QUOTES ABOUT ART
----------------------------------------------------------------------

Giraffiti: Concrete art, spray-painted very, very high.

Some painters transform the sun into a yellow spot, others transform a
yellow spot into the sun. -Pablo Picasso

Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once
he grows up. -Pablo Picasso 

Basically, collectors want nudes, so I have supplied for them nude
cars, nude telephones, nude electric plugs, nude switches, nude fans.
-Claes Oldenburg

You know you've achieved perfection in design, not when you have
nothing more to add, but when you have nothing more to take away.
-Antoine de Saint Exupery

A poet is a man who puts up a ladder to a star and climbs it while
playing a violin. -Edmond de Goncourt

To play safe, I prefer to accept only one type of power: the power of
art over trash, the triumph of magic over the brute. -Vladimir Nabokov

It is better to be good than to be original. -Ludwig Mies van der Rohe

Creativity is allowing yourself to make mistakes. Art is knowing which
ones to keep. -Scott Adams

I was going to have cosmetic surgery until I noticed that the doctor's
office was full of portraits by Picasso. -Rita Rudner

A man who works with his hands is a laborer; a man who works with his
hands and his brain is a craftsman; but a man who works with his hands
and his brain and his heart is an artist. -Louis Nizer

The food that you get in art museums is institutional revenge for
the art that you get in restaurants.

An artist cannot fail; it is a success to be one. 
-Charles Horton Cooley

When one buys some of my artwork I hope it is because they will wish
to learn from it and not because they think it will match their
drapes! -Christian Cardell Corbet

In art, all who have done something other than their predecessors have
merited the epithet of revolutionary; and it is they alone who are
masters. -Paul Gauguin 
             
The arts are an even better barometer of what is happening in our
world than the stock market or the debates in congress. 
-Hendrik Willem Van Loon
             
Time extracts various values from a painter's work. When these values
are exhausted the pictures are forgotten, and the more a picture has
to give, the greater it is. -Henri Matisse

If you hear a voice within you say 'you cannot paint,' then by all
means paint, and that voice will be silenced. -Vincent Van Gogh

Poets utter great and wise things which they do not themselves
understand. -Plato

We all know that art is not truth. Art is a lie that makes us realize
the truth. -Pablo Picasso 

True artists are almost the only men who do their work for pleasure.
-Auguste Rodin

It took me four years to paint like Raphael, but a lifetime to paint
like a child. -Pablo Picasso

All art is autobiographical; the pearl is the oyster's autobiography.
-Federico Fellini

I don't want to achieve immortality through my work... I want to
achieve it through not dying. -Woody Allen

Thousands of geniuses live and die undiscovered - either by themselves
or by others. -Mark Twain

The man with a new idea is a crank until the idea succeeds.
-Mark Twain

If you can't get a compliment any other way, pay yourself one.
-Mark Twain

Art, like morality, consists in drawing the line somewhere.
-Gilbert Keith Chesterton

An artist cannot speak about his art any more than a plant can discuss
horticulture. -Jean Cocteau

Every artist dips his brush in his own souls, and paints his own
nature into his pictures. -Henry Ward Beecher

In art, the hand can never execute anything higher than the heart can
imagine. -Ralph Waldo Emerson

If my husband would ever meet a woman on the street who looked like
the women in his paintings, he would fall over in a dead faint.
-Mrs. Picasso

Nature is a revelation of God; art a revelation of man.
-Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Originality is simply a pair of fresh eyes.
-Thomas Wentworth Higginson

We must never forget that art is not a form of propaganda, it is a
form of truth. -John Fitzgerald Kennedy

Pay no attention to what critics say. No statue has ever been put up
to a critic. -Jean Sibelius

The artist is nothing without the gift, but the gift is nothing
without the work.

