All About Art Quotes

#1. Let's be happy and forget all about art and politics!

Marty Rubin

#2. I lived in the world of poetry and ideas. I thought life was all about art and philosophy. In the military, I suddenly found out about the real world.

Shahin Najafi

#3. He knows all about art, but he doesn't know what he likes.

James Thurber

#4. I usually don't mind movies that people think go overboard because that's what art is all about. Art is about pushing us and making us examine ourselves.

Ice Cube

#5. A lot of young girls don't realise how diverse the career opportunities are in games development. Many think that you need elite math skills and a vast knowledge of all things tech to work in games, and haven't thought about avenues like design, producing, art, writing or composing.

Rhianna Pratchett

#6. Above all else, it is about leaving a mark that I existed: I was here. I was hungry. I was defeated. I was happy. I was sad. I was in love. I was afraid. I was hopeful. I had an idea and I had a good purpose and that's why I made works of art.

Felix Gonzalez-Torres

#7. My art teacher in junior high was a very out gay man and a mentor to me. He would tell us about Greenwich Village and show us the 'Village Voice' and describe his life, but it was all sort of subversive and below the radar.

Gus Van Sant

#8. What's important about the artists we learn about in art history and see in all the art books is that they have somehow pushed the boundaries of what people think art is or should be, and that's how they've made their work relevant. That's what I'm trying to figure out for myself.

Kadir Nelson

#9. I do think all art is autobiographical, and I do think I know quite a bit about women. I don't know anything about men.

Gloria Vanderbilt

#10. Hollywood used to be run by artists and people who loved artists ... people who wanted to make movies for all the right reasons. For the love. The Art. To tell stories. Yes to make money as well, but it was about both. Now I feel, it's mostly about bottom line and making money.

Matthew Lillard

#11. There is something very special about this part of the world [U.S], which is the openness and the curiosity and the lack of prejudice and the lack of generally accepted norms as to what art should be and how an artist's career should go and all that.

Esa-Pekka Salonen

#12. TV is a language all its own, a land of one dimensional stereotypes that destroys culture, not adds to it. TV is anti-art, a reflection of consumerism that serves the power structure. TV is about demographics.

Roseanne Barr

#13. There is no misery in art. All art is about saying yes, and all art is about its own making. - John Currin

Austin Kleon

#14. All a work of art can do is present the surface. I can't know the insides of people. I know very little about the inside of myself.

John Banville

#15. When I speak about freedom, it's about freedom of the spirit. Freedom of the spirit can't be represented by a body. It has to be art. It has to be all the colors. It has to be something that moves and has no boundaries.

Salma Hayek

#16. That's what all art's about - a sense of moving away from boundaries that you can't in real life. Like a dancer is always trying to fly, really - to do something that's just not possible. But you try to do as much as you can within those physical boundaries.

Kate Bush

#17. I was not at all worried about finding my doctor boring; I expected from him, thanks to an art of which the laws escaped me, that he pronounce concerning my health an indisputable oracle by consulting my entrails.

Marcel Proust

#18. It would be mistaken to suppose that any of the best photography is come at by intellection; it is like all art, essentially the result of an intuitive process, drawing on all that the artist is rather than on anything he thinks, far less theorizes about.

Helen Levitt

#19. Fifty grand for a paper bucket? Well it was all about context, you see.

Paul Christensen

#20. I never can hear a crowd of people singing and gesticulating, all together, at an Italian opera, without fancying myself at Athens, listening to that particular tragedy, by Sophocles, in which he introduces a full chorus of turkeys, who set about bewailing the death of Meleager.

Edgar Allan Poe

#21. Many great authors of the 19th century wrote under conditions of strict censorship. The great thing about the art of writing a novel, is that you can write about anything. All you have to say is that it's fiction.

Orhan Pamuk

#22. But why? Why do you care about our class's history?"
"I just do. Besides, I need something to put on my art-school applications besides 'Locks self in room and draws all day.' Even art schools won't take a psychopath.

