Quotes About Art

I would like to thank the people who encouraged me to draw army cartoons at a time when the gag man's conception of the army was one of mean ole sergeants and jeeps which jump over mountains.

The first time I met Patti Smith was in a laundromat. We knew some of the same people, including Richard Hell.

Having plenty of time and all the museum's funds at my disposal, I put myself on a regime to buy one picture a day.

I was a student at Harvard, and that's where I learned about so-called avant-garde music. Jackson Pollock, abstract expressionism and painting were well known at this time.

Tattoos exude pain and pleasure all at the same time.

No artist is pleased. There is no satisfaction whatever at any time. There is only a strange, divine dissatisfaction, a blessed unrest that keeps us marching and makes us more alive than the others.

It took me time to understand my water lilies. I had planted them for the pleasure of it; I grew them without ever thinking of painting them.

The modern artist is working with space and time, and expressing his feelings rather than illustrating.

The photograph is an undeniably powerful medium. Free from the constraints of language, and harnessing the unique qualities of a single moment frozen in time.

Contrary to general belief, an artist is never ahead of his time but most people are far behind theirs.

If it were not for art, I would have killed myself a long time ago.

When I conjure these memories, they are of the present to me, because after all, the artist is a kind of enchanter in time.

The body is living art. Your movement through time and space is art. A painter has brushes. You have your body.

The time is right to mix sentences with dirt and the sun with punctuation and rain with verbs.

Time is clay. Go make something.

Unlike all the other art forms, film is able to seize and render the passage of time, to stop it, almost to possess it in infinity. I'd say that film is the sculpting of time.

I find it so much easier to be creatively free at night. Daytime is for sleeping. Nighttime is the best time for making art. The later at night it gets the further into another world you go.

Photography has all the rights, and all the merits, necessary for us to turn towards it as the art of our time.

Photography does not create eternity, as art does; it embalms time, rescuing it simply from its proper corruption.

A photograph is the illusion of a literal description of how the camera 'saw' a piece of time and space.

Architecture is a discipline that takes time and patience. If one spends enough years writing complex novels one might be able, someday, to construct a respectable haiku.

True music must repeat the thought and inspirations of the people and the time.

Language in art remains a highly ambiguous transaction, a quicksand, a trampoline, a frozen pool which might give way under you ... at any time.

When we rejoice in beautiful scenery, great art, and great music, it is but the flexing of instincts acquired in another place and another time.