Quotes About Art

So we'll leave him [Plato] to the philosophers and not try to make a novelist of him against his will; he excluded innovative artists from his ideal republic, so we'll exclude him from our republic of fiction.

PAUL GAUGUIN, 1891 (Illustration credit 34.1)

Art works because it appeals to certain faculties of the mind. Music depends on details of the auditory system, painting and sculpture on the visual system. Poetry and literature depend on language.

Creative work is not a selfish act or a bid for attention on the part of the actor. It's a gift to the world and every being in it. Don't cheat us of your contribution. Give us what you've got.

Art was disgusting. It led to thought, and thought led to dissatisfaction, which in turn led to rebellion.

The ought to be a worldwide cultural taskforce that just stops you when you have ideas like combining The Red Desert with an armored car heist movie.

You're supposed to expand your mind to fit the art, you're not supposed to chop the art down to fit your mind.

I don't think any movie or any book or any work of art can solve the stalemate in the Middle East today. But it's certainly worth a try.

writing is like dancing, or sports, where the expression of grace come only through movement.

But if oxen (and horses) and lions had hands or could draw with hands and create works of art like those made by men, horses would draw pictures of gods like horses, and oxen of gods like oxen, and they would make the bodies [of their gods] in accordance with the form that each species itself possesses.

The pre-Socratic Xenophanes famously commented, "Ethiopians have gods with snub noses and black hair, Thracians gods with gray eyes and red hair," and remarked, "But if oxen (and horses) and lions had hands or could draw with hands and create works of art like those made by men, horses would draw pictures of gods like horses, and oxen of gods like oxen, and they would make the bodies [of their gods] in accordance with the form that each species itself possesses.

their contemporaries in the West, Charlemagne and his lords, were dabbling in the art of writing their names.

I've been doing a lot of abstract painting lately, extremely abstract. No brush, no paint, no canvas, I just think about it.

It's a small world, but I wouldn't want to paint it.

Last year I went fishing with Salvador Dali. He was using a dotted line. He caught every other fish.

It's a small world, but I wouldn't want to have to paint it.

Music is a world within itself, with a language we all understand.

Here is my music. It is all I have to tell you how I feel. Know that your love keeps my love strong.

Art flouts convention. Convention became convention because it works.

I feel this music has nurtured me as I've been immersing myself in it. I've felt supported by it.

That sense of failure, I don't know where people put it who don't write songs and aren't able to emote physically. It must go somewhere.

Songs are built by whimsy, faulty memory, and free association.

Mediocre Art is better than Fraud

Poor Beth, it must have felt like slow and agonising death, keeping his distance from Tartaruchi; this work of art was but a poor substitute.