Art Quotes

It is now life and not art that requires the willing suspension of disbelief

Lionel Trilling

I probably have a 20,000-word vocabulary. I'll match my wits with anyone on literature, science and the arts.

Mike Tyson

The greatest art belongs to the world. Do not be intimidated by the experts. Trust your instincts. Do not be afraid to go against what you were taught, or what you were told to see or believe. Every person, every set of eyes, has the right to the truth.

Blue Balliett

Art like life should be free, since both are experimental.

George Santayana

For the canons of good society are, or should be, the same as the canons of art. Form is absolutely essential to it. It should have the dignity of a ceremony, as well as its unreality, and should combine the insincere character of a romantic play with the wit and beauty that make such plays delightful to us.

Oscar Wilde

An art of expression should begin with childhood, and the lucid use of one's mother tongue should be typical of that art. The sense of reality should be strengthened from the beginning, yet by no means at the cost of those lofty illusions we call patriotism, veneration, love.

Louis Sullivan

All we have, it seems to me, is the beauty of art and nature and life, and the love which that beauty inspires.

Edward Abbey

The painting has a life of its own

Jackson Pollock

Italo Calvino said the artist reveals that bit of truth hidden at the bottom of every lie. Art is all about the art of lying. The artist's imperative is to create a supreme fiction, a lie that, paradoxically, discloses a truth. It's precisely this kind of paradox that Calvino and Fellini adored.

Damian Pettigrew

Blessed are they who see beautiful things in humble places where other people see nothing.

Camille Pissarro

When I think of art I think of beauty. Beauty is the mystery of life. It is not in the eye it is in the mind. In our minds there is awareness of perfection.

Agnes Martin

Love and art do not embrace what is beautiful but what is made beautiful by this embrace.

Karl Kraus

my problem is that my body acts before my brain thinks... it sometimes brings me huge trouble, or also huge success. recently, my body and brain got come to an agreement. it may be far better to live this gambling life than living in boring average ...they at least make my art more interesting

Hiroko Sakai

It is hard work and great art to make life not so serious.

John Irving

While a large segment of the art world has obsessed over a tiny number of stars and their prices, an aesthetic shift has been occurring. It's not a movement - movements are more sure of themselves. It's a change of mood or expectation, a desire for art to be more than showy effects, big numbers, and gamesmanship.

Jerry Saltz

Space is the breath of art.

Frank Lloyd Wright

But in Christianity, by contrast, the freedom of the children of God was also freedom from all important worldly interests, from all art and science, etc.

Bruno Bauer

Art must take reality by surprise.

Francoise Sagan

Any great art work revives and readapts time and space, and the measure of its success is the extent to which it makes you an inhabitant of that world - the extent to which it invites you in and lets you breathe its strange, special air.

Leonard Bernstein

The market follows the artist. The artist does not follow the market.

Iimani David