Art Quotes

If we are to change our world view, images have to change. The artist now has a very important job to do. He's not a little peripheral figure entertaining rich people, he's really needed.

David Hockney

An artist is a man of action, whether he creates a personality, invents an expedient, or finds the issue of a complicated situation.

Joseph Conrad

Comedy aims at representing men as worse, Tragedy as better than in actual life.

Aristotle

To reveal art and conceal the artist is art's aim

Oscar Wilde

One wanted, she thought, dipping her brush deliberately, to be on a level with ordinary experience, to feel simply that's a chair, that's a table, and yet at the same time, It's a miracle, it's an ecstasy.

Virginia Woolf

Autumn seemed to arrive suddenly that year. The morning of the first September was crisp and golden as an apple...

J.K. Rowling

Every man should follow the bent of his nature in art and letters, always provided that he does not offend against the rules of morality and good taste.

Thomas Edward Brown

The artist who is not also a craftsman is no good; but, alas, most of our artists are nothing else

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

The trend in some of the contemporary movements in art, but by no means all, seems to deny this ideal and to me appears to lead to a purely decorative conception of painting.

Edward Hopper

The beginning of a friendship, the fact that two people out of the thousands around them can meet and connect and become friends, seems like a kind of magic to me. But maintaining a friendship requires work. I don't mean that as a bad thing. Good art requires work as well.

Charles de Lint

To work and create 'for nothing', to sculpture in clay, to know that one's creation has no future, to see one's work destroyed in a day while being aware that fundamentally this has no more importance than building for centuries- this is the difficult wisdom that absurd thought sanctions. Performing these two tasks simultaneously, negating on one hand and magnifying on the other, is the way open to the absurd creator. He must give the void its colors.

Albert Camus

Translation is the art of failure.

Umberto Eco

Painting is a way to forget life. It is a cry in the night, a strangled laugh.

Georges Rouault

The art world is molting - some would say melting. Galleries are closing museums are scaling back.

Jerry Saltz

In art, one idea is as good as another. If one takes the idea of trembling, for instance, all of a sudden most art starts to tremble. Michelangelo starts to tremble. El Greco starts to tremble. All the Impressionists start to tremble.

Willem de Kooning

Whatever an artist's personal feelings are, as soon as an artist fills a certain area on the canvas or circumscribes it, he becomes historical. He acts from or upon other artists.

Willem de Kooning

An artist is forced by others to paint out of his own free will.

Willem de Kooning

Music is the vapour of art.

Victor Hugo

Politics is the art of preventing people from busying themselves with what is their own business.

Paul Valery

My love of fine art increased - the more of it I saw, the more of it I wanted to see.

Paul Getty