Quotes About Art

Art is an expression of joy and awe. It is not an attempt to share one's virtues and accomplishments with the audience, but an act of selfless spirit.

You will say that I am old and mad, was what Michaelangelo wrote, but I answer that there is no better way of being sane and free from anxiety than by being mad.

Once, Turner had himself lashed to the mast of a ship for several hours, during a furious storm, so that he could later paint the storm. Obviously, it was not the storm itself that Turner intended to paint. What he intended to paint was a representation of the storm. One's language is frequently imprecise in that manner, I have discovered.

If forced to choose, Giacometti once said, he would rescue a cat from a burning building before a Rembrandt.

Trying to imagine E. M. Forster , who found Ulysses indecorous, at a London performance of Lenny Bruce —to which in fact he was once taken. Trying to imagine the same for a time-transported Nathaniel Hawthorne —who during his first visit to Europe was even shocked by the profusion of naked statues.

Have I ever said that Turner once actually had himself lashed to the mast of a ship, to be able to later do a painting of a storm? Which has never failed to remind me of the scene in which Odysseus does the identical thing, of course, so that he can listen to the Sirens singing but will stay put.

Vito Paulekas.

What was it that the eighteenth-century traveller said about Mull? 'Italy itself, with all the assistance of art, can hardly afford anything more beautiful and diverting'. On this blessed September evening that verdict needs no amendment.

When I was a Poet Everything was Possible there wasn't Anything that wasn't Poetry

It increasingly seems that life is something that happens to you and art the opportunity to understand what's transpired. You need only to be brave.

If you show someone something you've written, you give them a sharpened stake, lie down in your coffin, and say, 'When you're ready'.

The true writer, the born writer, will scribble words on scraps of litter, the back of a bus tickets, on the wall of a cell.

Letters, like compilation tapes, were really vehicles for unexpressed emotions and she was clearly putting far too much time and energy into them.

Of course you should study whatever you want. The written appreciation and understanding of literature, or any kind of artistic endeavour, is absolutely central to a decent society. Why d'you think books are the first things that the fascists burn?

Simply try and be good and courageous and bold and to make a difference. Not change the world exactly, but the bit around you. Go out there with your passion and your electric typewriter and work hard at...something. Change lives through art maybe. Cherish your friends, stay true to your principles, live passionately and fully and well. Experience new things. Love and be loved, if you ever get the chance.

Change lives through art maybe. Write beautifully. Cherish your friends, stay true to your principles, live passionately and fully and well. Experience new things. Love and be loved if at all possible. Eat sensibly. Stuff like that.

No-one ever built a statue of a critic.

Why, I wondered, did people seek out portrayals of the very experiences that, in real life, would send them mad with despair? Shouldn't art be an escape, a laugh, a comfort, a thrill?

There may well be a scientific paper to be written on why walking in an art gallery is so much more exhausting than, say, climbing Helvellyn. My guess is that it is something to do with the energy required to hold muscles in tension, combined with the mental exertion of wondering what to say.

Falling in love like that? Writing poetry, crying at pop songs? Dragging people into photo-booths, taking a while day to make a compilation tape, asking people if they wanted to share your bed, just for company? If you quoted Bob Dylan or T.S. Eliot or, God forbid, Brecht at someone these days they would smile politely and step quietly backwards, and who would blame them?

Letters, like compilation tapes, were really vehicles for unexpressed emotions.

Puede que por eso las audioguías de los museos se han vuelto tan populares. Con ellas, una reconfortante voz te dice al oído qué pensar y sentir: «mire a la izquierda, por favor, observe». Sería maravilloso poder contar con esa voz también fuera del museo y a lo largo de la vida.

In portraiture I look for people that I recognise – 'Look, it's Uncle Tony' – or for the faces of film stars. The Madame Tussaud's school of art appreciation.

Change lives through art, maybe. Write beautifully. Cherish your friends, stay true to your principles, live passionately and fully and well. Experience new things. Love and be loved if at all possible. Eat sensibly. Stuff like that. It wasn't much in the way of a guiding philosophy, and not one your could share, least of all with this man, but it was what she believed.