Quotes About Art

But one night I was just so wired from being with Tris that I had to stay up until I turned the evening into a song.

But now it's the museum backdrop for the exhibition of grief.

Art for art's sake but money for Christ's sake.

It doesn't do any good to say, 'This is what it means.' When you are spoon fed a film, people instantly know what it is. I like films that leave room to dream.

If you want to get one hour of good painting in, you have to have four hours of uninterrupted time.

When you finish anything, people want you to then talk about it. And I think it's almost like a crime. A film or a painting – each thing is its own sort of language and it's not right to try to say the same thing in words. The words are not there. The language of film, cinema, is the language it was put into, and the English language – it's not going to translate. It's going to lose.

But if you know that you've got to be somewhere in half an hour, there's no way you can achieve that. So the art life means a freedom to have time for the good things to happen. There's not always a lot of time for other things.

Right here people might bring up Vincent van Gogh as an example of a painter who did great work in spite of—or because of—his suffering. I like to think that van Gogh would have been even more prolific and even greater if he wasn't so restricted by the things tormenting him. I don't think it was pain that made him so great—I think his painting brought him whatever happiness he had.

Look at Van Gogh - The guy could not sell one painting and now nobody can afford them

And there are plays – and books and songs and poems and dances – that are perhaps upsetting or intricate or unusual, that leave you unsure, but which you think about perhaps the next day, and perhaps for a week, and perhaps for the rest of your life. Because they aren't clean, they aren't neat, but there's something in them that comes from the heart, and, so, goes to the heart.

When you come into the theater, you have to be willing to say, We're all here to undergo a communion, to find out what is going on in this world. If you're not willing to say that, what you get is entertainment instead of art, and poor entertainment at that.

The audience can endorse the triviality of modern art, but they can't like it.

When you leave the theater wanting to discuss the play, that's a good play. When you leave the theater wanting to discuss your life and the world, that's art

After the conflagration, in the final years of humankind, the artists will, once again, be found painting the ceilings of the caves, and the middlemen will, as always, be trying to talk the honest hunters out of their kill. And it may or may not then be remembered, or indeed believed, there was once a time when the two groups were inextricably linked.

Art has no chance of making the world more just than politics has of making it more beautiful.

One of the things people generally admire about Van Gogh, even though they were not always aware of it, was the way he could make even a chair seem to have anxiety in it.

People who write novels only write them when they have very little else to write

Planeando su Balzac, Rodin llegó a rastrear a un sastre que el novelista había empleado cuarenta años antes; y le encargó un traje con las medidas del muerto.

Jackson Pollock alguna vez fue asistente de David Alfaro Siqueiros.

Si es arte no es para todos, y si es para todos no es arte.

Matisse, consultado sobre la piel verde: No estoy pintando una mujer. Estoy pintando un cuadro.

Uno no termina un poema, simplemente lo abandona.

Cavanaugh believed that the term "martial arts" was a self-contradiction. When it came to combat, there was nothing artistic, nothing smooth and graceful about it.

I've become like one of those people I hate, the sort who go to the museum and, instead of looking at the magnificent Brueghel, take a picture of it, reducing it from art to proof. It's not Look what Brueghel did, painted this masterpiece but Look what I did, went to Rotterdam and stood in front of a Brueghel painting!