Natalie Standiford

#23. Cooking is an art, but all art requires knowing something about the techniques and materials. Using modernist techniques, you get more control, and that allows you to be more artistic, not less!

Nathan Myhrvold

#24. There's something pleasing about large, well-lit spaces. I love that dealers are willing to take massive chances in order to give this much room to their artists. Most of all, I love that more galleries showing more art gives more artists a shot.

Jerry Saltz

#25. I must confess that over my career, I've actually downplayed the importance of DJs. It's such a different art form. Then all of a sudden you try it, and you think, 'Good God, these guys do work.' I used to be very cynical and very blase about it. I can only apologize.

Peter Hook

#26. I was drawn to biology and history and, of course, art. And I loved languages. The biggest problem I had is that I wasn't taught about the connections between all these things. I think that would have given life a lot more meaning and it would be a lot more enjoyable.

Hussein Chalayan

#27. There's something about being able to literally consume a work of art - then to divide all that pleasure of it - because it's a memory. A great wine for me is a memory, it's an extraordinary experience.

Robert B. Parker

#28. When you're so drawn to art, to making pictures and looking at art, it's really all you want to think about.

Don Ed Hardy

#29. People sometimes complain that Berliners just sit around all day in cafes, smoking and talking about art. Is that supposed to be a bad thing?

Joe Jackson

#30. Don't worry about your originality. You couldn't get rid of it even if you wanted to. It will stick with you and show up for better or worse in spite of all you or anyone else can do.

Robert Henri

#31. You know a trillion times more about art than me. But I've learned that it isn't necessary to know all that much. You just make what you wanna see, right? It's a game, right? It's like being paid for dreaming.

Tom Robbins

#32. It's easy to say "This year in art sucked." After all, about 85 percent of all shows of contemporary art are bad. But 85 percent of all art made in the Renaissance was bad.

David Edelstein

#33. When you sit down to play a game you should think only about the position, but not about the opponent. Whether chess is regarded as a science, or an art, or a sport, all the same psychology bears no relation to it and only stands in the way of real chess.

Jose Raul Capablanca

#34. Writing, photography...art. It's all about what's in focus.

Kelly E. Lindner

#35. I didn't want make art about the internet at all. It's a really hard subject to take on and I did not set out to do that. But, it was real and it was what was happening.

Erika M. Anderson

#36. Chess is all about getting the king into check, you see. It's about killing the father. I would say that chess has more to do with the art of murder than it does with the art of war.

Arturo Perez-Reverte

#37. My father was very sure about certain matters pertaining to the universe. To him all good things-trout as well as eternal salvation-come by grace and grace comes by art and art does not come easy.

Norman Maclean

#38. I think in the Western world we have gotten overly identified with doing, and we've kind of forgotten about the art of being. And we don't see value in it; we think that if you're not doing something all of the time, being very active and producing something, then you're sort of wasting your time.

Shakti Gawain

#39. I used to believe my art had to be about the things that brought me joy and gave me hope. But I learned that art can be found in all of life, even in pain.
Valentine, while in Italy (pg 267)

Adriana Trigiani

#40. Have you killed anyone?" she asked quickly.
"What? Did you miss what I said, about turning murder into
an art form?"
"But you haven't actually killed anyone yet, have you? I read
your file."
He glowered. "Technically, yeah, all right, maybe I haven't

Derek Landy

#41. Life is like art - it is all about interpretation.

Robert Holden

#42. We feel more and more intensely about the music we make. It's unexpected, and not always what you would think of in Beach House. It's all art in the end. We aren't making records because we have to; it's because it's what we want to express.

Victoria Legrand

#43. I don't believe in the school of hard knocks, although I've had them. All that stuff about whatever doesn't kill you makes you stronger is so not true. Do you know what makes you stronger? When people treat you and your art with dignity.

Lana Del Rey

#44. In my brain all I think about is fame.

