Quotes About Art

Choreography is like cooking or gardening. Not like painting because painting stays. Dancing disintegrates. Like a garden. Lots of roses come up, and in the evening they're gone.

Dance has to look like the music. If you see music simply as an accompaniment, then you don't hear it. I occupy myself with how not to interfere with the music.

When you have a garden full of pretty flowers, you don't demand of them, "What do you mean? What is your significance?" Dancers are just flowers, and flowers grow without any literal meaning, they are just beautiful. We're like flowers. A flower doesn't tell you a story. It's in itself a beautiful thing.

Publicity overrates everything. Picasso's overrated. I'm overrated. Even Jack Benny's overrated.

In my ballets, woman is first. Men are consorts. God made men to sing the praises of women. They are not equal to men: They are better.

Ballet is the one place where art flourishes because of a woman; woman is the goddess, the poetess, the muse. That is why I have a company with beautiful girl dancers.

Dancing is music made visible.

Dancers are instruments, like a piano the choreographer plays.

Photoghraphic projects can be as short as an afternoon or as long as a lifetime.

It's easier to replace a dead man than a good picture.

The chief objection of playing wind instruments is that it prolongs the life of the player.

You use a glass mirror to see your face; you use works of art to see your soul.

Dancing is a perpendicular expression of a horizontal desire.

My art is the result of a deeply personal, infinitely complex, and still essentially mysterious, exploration of experience. No words will ever touch it.

I recently bought a book of free verse. For $12.

We have watered our horses in Helicon.

These gems have life in them: their colors speak, say what words fail of.

It is always fatal to have music or poetry interrupted.

Poetry is a mere drug, Sir.

All false art, all vain wisdom, lasts its time but finally destroys itself, and its highest culture is also the epoch of its decay.

La belleza artística no consiste en representar una cosa bella, sino en la bella representación de una cosa.

True politics cannot take a single step without first paying homage to morals, and while politics itself is a difficult art, its combination with morals is no art at all; for morals cuts the Gordian knot which politics cannot solve as soon as the two are in conflict.

I did not know then that words and music are more deadly than any spear.

Photography is a strange phenomenon ... You trust your eye and cannot help but bare your soul.