Quotes About Art

Literature, which I have the honor to serve, is dear to me just because the noblest task it sets before itself is that of wiping out boundaries and distances.

Far from Italy, far from my native TarentumI lie; and this is the worst of it—worse than death.An exile's life is no life. But the Muses loved me.For my suffering they gave me a honeyed gift:My name survives me. Thanks to the sweet MusesLeonidas will echo throughout all time.

The Italian Renaissance was as much an age of culture and learning as of violence and deceit.

Cordelia was thinking how human beings can invent words, how they can line up their invented words side by side on paper. It was magic.

I didn't have time to be anyone's muse... I was too busy rebelling against my family and learning to be an artist.

Isn't it enough that the world is full of ugly human beings without making copies of them?

El arte es una magia que hace que las horas se desvanezcan e incluso que los días se disuelvan en segundos.

Joan Miró gave me some money one day and told me to get him some cigarettes. I gave it back and said if he wanted cigarettes, he could bloody well get them himself.

To sing is the most human of the art form delivery, more than, perhaps, an instrument which has to be tuned mechanically. You are the tuner; you are the vessel. Everything depends on how you feel as a person. It is for you to hear how beautiful your instrument is. From you to you with much, much love. That way you can send it out to the public because they make the careers. Once they accept you and your freedom to be and your love for singing they never leave you. There is no love like that.

American architecture is the art of covering one thing with another thing, to immitate a third thing which, if genuine, would not be desirable

A painter paints his pictures on canvas. But musicians paint their pictures on silence. We provide the music, and you provide the silence.

A painter paints pictures on canvas. But musicians paint their pictures on silence.

No, I never had any dreams. The process of art is a dream in itself. The artist just doesn't... you work out something. It's yours. You don't have to go to sleep to do that. You do that on the canvas.

Daniel Maclise (whose 1839 oil of Dickens hangs today at the National Portrait Gallery).

delighted Rubens but would have appalled Vargas.

When I was 12 years old, someone took me to see Martha Graham. It was nothing like what I thought of as serious dancing and even then I knew I was having a great experience. It was as if somebody was moving through space like no one ever did before.

All good criticism should be judged the way art is. You shouldn't read it the way you read history or science.

Flatness was construed as (was made to be) a barrier put up against the viewer's normal wish to enter a picture and dream, to make it be a space apart from life in which the mind would be free to make its own connections.

There is an art to grieving. To grieve well the loss of anyone or anything--a parent, a love, a child, an era, a home, a job--is a creative act. It takes attention and patience and courage. But many of us do not know how to grieve. We were never taught, and we don't see examples of full-bodied grieving around us. Our culture favors the fast-food model of mourning--get over it quick and get back to work; affix the bandage of "closure" and move on.

While appropriation art is critical to art, it's an ambiguous art form in the world of the Supreme Court.

Creation always involves building upon something else. There is no art that doesn't reuse. And there will be less art if every reuse is taxed by the appropriator. Monopoly controls have been the exception in free societies; they have been the rule in closed societies.

My major aim was to shape a book which would make its own comment, a wordless statement: to talk through the way it was shaped.

The first mistake of Art is to assume that it's serious.

The first mistake of art is to assume that it's serious.