ART QUOTES VII

quotations about art

Art quote

Artists recognize other artists as soon as the pencil begins to move.

DAN SIMMONS

The Rise of Endymion

Tags: Dan Simmons, artists


Art and love are the same thing: It's the process of seeing yourself in things that are not you.

CHUCK KLOSTERMAN

Killing Yourself to Live

Tags: love


True art required the right amount of uncertainty, just as gourmet cooking needed the proper spices and flavors.

BRIAN HERBERT & KEVIN J. ANDERSON

The Butlerian Jihad

Tags: Brian Herbert, cooking


Art is awkward until technique has become an unconscious habit.

AUSTIN O'MALLEY

Keystones of Thought

Tags: Austin O'Malley


Art is one of man's few serious activities.

AUSTIN O'MALLEY

Keystones of Thought

Tags: Austin O'Malley


The difference between the first and second-best things in art absolutely seems to escape verbal definition -- it is a matter of a hair, a shade, an inward quiver of some kind -- yet what miles away in the point of preciousness!

WILLIAM JAMES

letter to Henry Rutgers Marshall, Feb. 7, 1899

Tags: William James


A copy of the universe is not what is required of art; one of the damned things is ample.

REBECCA WEST

The Strange Necessity

Tags: Rebecca West, universe


Real art, like the wife of an affectionate husband, needs no ornaments. But counterfeit art, like a prostitute, must always be decked out. The cause of production of real art is the artist's inner need to express a feeling that has accumulated, just as for a mother the cause of sexual conception is love. The cause of counterfeit art, as of prostitution, is gain. The consequence of true art is the introduction of a new feeling into the intercourse of life, as the consequence of a wife's love is the birth of a new man into life. The consequences of counterfeit art are the perversion of man, pleasure which never satisfies, and the weakening of man's spiritual strength.

LEO TOLSTOY

What Is Art?

Tags: Leo Tolstoy


Art has to reveal to us ideas, formless spiritual essences. The supreme question about a work of art is out of how deep a life does it spring. The painting of Gustave Moreau is the painting of ideas. The deepest poetry of Shelley, the words of Hamlet bring our mind into contact with the eternal wisdom, Plato's world of ideas. All the rest is the speculation of schoolboys for schoolboys.

JAMES JOYCE

Ulysses

Tags: James Joyce, ideas


But art consists not so much in the knowledge of principles, as in the manner of applying them; to reveal them to ignorant people is to put a razor in the hand of a monkey.

HONORÉ DE BALZAC

Physiology

Tags: Honoré de Balzac


The true artist will let his wife starve, his children go barefoot, his mother drudge for a living at seventy, sooner than work at anything but his art.

GEORGE BERNARD SHAW

Man and Superman

Tags: George Bernard Shaw


The function of art is to bring people into greater touch with reality, and yet our movie houses and family rooms are jammed with people after as much reality-removal as they can get.

EDWARD ALBEE

Stretching My Mind

Tags: Edward Albee, reality


Doing a life study while drunk and in the process of being seduced is never a formula for quality art.

DAN SIMMONS

The Fall of Hyperion

Tags: Dan Simmons


Art begins with resistance -- at the point where resistance is overcome.

ANDRE GIDE

Autumn Leaves

Tags: Andre Gide


Art, true art, is the desire of a man to express himself, to record the reactions of his personality to the world he lives in.

AMY LOWELL

Tendencies in Modern Poetry

Tags: Amy Lowell


The work of art is a scapegoat surplus product, a dispensable cliche of form and meaning, having only the value the spectator--the symbol of society at large--gives it as he encounters it in the no man's land of the gallery or museum. He victimizes it and is victimized by it; he is ambivalent about it as it is in itself. It has a certain amount of authority, yet no more than he gives it by channeling his life-energy in its forms. In other words, it forces him to recognize his own authoritarian style, i.e., his tendency to treat his own identity as a finished form, but at the same time possessed of an energy that contradicts that form by reaching for other identities. The work of art teaches the spectator that he too is communal cliche and unfinished expression.

DONALD BURTON KUSPIT

Redeeming Art: Critical Reveries

Tags: Donald Burton Kuspit


Perhaps art is a quest for the perfect, or even the imperfect. Reality always falls short on both sides.

ANNA DEAVERE SMITH

Letters to a Young Artist

Tags: Anna Deavere Smith, perfection


Don't worry about making art, just get it done. Let everyone else decide if it's good or bad, whether they love it or hate it. While they are deciding, make even more art.

ANDY WARHOL

attributed, "Andy Warhol's Best Advice about Art", Flavorwire, August 6, 2012

Tags: Andy Warhol


That beauty which is meant by art is no mere accident of human life which people can take or leave, but a positive necessity of life if we are to live as nature meant us to, that is to say unless we are content to be less than men.

OSCAR WILDE

"Art and the Handicraftsman"

Tags: Oscar Wilde


There are only two styles of portrait painting: the serious and the smirk.

CHARLES DICKENS

Nicholas Nickleby

Tags: Charles Dickens, painting