Quotes About Art

With any work worth its salt, you have to trust the author enough to take its measure. And if you apply too many preconceptions, you are not taking its measure.

Art is a private thing, the artist makes it for himself; a comprehensible work is the product of a journalist. We need works that are strong, straight, precise, and forever beyond understanding.

I rather like a certain clumsiness in a work of art.

Songwriting is kind of like a craft. It's not something that just comes in a dream. You've got to work at it.

It is a great privilege to be able to work with, and I suppose work off, my feelings through sculpture.

I often joke that I straddle psychosis and neurosis, and that being an artist keeps me in the middle, so I can work between the two.

It is already a great thing if the main ideas and general outline of a work come without any racking of brains, as the result of that supernatural and inexplicable force we call inspiration.

I've always wanted to work for Walt Disney. That's what I thought I was going to do when I grew up.

The Biblical story of the creation is an excellent parable of movement. The work of art, too, is above all a process of creation, it is never experienced as a mere product.

To accomplish artistic work, of any individual worth, nature must be seen through the medium of the artist's intellectual emotions.

Poet and sculptor, do the work, / Nor let the modish painter shirk

I believe that a picture, a work of art, lives and dies just as we do.

A strong work of art really leaves people speechless. They feel a little angry because they don't understand it.

Creative expression requires an ability to work with feelings and channel them. Frustration, dissatisfaction, and even a sense of desperation may help you access an eloquence you never knew existed.

The September 11 attacks were the greatest work of art in the cosmos...compared to that, we composers are nothing

How do you do original work when culture is telling you which font face to use, which layout.

I think a single sentence by Van Gogh is better than the whole work of all the art critics and art historians put together.

It is a mistake for a sculptor or a painter to speak or write very often about his job. It releases tension needed for his work.

I don't need a psychiatrist. I can sort out my fears with my work. That's the privilege of all artists, to be able to sort out their unhappiness and their neuroses in order to create something.

I work as diligently on my canvases as the laborers do in their fields.

A work of art has value only if tremors of the future run through it.

The difficulty of carrying on a leisure-oriented tradition of culture in a work-oriented society is enough in itself to keep the present crisis in our culture unresolved.

What you try to become is a bringer of magic, for magic and the truth are closely allied and movies are sheer magic ... when they work, it's, well, it's glorious.

The work of art... is an instrument for tilling the human psyche, that it may continue to yield a harvest of vital beauty.