Quotes About Art

Comics deal with two fundamental communicating devices: words and images. Admittedly this is an arbitrary separation. But, since in the modern world of communication they are treated as independent disciplines, it seems valid. Actually, the are derivatives of a single origin and in the skillful employment of words and images lies the expressive potential of the medium.

I'll make a beautiful corpse.

Diplomacy is the art of saying 'Nice doggie' until you can find a rock.

Lin Yutang also believed that reading is an art. One chapter of the Importance of Living is devoted to "the Art of Reading." Lin writes that, "the man who has not the habit of reading is imprisoned in his immediate world, in respect to time and space. His life falls into a set routine; he is limited to contact and conversation with a few friends and acquaintances, and he sees only what happens in his immediate neighborhood.

But mostly, when I look back, what I remember is not Mom rushing about; it's Mom sitting quietly in the center of the house, in the living room, under the swirling colors of a Paul Jenkins painting; there would be a fire in the fireplace and a throw over her lap, her hands sticking out to hold a book. And we all wanted to be there with her and Dad, reading quietly too.

A creative life cannot be sustained by approval any more than it can be destroyed by criticism.

When you create art, the world has to wait.

All the arts are conduits for the expression of this deep human longing for unity, but it is only in the art of food preparation and eating that this oneness is actually physically achieved. This is part of what makes eating such a powerful experience and metaphor: food art is eaten and becomes us. It enters as object and becomes subject; what is "not-me" is transformed into "me.

What was any art but a mold in which to imprison for a moment the shining elusive element which is life itself — life hurrying past us and running away, too strong to stop, too sweet to lose.

The condition every art requires is, not so much freedom from restriction, as freedom from adulteration and from the intrusion of foreign matter.

The stupid believe that to be truthful is easy only the artist, the great artist, knows how difficult it is.

I tell you there is such a thing as creative hate!

Art, it seems to me, should simplify finding what conventions of form and what detail one can do without and yet preserve the spirit of the whole -- so that all that one has suppressed and cut away is there to the reader's consciousness as much as if it were in type on the page.

She used to drag her mattress besider her low window and lie awake for a long while, vibrating with excitement, as a machine vibrates from speed. Life rushed in upon her through that window - or so it seemed. In reality, of course, life rushes from within, not from without. There is no work of art so big or so beautiful that is was not once all contained in some youthful body, like this one which lay on the floor in the moonlight, pulsing with ardor and anticipation.

Religion and art spring from the same root and are close kin. Economics and art are strangers.

I don't paint to live, I live to paint.

Ik schrijf, hoewel ik weet dat men alleen één woord schrijven kan door er tienduizend over te slaan. Maar deze tienduizend blijven zweven als modder in een glas vuil water. Kijkt men er boven in, dan verduisteren zij het neerslag dat op die bodem ligt. Ik zie wat ik geschreven heb alleen maar door de troebele mist van dat wat geen gestalte heeft aangenomen. Begrijpt men nu, waarom het door mijzelf beschreven papier zulk een verontreinigde indruk op mij maakt?

De twijfel zit in zijn werk als een breipatroon in een damesblad.

Dagboekschrijvers als ik schrijven hun dagboek met de onuitgesproken bedoeling zichzelf als een ander voor zich te kunnen zien… Eigenlijk zijn ze geen dagboekschrijvers, maar zelfportrettisten, of een mengeling van die twee.

The special calling of the artist is to call the world to a kind of rest or remind it of its restlessness

Words and pictures can work together to communicate more powerfully than either alone.

Father, in spite of all this spending of money in learning Latin, I will be a painter.

Dip your pen into your arteries and write.

With pen and with pencil we're learning to say Nothing, more cleverly every day.