Artist Quotes

Alan Dean Foster

Living gives you a better understanding of life. I would hope that my characters have become deeper and more rounded personalities. Wider travels have given me considerably greater insight into how cultural differences affect not only people, but politics and art.

Andrew Kuntz

I find working with glass meditative, almost therapeutic. I can leave the world behind, and focus… The simplicity of form, the drama of rich, intense colour, the joy of challenge, and the challenge of endurance… The piece, when it is over, is not what is made, but how it is made.

Andy Warhol

I loved working when I worked at commercial art and they told you what to do and how to do it and all you had to do was correct it and they’d say yes or no. The hard thing is when you have to dream up the tasteless things to do on your own.

Business art is the step that comes after Art. I started as a commercial artist, and I want to finish as a business artist.

I do the same thing everyday. I go to work and paint. I try to turn out as many pictures as I can.

Paint anybody, anybody that asks me.

I always think I don’t do the first one good, so I try to do it more.

Making money is art and working is art and good business is the best art.

Being born is like being kidnapped. And then sold into slavery.

Death means a lot of money, honey. Death can really make you look like a star.

Fantasy love is much better than reality love. Never doing it is very exciting. The most exciting attractions are between two opposites that never meet.

Why do people think artists are special? It’s just another job.

I have Social Disease. I have to go out every night. If I stay home one night I start spreading rumors to my dogs.

Don’t pay any attention to what they write about you. Just measure it in inches.

I suppose I have a really loose interpretation of ‘work’, because I think that just being alive is so much work at something you don’t always want to do.

Benjamin Constant

Art for art’s sake, with no purpose, for any purpose perverts art. But art achieves a purpose which is not its own.

Carl Jung

Art is a kind of innate drive that seizes a human being and makes him its instrument. To perform this difficult office it is sometimes necessary for him to sacrifice happiness and everything that makes life worth living for the ordinary human being.

Daniel Barenboim

Every great work of art has two faces, one toward its own time and one toward the future, toward eternity.

Denise Levertov

I don’t think one can accurately measure the historical effectiveness of a poem; but one does know, of course, that books influence individuals; and individuals, although they are part of large economic and social processes, influence history. Every mass is after all made up of millions of individuals.

Elizabeth Murray

Gardening is the art that uses flowers and plants as paint, and the soil and sky as canvas.

Ezra Pound

Good art can not be immoral. By good art I mean art that bears true witness, I mean the art that is most precise.

Helen M. Winslow

Women, poets, and especially artists, like cats; delicate natures only can realize their sensitive nervous systems.

Jean de La Bruyere

There are certain things in which mediocrity is intolerable: poetry, music, painting, public eloquence. What torture it is to hear a frigid speech being pompously declaimed, or second-rate verse spoken with all a bad poet’s bombast!

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Science and art belong to the whole world, and before them vanish the barriers of nationality.

Joseph Campbell

The role of the artist I now understood as that of revealing through the world-surfaces the implicit forms of the soul, and the great agent to assist the artist was the myth.

Julia Cameron

Art is not about thinking something up. It is the opposite — getting something down.

Magdalena Abakanowicz

Art will remain the most astonishing activity of mankind born out of struggle between wisdom and madness, between dream and reality in our mind.

Art does not solve problems but makes us aware of their existence. It opens our eyes to see and our brain to imagine.

Oscar Levant

There’s a fine line between genius and insanity. I have erased this line.

Oscar Wilde

The moment you think you understand a great work of art, it’s dead for you.

Paul Cezanne

The Louvre is the book in which we learn to read.

It took me 40 years to find out that painting is not sculpture.

Don’t be an art critic, but paint, there lies salvation.

What is one to think of those fools who tell one that the artist is always subordinate to nature? Art is in harmony parallel with nature.

A work of art which did not begin in emotion is not art.

All my life I have worked to be able to earn my living, but I thought that one could do good painting without attracting attention to one’s private life. Certainly, an artist wishes to raise himself intellectually as much as possible, but the man must remain obscure. The pleasure must be found in the work.

Pablo Picasso

My mother said to me, “If you become a soldier, you’ll be a general; if you become a monk, you’ll end up as the Pope.” Instead, I became a painter and wound up as Picasso.

All children are artists. The problem is how to remain an artist once he grows up.

Ralph Sockman

Christmas renews our youth by stirring our wonder. The capacity for wonder has been called our most pregnant human faculty, for in it are born our art, our science, our religion.

Richard Avedon

There is no such thing as inaccuracy in a photograph. All photographs are accurate. None of them is the truth.

If a day goes by without my doing something related to photography, it’s as though I’ve neglected something essential to my existence, as though I had forgotten to wake up.

A portrait is not a likeness. The moment an emotion or fact is transformed into a photograph it is no longer a fact but an opinion. There is no such thing as inaccuracy in a photograph. All photographs are accurate. None of them is the truth.

I don’t really remember the day when I stood behind my camera with Henry Kissinger on the other side. I am sure he doesn’t remember it either. But this photograph is here now to prove that no amount of kindness on my part could make this photograph mean exactly what he.. or even I.. wanted it to mean. It’s a reminder of the wonder and terror that is a photograph.

A photographic portrait is a picture of someone who knows he’s being photographed, and what he does with this knowledge is as much a part of the photograph as what he’s wearing or how he looks. He’s implicated in what’s happening, and he has a certain real power over the result.

A portrait photographer depends upon another person to complete his picture. The subject imagined, which in a sense is me, must be discovered in someone else willing to take part in a fiction he cannot possibly know about.

Photography has always reminded me of the second child.. trying to prove itself. The fact that it wasn’t really considered an art.. that it was considered a craft.. has trapped almost every serious photographer.

I know that the accident of my being a photographer has made my life possible.

Rita Mae Brown

Art is moral passion married to entertainment. Moral passion without entertainment is propaganda, and entertainment without moral passion is television.

Rollo May

Creativity arises out of the tension between spontaneity and limitations, the latter (like the river banks) forcing the spontaneity into the various forms which are essential to the work of art or poem.

Sir Walter Scott

Nothing is more the child of art than a garden.

Theodore Adorno

A successful work of art is not one which resolves contradictions in a spurious harmony, but one which expresses the idea of harmony negatively by embodying the contradictions, pure and uncompromised, in its innermost structure.

Thomas Moore

The many great gardens of the world, of literature and poetry, of painting and music, of religion and architecture, all make the point as clear as possible: The soul cannot thrive in the absence of a garden. If you don’t want paradise, you are not human; and if you are not human, you don’t have a soul.

Vita Sackville-West

Every garden-maker should be an artist along his own lines. That is the only possible way to create a garden, irespective of size or wealth.

William S. Burroughs

Nothing exists until or unless it is observed. An artist is making something exist by observing it. And his hope for other people is that they will also make it exist by observing it. I call it “creative observation.” Creative viewing.

William Wordsworth

Laying out grounds may be considered a liberal art, in some sort like poetry and painting.