Don't ask me what I want to express with my pictures, ask yourself,
what they mean to you! -Michael Quack

Criticism is a queer thing. If I print, "She was stark naked" and then
proceed to describe her person in detail, what critic would not howl?
Who would venture to leave the book on a parlor table? But the artist
does this and all ages gather around and look and talk and point.
-Mark Twain

Artists can color the sky red because they know it's blue. Those of us
who aren't artists must color things the way they are or people might
think we're stupid. -Jules Feiffer

Normal is in the eye of the beholder. -Whoopi Goldberg

Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities. Truth isn't. -Mark Twain

Imitation is the most serious form of flattery.

Every great work of art is offensive to someone, for a work of art is
a protest against things as they are and a proclamation of things as
they ought to be. -Gerald W. Johnson

I went to the museum where they had all the heads and arms from the
statues that are in all the other museums. -Steven Wright

It is not hard to understand modern art. If it hangs on a wall it's a
painting, and if you can walk around it it's a sculpture.

Art washes away from the soul the dust of everyday life.
-Pablo Picasso




Sometimes I do get to places just when God's ready to have somebody
click the shutter. -Ansel Adams

No place is boring, if you've had a good night's sleep and have a
pocket full of unexposed film. -Robert Adams

Buying a Nikon doesn't make you a photographer. It makes you a Nikon
owner.

You can't depend on your eyes if your imagination is out of focus.
-Mark Twain

A picture is the expression of an impression. If the beautiful were
not in us, how would we ever recognize it? -Ernst Haas

There are no rules for good photographs, there are only good
photographs. -Ansel Adams

There are always two people in every picture: the photographer and the
viewer. -Ansel Adams

The books that the world calls immoral are the books that show the
world its own shame. -Oscar Wilde

Art is long, life short; judgement difficult, opportunity transient.
-Goethe

It's only words... unless they're true. -David Mamet

If all else fails, immortality can always be assured by spectacular
error. -John Kenneth Galbraith

Originality is something that is easily exaggerated, especially by
authors contemplating their own work. -John Kenneth Galbraith

When you risk becoming an artist, you risk taking your talent
seriously. -Dee Ito

Censorship always defeats it own purpose, for it creates in the end
the kind of society that is incapable of exercising real discretion.
-Henry Steele Commager

I am a deeply superficial person. -Andy Warhol 

Art is work, to sell it is art.

The real act of discovery is not in finding new lands, but in seeing
with new eyes. -Marcel Proust

Life beats down and crushes the soul and art reminds you that you have
one.  -Stella Adler

Music with dinner is an insult both to the cook and the violinist.
-G. K. Chesterton

You don't have to suffer to be a poet; adolescence is enough suffering
for anyone. -John Ciardi

The fact that no one understands you doesn't mean that you're an
artist.

I like to think that a good painting (or a good poem or a good book,
or any good thing) can be measured by how much, after experiencing it
for a while, you start to forget that it was made about someone other
than you. -Andrew Hershey

In feature films the directory is God; in documentary films God is the
director. -Alfred Hitchcock

I hate flowers. I only paint them because they're cheaper than models
and they don't move. -Georgia O'Keefe

Though we travel the world over to find the beautiful, we must carry
it with us or we find it not. -Ralph Waldo Emerson

You will find poetry nowhere unless you bring some with you.
-Joubert

In his lifetime van Gogh painted 486 paintings. Oddly enough, 8975 of
them are to be found in the United States. -Werner Lansburgh

There are painters who transform the sun into a yellow spot, but there
are others who with the help of their art and their intelligence,
transform a yellow spot into the sun. -Pablo Picasso

The greatest masterpieces were once only pigments on a palette.
-Henry S. Haskins

Life is a great big canvas, and you should throw all the paint on it
you can. -Danny Kaye

Q. How many surrealists does it take to change a light bulb? 
A. Fish!

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 Picasso. -Pablo Picasso

Great art is an instant arrested in eternity. -Huneker

The writer must be willing, above everything else, to take chances, to
risk making a fool of himself - or even to risk revealing the fact he
is a fool. -Jessamyn West

Art is everywhere, except it has to pass through a creative mind.
-Louise Nevelson