Quotes About Art

That's the difference between life and art, of course. Life has no frames, no curtains, no beginnings and no endings.

The clay can become a bear," she said, "but not as long as it rests cold and wet in the riverbank.

You mean I have to get the confession from the white boy? They train these boys to lie, you know. If you're white they don't let you grow up to adulthood if you haven't mastered the art of pretending to say one thing while actually intending to do another.

Our works in stone, in paint, in print, are spared, some of them, for a few decades or a millennium or two, but everything must finally fall in war, or wear away into the ultimate and universal ash - the triumphs, the frauds, the treasures and the fakes. A fact of life: we're going to die. Be of good heart, cry the dead artists out of the living past. Our songs will all be silenced, but what of it? Go on singing. Maybe a man's name doesn't matter all that much.

Every man who is any kind of artist has a great deal of female in him. I act and give of myself as a man, but I register and receive with the soul of a woman. The only really good artists are feminine. I can't admit the existence of an artist whose dominant personality is masculine.

Behind every exquisite thing that existed, there was something tragic.

What of Art? -It is a malady. --Love? -An Illusion. --Religion? -The fashionable substitute for Belief. --You are a sceptic. -Never! Scepticism is the beginning of Faith. --What are you? -To define is to limit.

Art is the only serious thing in the world. And the artist is the only person who is never serious.

The world is changed because you are made of ivory and gold. The curves of your lips rewrite history.

Paradoxically though it may seem, it is none the less true that life imitates art far more than art imitates life.

I love acting. It is so much more real than life.

Life has been your art. You have set yourself to music. Your days are your sonnets.

You have killed my love. You used to stir my imagination. Now you don't even stir my curiosity. You simply produce no effect. I loved you because you were marvelous, because you had genius and intellect, because you realized the dreams of great poets and gave shape and substance to the shadows of art. You have thrown it all away. You are shallow and stupid.

Art is the most intense mode of individualism that the world has known.

All art is at once surface and symbol. Those who go beneath the surface do so at their peril.

I hate vulgar realism in literature. The man who would call a spade a spade should be compelled to use one.

She lives the poetry she cannot write.

Women, as some witty Frenchman once put it, inspire us with the desire to do masterpieces and always prevent us from carrying them out.

Mere color, unspoiled by meaning, and unallied with definite form, can speak to the soul in a thousand different ways.

Morality, like art, means drawing a line someplace.

All bad poetry springs from genuine feeling. To be natural is to be obvious, and to be obvious is to be inartistic.

I find him in the curves of certain lines, in the loveliness and subtleties of certain colours.

Paradox though it may seem - and paradoxes are always dangerous things - it is none the less true that Life imitates art far more than Art imitates life.

every portrait that is painted with feeling is a portrait of the artist, not of the sitter. The sitter is merely the accident, the occasion. It is not he who is revealed by the painter; it is rather the painter who, on the coloured canvas, reveals himself.