Quotes About Art

I congratulate you on your success stealing the painting.

I have hated words and I have loved them, and I hope I have made them right.

The old man's eyes are unpolished sapphires, and, in the haze of a thousand years of incense burned, he tells me tales of Canaletto, of Guardi and Titian and Tiepolo. He speaks of them as though they are his confidants, the fellows with whom he sups on Thursday nights. He says life is a search for beauty and that art dissolves loneliness. His and mine, I think. I am not alone. I am a wanderer in a blue felt cloche, come to Venice to stitch together her fantasies.

Barlozzo's word for nonchalance is sprezzatura. A hard word, a hard concept. The translation is "the state of effortlessness." It means the mastering of something—an art, a life—without really working at it, with the result being nonchalance.

I never enjoyed working in a film.

Artwork is not synonymous to intention. It is peculiar that although almost everybody says artworks don't give answers, they seem to be sure that a good work asks questions. It sounds like the other side of the same coin to me.

I like to read about art. It also stimulates me to go and do something totally different in the middle of a sentence, or afterwards, like picking up a paintbrush for example. It is only that due to the overload of art historians, artists and other artrelated people, we are flooded by an overload of insipid writings, to such an extent that when you get to the right thing, you are too tired to read it.

I can see why many visual artists dislike words in artworks. They feel that words dirty the clear water that has to reflect the sky. It disturbs the pleasure of the silent image, the freedom from history, the beauty of nameless forms. (...) I know that neither images nor words, can escape the drunkenness and longing caused by the turning of the world. Words and images drink the same wine. There is no purity to protect.

Words and images drink the same wine. There is no purity to protect.

I write about my own work because I want to speak for myself. I might not be the only authority, nor the best authority, but I want to participate in the writing of my own history. Why should artists be validated by outside authorities. I don't like being paternalism and colonised by every Tom, Dick or Harry that comes along (male or female).

I write about my own work because I want to speak for myself. I might not be the only authority, nor the best authority, but I want to participate in the writing of my own history. Why should artists be validated by outside authorities. I don't like being paternalised and colonised by every Tom, Dick or Harry that comes along (male or female).

The spider's lesson is never to be greedy. It shows that objects of necessity can be objects of beauty and art as well. The spider teaches us that we can be too easily enraptured with ourselves.

Acting is the expression of a neurotic impulse. It's a bum's life. Quitting acting, that's the sign of maturity.

An actor is at most a poet and at least an entertainer.

I don't really care what other people think about art, sir. Either you get it or you don't, and it seems pretty stupid waiting on people to get it when you could just as easily enjoy having more museum space to yourself, thank to one less idiot telling me how his four-year-old daughter could do that.

is not gone, you're in the flatness of the deadlands. Time doesn't stop. You watch it move but you are still, like a painting with a Mona Lisa smile.

Comedy is very hard, but you have to learn the art and science of it.

The art of pleasing is the art of deception.

Advertising is the greatest art form of the 20th century.

Great art speaks a language which every intelligent person can understand. The people who call themselves modernists today speak a different language.

Art at its most significant is a Distant Early Warning System that can always be relied on to tell the old culture what is beginning to happen to it.

I think of art, at its most significant, as a DEW line, a Distant Early Warning system that can always be relied on to tell the old culture what is beginning to happen to it.

Art at its most significant is a distant early warning system that can always be relied on to tell the old culture what is beginning to happen.

Ads are the cave art of the twentieth century.