Art Quotes

"To me, thoughts are fun and art is fun. The strength of our society should not be idle entertainments but the joy of pursuing ideas"

Philip Kaufman, Director

"There are situations which cannot honorably be met by art"

George Oppen, Poet

"The musician is perhaps the most modest of animals, but he is also the proudest. It is he who invented the sublime art of ruining poetry"

Erik Satie, Composer

"Any art worthy of its name should address 'life', 'man', 'nature', 'death' and 'tragedy'"

Barnett Newman, Artist

"The only line that's wrong in Shakespeare is 'holding a mirror up to nature.' You hold a magnifying glass up to nature. As an actor you just enlarge it enough so that your audience can identify with the situation. If it were a mirror, we would have no art"

Montgomery Clift, Actor

"We call those works of art concrete that came into being on the basis of their inherent resources and rules - without external borrowing from natural phenomena, without transforming those phenomena, in other words: not by abstraction"

Max Bill, Architect

"The orbit of human vision has widened and art has annexed fresh territories that were formerly denied to it"

Max Bill, Architect

"Even in modern art, artists have used methods based on calculation, inasmuch as these elements, alongside those of a more personal and emotional nature, give balance and harmony to any work of art"

Max Bill, Architect

"A love of classical music is only partially a natural response to hearing the works performed, it also must come about by a decision to listen carefully, to pay close attention, a decision inevitably motivated by the cultural and social prestige of the art"

Charles Rosen, Musician

"I was the executive editor on a little magazine called Greek Accent, whose only claim to fame is that its art director went on to be the art director of Discover for many years"

Jane Haddam, Writer

"I like the fact that in ancient Chinese art the great painters always included a deliberate flaw in their work: human creation is never perfect"

Madeleine L'Engle, Novelist

"If a man devotes himself to art, much evil is avoided that happens otherwise if one is idle"

Albrecht Durer, Artist

"Art allows people a way to dream their way out of their struggle"

Russell Simmons, Businessman

"All along we find that social life - religion, politics, art - reflects the stages reached in the development of the knowledge of self; it shows the social uses made of this knowledge"

James M. Baldwin

"Art is 110 percent sweat"

Robert Riskin, Playwright

"It would have to be connected with performance art somehow, either in the front of the house or the back. I was myopic about this from fourth grade on"

James Marsters, Actor

"I want to make exalted art. A successful image has pictorial lift. I am looking for whatever is up there"

Frank Stella, Artist

"Art is uncompromising and life is full of compromises"

Gunther Grass, Author

"Art is made to disturb, science reassures"

Georges Braque, Artist

"We may not like our times or many aspects of the time we live in but that is not the fault of art as such"

David Elliott, Celebrity

"No art is any good unless you can feel how it's put together. By and large it's the eye, the hand and if it's any good, you feel the body. Most of the best stuff seems to be a complete gesture, the totality of the artist's body; you can really lean on it"

Frank Stella, Artist

"I always said God was against art and I still believe it"

Edward Elgar, Composer

"I have perfected the art of putting my feet on my husband's lap during awards ceremonies so he can rub them"

Annette Bening, Actress

"Science is what we understand well enough to explain to a computer. Art is everything else we do"

Donald Knuth, Scientist

"The theatre is a gross art, built in sweeps and over-emphasis. Compromise is its second name"

Enid Bagnold, Author

"The art music of the West has developed through out its history by means of individual geniuses, and out of the soil supporting them; non-Western musicians were born, and grew like the grasses of the field"

Toru Takemitsu, Composer

"One might not think of light as a matter of fact, but I do. And it is, as I said, as plain and open and direct an art as you will ever find"

Dan Flavin, Sculptor

"I'm not really sure what social message my art carries, if any. And I don't really want it to carry one. I'm not interested in the subject matter to try to teach society anything, or to try to better our world in any way"

Roy Lichtenstein, Artist

"He has made a profession out of a business and an art out of a profession"

Clifton Paul Fadiman, Writer

"Comics, at least in periodical form, exist almost entirely free of any pretense; the critical world of art hardly touches them, and they're 100% personal"

Chris Ware, Artist

"The trouble with movies as a business is that it's an art, and the trouble with movies as art is that it's a business"

Charlton Heston, Actor

"There's room for the Gap, but the joy of dressing is an art"

John Galliano, Designer

"The pursuit of perfection always implies a definite aristocracy, which is as much a goal of effort as a noble philosophy, an august civil polity or a great art"

Ralph A. Cram

"Art thou the King of the Jews?"

Pontius Pilate, Politician

"Some people act as though art that is for a mass audience is not good art, and I think this has been a very negative thing. I know that I have wanted very much to write books that are accessible to the widest audience possible"

Bell Hooks, Critic

"The art of life is to show your hand"

Edward V. Lucas

"Postmodernism surely requires an even greater grasp of symbolism, as it's increasingly an art of gesture alone"

Andrew Eldritch, Musician

"I dislike literary jargon and never use it. Criticism has only one function and that is to help readers read and understand literature. It is not a science, it is an aid to art"

Anne Stevenson, Poet

"Art never seems to make me peaceful or pure"

Willem de Kooning, Artist

"Great artists are people who find the way to be themselves in their art. Any sort of pretension induces mediocrity in art and life alike"

Margot Fonteyn, Dancer

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