Quotes About Art

With the brush we merely tint, while the imagination alone produces colour.

Art is the means we have of undoing the damage of haste. It's what everything else isn't.

Shooting well with the rifle is the highest kind of skill, for the rifle is the queen of weapons; and it is a difficult art to learn.

It may, after all, be the bad habit of creative talents to invest themselves in pathological extremes that yield remarkable insights but no durable way of life for those who cannot translate their psychic wounds into significant art or thought.

The more people have time to experience the joys of creativity, the less they will be consumers, especially of mass-produced culture. I see that as a kind of new wealth that counts for more than owning material things. I also see art as something people will do rather than consume, and do it as a natural part of their lives; creative endeavors are a form of profound spiritual satisfaction.

The art of cinema begins with scraping the chewing gum off the seats.

90% of everything is crap.

The brain is full of lonely ideas, begging you to make some sense of them, to recognize them as interesting. The lazy brain just files them away in old pigeonholes, like a bureaucrat who wants an easy life. The lively brain picks and chooses and creates new works of art out of ideas.

This neglect of lore associated with Crete is reflected in classical Greek art and literature although, paradoxically, its remnants are found only in Attic myths.6

Nothing is truly beautiful unless it cannot be used for anything; everything that is useful is ugly because it is the expression of some need, and those of man are ignoble and disgusting, like his poor and infirm nature.

Deep feeling doesn't make for good poetry. A way with language would be a bit of help.

Deep feeling doesn't make for good poetry. A way with language would be a bit of help.

A literary influence is never just a literary influence. It's also an influence in the way you see everything - in the way you feel your life.

The huge problem in our society is the enormous ignorance of the ideas that underlie modern art.

Architecture is involved with the world, but at the same time it has a certain autonomy. This autonomy cannot be explained in terms of traditional logic because the most interesting parts of the work are non-verbal. They operate within the terms of the work, like any art.

So at a time in which the media give the public everything it wants and desires, maybe art should adopt a much more aggressive attitude towards the public. I myself am very much inclined to take this position.

Hans Hofmann, en Manhattan. Incluso instruy6 en el arte al padre de Robert Ike Niro. Cierta vez este hombre declar6 que si uno quiere que prevalezca lo necesario, debe deshacerse de lo innecesario.

Beginners cringe at the thought of perspective, but you have to admit it's very cool once you see that car sitting on your paper like it was a real three-dimensional object! You don't want to be drawing side views all your life,

I think no artist can claim to have any access to the truth, or an authentic version of an event. But obviously they have slightly better means at their disposal because they have their art to energize whatever it is they're trying to write about. They have music.

One of the interesting things here is that the people who should be shaping the future are politicians. But the political framework itself is so dead and closed that people look to other sources, like artists, because art and music allow people a certain freedom.

My songs are my kids. Some of them stay with me, some others I have to send out, out to the war. It might sound stupid and it might even sound naive, but that's just the way it is.

I think the most important thing about music is the sense of escape.

I believe that any great work of art is, in itself, a form of resistance against a sense of powerlessness.

The reason you create music or art or write is in order to put things in a way you can possibly deal with them, and death is one of those areas... If you're accused of being morbid or bleak then you're onto a good thing, I'd say. Our culture is the most fucking desperate culture, desperately trying to avoid anything vaguely depressing.