Quotes About Art

I still do not know where the notes will come from when I accept a commission for a new work.

Yes, influences are enriching, and they can be found in every work of art, even the most original.

Baseball is more like a novel than a war. It is like an ongoing, hundred-year work of art, peopled with thousands of characters, full of improbable events, anecdotes, folklore and numbers.

Ideas mostly come from the work itself. Often when I'm drawing, the words will be bouncing around in my head, and when I'm writing, ideas about the drawing happen.

... too many young painters of the day work for the crowd, and not for art. But, then, should not the painters of the day work for the education of the crowd?

I come from a generation where you put the art out and had the luxury to sit back and watch the world deconstruct it, and that was valued. Unfortunately now the work lives in a weird context.

I believe that each work of art, whether it is a work of great genius, or something very small, comes to the artist and says, "Here I am. Enflesh me. Give birth to me."

the artist is not separate from the work and therefore cannot judge it.

I have a long history with Soho: even when I was at art college, I came down to Soho to work in the summer.

A work should convey its entire meaning by itself, imposing it on the spectator even before he knows what the subject is.

What artists call posterity is the posterity of the work of art.

I love the idea of bringing my work to the general public, not just people who go to gallery openings.

I used to write in bed, starting when I woke up. I believe that creative work comes from our subconscious mind, so I try to keep the gap between sleep and writing as minimal as possible.

Documentation is misleading, because the performance is dead. So the very early works were not documented at all.

Look at Picasso. O'Neill. Tennessee Williams. Capote. Were these shiny happy people spreading sunshine? No. Only the greatest of personal demons can force you to do powerful work.

If you look on the history of art you observe how the most popular forms trample the rest. The abstract expressionists destroyed figurative work for more than 30 years.

The only way to survive is to intently focus on how the art world operates. Once you understand how things work, you can find a solution to the problems you are facing.

Perhaps he was a fool, but he thought that if a work were truly great you would only have to read it once and you would be stolen from yourself, desperately moved, changed forever.

I'm sort of murdered for selling books. The idea is, if you make money your work can't be literary.

My idea with my work is always to fashion something that's impossible to transpose into any other media.

If you're a writer, you've chosen art as a way of life. You must accept that some will like your work and others will not. It's the life you chose, so live with it and don't complain.

The beauty of my work is that my sets cost nothing. That's what I love about being a writer of novels.

As information becomes our environment, it becomes mandatory to program the environment itself as a work of art.

If I've done my work well, I vanish completely from the scene. I believe it is invasive of the work when you know too much about the writer.