Quotes About Art

Peter used to say that an artist's job is to make order out of chaos. You collect details, look for a pattern, and organize. You make sense out of senseless facts. You puzzle together bits of everything. You shuffle and reorganize. Collage. Montage. Assemble.

I asked if Tyler was an artist. Tyler shrugged...What Tyler had created was the shadow of a giant hand. . . he said how at exactly four-thirty the hand was perfect. The giant shadow hand was perfect for one minute, and for one perfect minute Tyler sat in the palm of a perfection he'd created himself. One minute was enough, Tyler said, a person had to work hard for it, but a minute of perfection was worth the effort. A moment was the most you could ever expect from perfection.

Look at your fingers, how the first joint is longer than the second is longer than the end joint. The ratio is Phi, after the sculptor Phidias. The architecture of you.

You talked about Nietzsche and his tertiary syphilis. Mozart and his uremia. Paul Klee and the scleroderma that shrank his joints and muscles to death. Frida Kahlo and the spina bifida that covered her legs with bleeding sores. Lord Byron and his clubfoot. The Brontë sisters and their tuberculosis. Mark Rothko and his suicide. Flannery O'Connor and her lupus. Inspiration needs disease, injury, madness.

How physical beauty turns out to be chemistry and geometry and anatomy. Art is really science. Discovering why people like something is so you can replicate it. Copy it. It's a paradox, creating a real smile. Rehearsing again and again a spontaneous moment of horror. All the sweat and boring effort that goes into creating what looks easy and instant.

What you don't learn in art theory is how too big a compliment can hurt more than a slap to the face.

Nothing is static. Even the Mona Lisa is falling apart.

You've never seen a crucifix with a Jesus who wasn't almost naked. You've never seen a fat Jesus. Or a Jesus with body hair. Every crucifix you've ever seen, the Jesus could be shirtless and modeling designer jeans or men's cologne.

Inspiration needs disease, injury, madness.

What they don't teach you in art school is never, ever to tell people you wanted to be an artist. Just so you know, for the rest of your life, people will torture you by saying how you used to love to draw when you were young. You used to love to paint. A couple drinks. A couple aspirin. Repeat.

Suffering is key to inspiration.

Days she's wasted locked up here in this room, and nothing she's done is half as good as the sketch of a chair she did while shitting her pants.

The people who really, actually loved us, they'd beg us to go. To fulfill our dreams. Practice our craft. And they would love us when we all came back.

Slang is the writer's palette of colors.

Because the only frontier left is the world of intangibles, ideas, stories, music, art. Because nothing is as perfect as you can imagine it.

Still, the better she could draw, the worse her life got--until nothing in her real world was good enough. It got until she didn't belong anywhere. It got so nobody was good enough, refined enough, real enough. Not the boys in high school. Not the other girls. Nothing was real as her imagined world.

You'd be surprised just how fast you can close the door on your past. Learn needlepoint. Make a stained-glass lamp.

Art never comes from happiness

And the kid is stupid enough to think a picture or a sculpture or a story could somehow replace anybody you love.

If you want Neil Gaiman I could draw you a map.

Es gracioso que la belleza del arte tenga mucho más que ver con el marco que con la obra de arte en sí misma.

It's funny how the beauty of art has so much more to do with he frame than with the artwork itself.

Qué es peor, el infierno o la nada? Quema los museos, límpiate el culo con la Mona Lisa, para que al menos Dios aprenda tu nombre.

Quería destrozar algo hermoso.