Quotes About Art

I'd been painting rats for three years before someone said 'that's clever it's an anagram of art' and I had to pretend I'd known that all along.

Sometimes, I think the only art left for us is slowly peeling the label off a beer bottle while somebody tells you about a dream they had.

Ignorance is the first requisite of the historian - ignorance, which simplifies and clarifies, which selects and omits, with a placid perfection unattainable by the highest art.

With the art therapy, as soon as they saw the paper and crayons coming, we couldn't get it out fast enough. And we told them to draw about the tsunami.

[Art] can speak its own language only as long as the images are alive which refuse and refute the established order.

Difficulty is a coin the learned make use of like jugglers, to conceal the inanity of their art.

I try to paint what I have found and not what I look for. In art, intentions are of little importance.

Good painting is the kind that looks like sculpture.

There's art on the show that's really bad - these cliché Abstract Expressionist gestural things. It's almost like extensions of my performance, because in the scene I'm really mad.

Diplomacy - the art of jumping into trouble without making a splash.

Explain to me, please, why in our literature and art so often people absolutely incompetent in this field have the final word.

When I first started all this, it was mostly music fans that came along, Stones fans. But now, I'm being taken seriously. I've got highfalutin art collectors and everything!

Avant-garde is French for bullshit

We know great art by its effect on us. If we are prepared to look without preconceptions, without defenses, without haste, then art will change us.

Art has absolutely no existence as veracity, as truth.

You see, to me, the art of music is listening to it, not playing it. The real art of it is hearing it.

I have now attained the true art of letter-writing, which we are always told, is to express on paper exactly what one would say to the same person by word of mouth.

In Holland, everyone is an expert in painting and in tulips.

Can the plural possessive express the feelings in your heart? If you don't learn art now, you will never learn to breathe!

Never put more than two waves in a picture; it's fussy.

When we are moved by art we are grateful that the artist lived, grateful that he labored in the service of his gifts.

The negative is comparable to the composer's score and the print to its performance. Each performance differs in subtle ways.

The more abstract is form, the more clear and direct its appeal.

If you're mad at someone for being excited and inspired by your art then you're doing it wrong.