Quotes About Art

I think art is the only thing that's spirtual in the world. And I refuse to be forced to believe in other people's interpretations of God. I don't think anybody should be. No one person can own the copyright to what God means.

I want to overhear passionate arguments about what we are and what we are doing and what we ought to do. I want to feel that art is an utterance made in good faith by one human being to another. I want to believe there are geniuses scheming to astonish the rest of us, just for the pleasure of it.

The locus of the human mystery is perception of this world. From it proceeds every thought, every art.

It is not unusual now to hear religion and humanism spoken of as if they were opposed, even antagonistic. But humanism clearly rested on the idea that people have souls, and that they have certain obligations to them, and certain pleasures in them, which arise from their refinement or their expression in art or in admirable or striking conduct, or which arise from finding other souls expressed in music or philosophy or philanthropy or revolution.

Tehching Hsieh—for me, always a true master of performance art, and one who truly represents transformation. Tehching has made five performances in his life, each of them lasting for one year. He followed this with a thirteen-year plan, in which he made art without showing it. If you ask him what he's doing now, he will say he is doing life. And this, for me, is the ultimate proof of his mastery.

If you start believing in your greatness, it is the death of your creativity. - Ego is the enemy

I had come to believe that art must be disturbing, art must ask questions, art must predict the future. If art is just political, it becomes like newspaper. It can be used once, and the next day it's yesterday's news. Only layers of meaning can give long life to art - that way, society takes what it needs from the work over time.

Je crois passionnément que, si on possède la fin de créer, on n'a pas le droit de se tuer parce qu'il est de votre devoir de partager ce son avec autrui.

Once, Picasso was asked what his paintings meant. He said, Do you ever know what the birds are singing? You don't. But you listen to them anyway. So, sometimes with art, it is important just to look.

The perception is that an artist has to suffer. I've suffered enough in my lifetime.

I'm only interested in an art which can change the ideology of society....Art which is only committed to aesthetic values is incomplete.

Never make a threat. Reason with people." The word "reason" sounded so much better in Italian, ragione, to rejoin. The art of this was to ignore all insults, all threats; to turn the other cheek.

Scrivere un romanzo è una cerimonia che somiglia allo streap-tease. Come la ragazza che, sotto impudichi riflettori, si libera dei propri indumenti e mostra, a uno a uno, i suoi incanti segreti, così anche il romanziere mette a nudo la propria intimità in pubblico attraverso i suoi romanzi.

Light literature, along with light cinema and light art, give the reader and the viewer the comfortable impression that they are cultured, revolutionary, modern and in the vanguard without having to make the slightest intellectual effort. Culture that purports to be avant-garde and iconoclastic instead offers conformity in its worst forms: smugness and self-satisfaction.

Writing is a compensatory activity, and literature abounds in cases like his. Borges's pages teem with knives, crimes, and scenes of torture, but the cruelty is kept at a distance by his fine sense of irony and by the cool rationalism of his prose, which never falls into sensationalism or the purely emotional. This lends a statuesque quality to the physical horror, giving it the nature of a work of art set in an unreal world.

The houses are ugly, imitations of imitations.

Desvarío empobrecedor el de querer escribir novelas, el de querer explayar en quinientas páginas algo que se puede formular en una sola frase».

La vocación literaria no es un pasatiempo, un deporte, un juego refinado que se practica en los ratos de ocio. Es una dedicación exclusiva y excluyente, una prioridad a la que nada puede anteponerse, una servidumbre libremente elegida que hace de sus víctimas (de sus dichosas victimas) unos esclavos.

que la crítica y la alta cultura. ¿Por qué? Porque el erotismo, que convierte el acto sexual en obra de arte, en un ritual al que la literatura, las artes plásticas, la música y una refinada sensibilidad impregnan de imágenes de elevado virtuosismo estético, es la negación misma de ese sexo fácil, expeditivo y promiscuo

ciertas cosas, como la casquette de Charles, son más locuaces y trascendentes que sus dueños, y nos revelan, mejor que las palabras y los actos de aquéllos, la personalidad del amo: su estatuto social, su economía, sus costumbres, sus aspiraciones, su imaginación, su sentido artístico, sus creencias.

La pintura debía ser expresión de la totalidad del ser humano: su inteligencia, su destreza artesanal, su cultura, pero también sus creencias, sus instintos, sus deseos y sus odios.

Lo màs importante es la verdad, que siempre es arte y en cambio la mentira no, o sòlo rara vez

Robbe-Grillet dice: «No, la novela no tiene que educar políticamente a nadie; la novela es fundamentalmente un arte».

Well, life isn't a cakewalk, is it?! Eighty-nine percent of the world's most valuable art was created by men living in rat-infested flats. You think Velásquez wore Adidas? You think he enjoyed the luxuries of central heating and twenty-four-hour pizza delivery?!