped twice in lustrous colour, has lain insistingly along a favorite outline, dwelt lovingly in a grand shadow--for these "too muches" for the everybody's picture, are so many helps to the making out the real painter's picture as he had it in his brain.

It is essential to do everything possible to attract young people to opera so they can see that it is not some antiquated art form but a repository of the most glorious music and drama that man has created.