Quotes About Art

A person's face goes in your eyes and down you arms and into your fingers, and that's how you draw.

A famous artist is approached by a student. You don't remember me, the student says correctly, but years ago you said something that changed my life. You said, 'Photography is death.' After that, says the student, I threw out my camera. I began again. I want to thank you for changing my life. Leave me alone, says the artist. Photography is life.

A painter was asked why he became a painter. He replied, Because I love the smell of paint.

I was six when my mother taught me the art of invisible strength. It was a strategy for winning arguments, respect for others, and eventually thought neither of us knew it at the time, chess games... Come from the South, blow from the wind -- poom!-- North will follow. Strongest wind cannot be seen.

A painting was a translation of the language of my heart.

You can never be an artist if your work comes without effort

Reviewers, critics, guest editors... Such people may have an eye for literary conventions and contrivances, allusions and innovations on the art. But what are their tastes based on? Do they tend to choose work that most resembles theirs?

If you want to take pictures of Chinese food, you have to taste real Chinese food. The flavors soak into your tongue, go into your stomach. The stomach is where your true feelings are. And if you take photos, these true feelings from your stomach can come out, so that everyone can taste the food just by looking at your pictures.

But in art, lovely subversive art, you see what breaks through in spite of restraint, or even because of it. Art despises placidity and smooth surfaces. Without art, I would have drowned under still waters.

Anyone can have original style," he countered. "And yet no one truly does. We're influenced by those who came before us, beginning with the painters thousands of years ago who imitated nature.

A portrait,' she had said, 'should be that of a person who was breathing at the time it was painted.It should capture one of those breaths.

Creation which cannot express itself becomes madness.

I am aware of being in a beautiful prison, from which I can only escape by writing.

Why one writes is a question I can answer easily, having so often asked it of myself. I believe one writes because one has to create a world in which one can live. I could not live in any of the worlds offered to me — the world of my parents, the world of war, the world of politics. I had to create a world of my own, like a climate, a country, an atmosphere in which I could breathe, reign, and recreate myself when destroyed by living. That, I believe, is the reason for every work of art.

words carry colors and sounds into the flesh

I gathered poets around me and we all wrote beautiful erotica. As we were condemned to focus only on sensuality, we had violent explosions of poetry. Writing erotica became a road to sainthood rather than to debauchery.

It is the function of art to renew our perception. What we are familiar with, we cease to see.

I will cover the walls with words. It will be la chambre des mots.

He worked on small canvases with a touch as light as a cobweb and coloring made of mirages. He lived there, at the bottom of the sea...

Fucking is an art. The mere fact of introducing the cock in the cunt and moving it in and out until the ejaculation of spunk is not art. True, it is fucking, but the difference between that way of doing it and the way it should be done, is like the difference between a child's first drawing and a picture by the world's greatest painter.

I am a woman first of all. At the core of my work was a journal written for the father I lost, loved and wanted to keep. I am personal. I am essentially human, not intellectual. I do not understand abstract act. Only art born of love, passion, pain.

What you call your lies are fiction and myths. The art of creating a disguise can be as beautiful as the creation of a painting… I created a woman for my artist life, bold, gay, courageous, generous, fearless; and another to please my father, a clear-sighted woman with a love of beauty, harmony, and self-discipline, critical and selective; and still another who lives in chaos, embraces the weak and the stumbling and the confused.

If you do not breathe through writing, if you do not cry out in writing, or sing in writing, then don't write.

What makes some butterflies have such beautiful colors on their wings, and others not? The plain ones were born of parents who didn't know how to paint.