Quotes About Art

Painters know that material needs are relative; and that the satisfactions of the mind are absolute.

His nudes and his roses declared to men of this century, already deep in their task of destruction, the stability of the eternal balance of nature.

The world of Rnoir is a single entity. The red of the poppy determines the pose of the young woman with the umbrella. The blue of the sky harmonizes with the sheepskin the young shepheard wears. His pictures are demonstrations of over-all unity. .... Renoir believed in the Chinese legend that a mandarin can be killed at a distance by an unconsciously lethal gesture made in Paris.

All of writing is a huge lake. There are great rivers that feed the lake, like Tolstoy or Dostoyevsky. And then there are mere trickles, like Jean Rhys. All that matters is feeding the lake. I don't matter. The lake matters. You must keep feeding the lake.

Beauty in art is often nothing but ugliness subdued.

Art's only concern with the real is to abolish it, and to substitute for it a new reality

I had woven a tapestry of obscenity that as far as I know is still hanging in space over Lake Michigan.

Pay no attention to what the critics say; there has never been set up a statue in honor of a critic.

I don't believe it pays to be a great author.

One should embrace the artist's profession only after recognising in oneself an intense passion for Nature and the disposition to pursue it with a perseverance that nothing can shatter - thirst for neither approval nor financial profit. Do not be discouraged by the censure that might fall upon one's works - one must be armoured with a strong conviction which makes one go straight ahead fearing no obstacle. An unremitting task […] an unassailable conscience. (From a sketchbook of 1847).

L'écrivain – et chacun pouvait l'être –, en refusant d'être artiste, réalisait ce miracle de l'art : créer une chose !

Speech therapy is an art that deserves to be more widely known. You cannot imagine the acrobatics your tongue mechanically performs in order to produce all the sounds of a language.

I need to feel strongly, to love and to admire, just as desperately as I need to breathe. A letter from a friend, a Balthus painting on a postcard, a page of Saint-Simon, give meaning to the passing hours. But to keep my mind sharp, to avoid descending into resigned indifference, I maintain a level of resentment and anger, neither too much nor to little, just a s a pressure cooker has a a safety valve to keep it from exploding.

I need to feel strongly, to love and to admire, just as desperately as I need to breathe. A letter from a friend, a Balthus painting on a postcard, a page of Saint-Simon, give meaning to the passing hours.

Art saved me it got me through my depression and self-loathing, back to a place of innocence.

I shall call modern that art which ... presents the fact that the unpresentable exists. To make visible that there is something which can be conceived and which can neither be seen nor made visible.

To transform the unconscious into discourse is to bypass the dynamics, to become complicit with the whole of Western ratio, which kills art at the same time as the dream. One does not in the least break with metaphysics by placing language everywhere.

Oh, how I wish I could make those who see my work feel the splendors and terrors of the night! One ought to be able to make people hear the songs, the silences, and murmurings of the air. They should feel the infinite.

Surrealism, although the courses of literature paradoxically make room for it today, is not a discipline that can be taught.

At the cinema we do not think, we are thought.

I pity the French Cinema because it has no money. I pity the American Cinema because it has no ideas.

Photography is truth. The cinema is truth twenty-four times per second.

I don't think you should feel about a film. You should feel about a woman, not a movie. You can't kiss a movie.

Art attracts us only by what it reveals of our most secret self.