Art Quotes

"The Pistols were like my work of art. They were my canvas"

"I was taught that to create anything you had to believe in failure, simply because you had to be prepared to go through an idea without any fear. Failure, you learned, as I did in art school, to be a wonderful thing. It allowed you to get up in the morning and take the pillow off your head"

Malcolm Mclaren, Musician

"Violin playing is a physical art with great traditions behind it"

Vanessa Mae, Musician

"The painter who feels obligated to depict his subjects as uniformly beautiful or handsome and without flaws will fall short of making art"

Joyce Maynard, Writer

"At the moment, in Britain we're facing such enormous cutbacks in education programs and music programs and art programs that you feel you are knocking your head against a brick wall"

Peter Maxwell Davies, Composer

"Trash has given us an appetite for art"

Pauline Kael, Critic

"I went to art school, I think it helped me a great deal because it taught me who I am"

Jackie DeShannon, Musician

"Nature is the most beautiful thing we have. It's better than art because it's from the creator"

Olivia Newton-John, Musician

"Art and religion first; then philosophy; lastly science. That is the order of the great subjects of life, that's their order of importance"

Muriel Spark, Novelist

"I love art and fashion"

Mena Suvari, Actress

"All art is exorcism. I paint dreams and visions too; the dreams and visions of my time. Painting is the effort to produce order; order in yourself. There is much chaos in me, much chaos in our time"

Otto Dix, Artist

"Movies are so rarely great art that if we cannot appreciate great trash we have very little reason to be interested in them"

Pauline Kael, Critic

"We were given clear concrete tools. The course did a great job demystifying the art of fiction writing and fostering confidence. The instructor brought complex concepts down to earth. I will miss coming here every week"

Miguel Ferrer, Actor

"People think that computer science is the art of geniuses but the actual reality is the opposite, just many people doing things that build on eachother, like a wall of mini stones"

Donald Knuth, Scientist

"I didn't want to save art - I respected the older artists too much to think art needed saving. But I knew it was finished, even though, at that time, I didn't know what I would do"

Sol LeWitt, Artist

"We have often been attracted to the story of the other, the outcast. And he and I just loved working together, so it just kept happening, and our relationship is completely bound up with our work. We enjoy each other's art"

Julie Taymor, Director

"Buying books was a way anyone could acquire a work of art for very little"

Sol LeWitt, Artist

"We want a vernacular in art. No mere verbal or formal agreement, or dead level of uniformity but that comprehensive and harmonizing unity with individual variety which can be developed among people politically and socially free"

Walter Crane, Artist

"The visual information of art history is going to students seamlessly, without the enormous trouble those of us who are older had when we studied art history many years ago"

Robert Nelson, Politician

"There was once a time when art history and film were basically the same medium, but art history is frozen in late-19th-century technology that has survived into the early 21st century"

Robert Nelson, Politician

"I had art as a major, along with English, French and History. I had dance, modern dance. In English I was allowed to write my own poetry, which I eventually got published"

Sally Kirkland, Actress

"I'm a bit surprised that the Raiders turned to Art Shell to be their new head coach, not because Shell isn't a good head coach - he had success before as the Raiders' head coach - but because he's been away from the game so long and the game has changed a lot in those years"

Ron Jaworski, Athlete

"To establish yourself as a leading man, you're shooting for the smallest point on the target, and you get a lot of judgment thrown at you. It takes a lot for them to get past everything and just watch your art and what you're doing"

Josh Holloway, Actor

"Cartooning at its best is a fine art. I'm a cartoonist who works in the medium of animation, which also allows me to paint my cartoons"

Ralph Bakshi, Director

"Absence is one of the most useful ingredients of family life, and to dose it rightly is an art like any other"

Freya Stark, Writer

"I don't like a lot of the stuff that goes on in the art world, but it's hard to be old and like what goes on around you"

Frank Stella, Artist

"But, after all, the aim of art is to create space - space that is not compromised by decoration or illustration, space within which the subjects of painting can live"

Frank Stella, Artist

"I'm not really quiet or shy. Ask any of my friends! But I always ground my poetry in life itself. Poetry is an art of language, though, so I am always aware of every word's meaning, or multiple meanings"

Anne Stevenson, Poet

"We should always remember that sensitiveness and emotion constitute the real content of a work of art"

Maurice Ravel, Composer

"There can be nothing exclusive about substantial art. It comes directly out of the heart of the experience of life and thinking about life and living life"

Charles Ives, Composer

"When there were financial difficulties they still managed to provide us with music and art lessons"

Jerome Isaac Friedman, Physicist

"At the art college in Edinburgh someone arranged for some London groups to come up and play. I was in a supporting band, with Bernie Green I think. Derek Bailey was one of the visiting musicians. He seemed to like my playing and asked me to come down to London"

Jamie Muir

"Your art kind of changes as you get older, by nature of the fact that you're hopefully gaining wisdom and you're starting to watch things with a better overview"

Sheryl Crow, Musician

"Back then, I didn't have a big organization around me. I was just a kid with a guitar, traveling around. My responsibility basically was to the art, and I had extra time on my hands. There is no extra time now. There isn't enough time"

Joni Mitchell, Musician

"So I was in America and I thought I'll stick around while I'm here and just see what happens. The next film I did was High Art, so I guess it started with a sort of vague idea but really just a fantasy"

Radha Mitchell, Actress

"But in the finished art of the song the use of words has no connection with the use of words in poetry"

John Drinkwater, Poet

"You must in all Airs follow the strength, spirit, and disposition of the horse, and do nothing against nature; for art is but to set nature in order, and nothing else"

William Cavendish, Public Servant

"People whose understanding and taste in literature, painting, and music are beyond question are, for the most part, ignorant of what is good or bad art in the theater"

Minnie Maddern Fiske, Actress

"With out art, without communicating, we wouldn't live beyond 30 because we'd be so sad and depressed"

Wayne Coyne, Musician

"I received from my experience in Japan an incredible sense of respect for the art of creating, not just the creative product. We're all about the product. To me, the process was also an incredibly important aspect of the total form"

Julie Taymor, Director

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