Quotes About Art

To spend your days in the company of naked men - that was the life for me. 'Turn a bit to the left, Jean-Claude. I long to capture the playful quality of your buttocks.

the beauty of an art school: as long as you can pay the tuition, they will never, even in the gentlest way, suggest that you have no talent.

True art was based upon despair, and the important thing was to make yourself and those around you as miserable as possible.

It was the artist's duty to find the appropriate objects, and the audience's job to decipher meaning. If the piece failed to work, it was their fault, not yours.

Neither of them had ever picked up a pen in their life, but all of a sudden they're poets, right, like that's all it takes—being in love.

The Artist's impressions of a walk in the woods. The Artist's view on viewing. The Artist on Art. How do you get your ideas for stories, Mr. Valentine? Well, I simply exploit everything I come into contact with. One ended, of course, by losing all spontaneity. You saw people as characters, sunsets as an excuse for similes—

Here I've given him a good eight inches and a shot at immortality and he'll turn on me the same way he did last year when I asked him to pose for a few nude sketches. Ingrate

In my house, our parents put us to bed with two simple words: "Shut up." That was always the last thing we heard before our lights were turned off. Our artwork did not hang on the refrigerator or anywhere near it, because our parents recognized it for what it was: crap. They did not live in a child's house, we lived in theirs.

One day she'd throw a dish at you, and the next she'd create a mosaic made of the shards.

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!

One of the things that happens when you're going through traumatic life situations is your work becomes one of the only places where you can escape and take control. I think it's in that sense that "tortured" souls sometimes produce great work.

always try to read form as content, style as meaning.

Every page is a bent version of reality—too unsophisticated to be art but too self-conscious to be mere reportage.

Art is the essential medium for the communication of a moral ideal.

Art is the act of triggering deep memories of what it means to be fully human.

We name mostly in order to control but what is worth loving does not want to be held within the bounds of too narrow a calling. In many ways love has already named us before we can even begin to speak back to it, before we can utter the right words or understand what has happened to us or is continuing to happen to us: an invitation to the most difficult art of all, to love without naming at all.

What I'm trying to say here is that all of my life I've made things that are like fragmented mirrors of the what I perceive to be the world. As far as I'm concerned the fact that in 1990 the human body is still a taboo subject is unbelievably ridiculous. What exactly is frightening about the human body?

The artist who really loves people loves them so well the way they are he sees no need to disguise their characteristics-he loves them whole, without retouching. Yet the word used for this unqualifying affection is 'cynicism'.

Technology can't do what humans do. Whatever it is that we do, we should do it now in earnest. If art is the gap's boatman, its job now grows critical: because it alone addresses our humanity. And we're going to need some of that.

In The Past, Andy Warhol Will Be Psychic For 15 seconds

Destruction is as valid an artistic statement as construction. Both statements echo the model of the society we live in. The only invalid art is utopian

But once an idea for a novel seizes a writer...well, it's like an inner fire that at first warms you and makes you feel good but then begins to eat you alive, burn you up from within. You can't just walk away from the fire; it keeps burning. The only way to put it out is to write the book.

Life is a gift that must be given back and joy should arise from its possession. It's too damn short and that's a fact. Hard to accept this earthly procession to final darkness is a journey done, circle completed, work of art sublime, a sweet melodic rhyme. A battle won.

To believe in luck, you must believe that the universe is a roulette wheel and that instead of paying out to us what we have earned, it pays out only what it wishes. But it is not a spinning wheel of chance, it is a work of art, complete and framed by eternity.