Tupac Shakur

#45. All of the art that I love is about peeling back layers and delving into something that's in a subconscious or dream realm. People like Jan Svankmajer, or the artist Yoshimoto Nara, or David Lynch.

Bat For Lashes

#46. Without a doubt,
I must read,
all the books
I've read about.
See the artworks
hung on hooks,
that I have only,
seen in books.

Lang Leav

#47. I was very prejudiced when I started arts school. I, like all of those kids, was like, "I don't like this modern stuff." I came to arts school with a very stupid, conservative set of ideas about art.

Ragnar Kjartansson

#48. I am adamant that we must not cut back on funding of the teaching of the arts in the schools: music, painting, theater, dance, all of it. The great thing about the arts is that the only way you learn how to do it is by doing it.

David McCullough

#49. The idea is to bring art to people who might never really interact with it. It's for all citizens, and it's about making the city more interesting and more visually significant.

Susan Davis

#50. Fetish is the exploration of sex as art, and the refinement of one's personal desires. Anything can be fetishised ... There'll be new fetishes forever. I feel that the 21st century is all about fetish.

Rick Castro

#51. There's design, and there's art. Good design is total harmony. There's no better designer than nature - if you look at a branch or a leaf, it's perfect. It's all function. Art is different. It's about emotion. It's about suffering and beauty - but mostly suffering!

Diane Von Furstenberg

#52. Self-expression is a hallmark of an artist, of art, to get something off one's chest, to sing one's song. So that element is present in all art. It is the key to even standing up and saying, "Hey, listen to me." Self-expression can be based on looking at the world and making observations about it.

George Carlin

#53. I have no evangelical feelings about art at all. I despise art education. Art doesn't lend itself to education. There is no knowledge there. It's a set of propositions about how things should look.

Dave Hickey

#54. I've done everything I wanted to do, writing books, learning about things, but I've been swindled all the same because it's never anything more.

Simone De Beauvoir

#55. Norway is a small country, about half the size of Sweden, but it has a very good film climate because they have municipal cinemas, so even in the smallest towns you have a cinema that shows art house films from all over the world.

Stellan Skarsgard

#56. You know that I immerse myself in music, so to speak - that I think about it all day long - that I like experimenting - studying - reflecting.

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

#57. I'd love to live nonbiologically and move about at the speed of light and be in communication with a million people at once and create works of art that are grand and sophisticated and very human at the same time so all these types of things.

Barry Ptolemy

#58. The one thing about program television that's absolutely incompatible with any concept of art is that all decisions have to be made by program directors, whereas art is autonomous. It may be dependent, but it knows no superiors.

Alexander Kluge

#59. The way I look at it is that once you create a piece of art, and it's out in the world, there's nothing you can do about it. People can use it the way they want to. There's nothing you can do about it. All you can hope for is that people that are using it are using it with the best intent.

David Lloyd

#60. If there is no art, no culture, then what the fuck are we going to talk about? These are our stories and our stories are all we got!

Dave Hickey

#61. I got into pastoring because of the art form. I started a church, but I felt the art form needed to be freed for all people. A particular religion over others was never interesting to me. I wanted to talk to people about what it means to be alive and what it means to be human.

Rob Bell

#62. Organized perception is what art is all about.

Roy Lichtenstein

#63. Art is all about the experience. I could say I don't really relate to opera, but then you watch Placido Domingo, and you go, 'Blimey, look at that.'

David Harewood

#64. One of the things I love about opera is that it's the combination of all the art forms, and certainly the world of fashion is a big deal in it.

Joyce DiDonato

#65. The drive, the ambition, the art; it all comes to me when I close my eyes and think about the sacrifices my Mom made for me.

Forrest Curran

#66. For all the years I'd spent talking about pictures, the truth was that I had no idea how to draw or what it felt like to do it. I would mistrust a poetry critic who couldn't produce a rhyming couplet. Could one write about art without knowing how to draw?

Adam Gopnik

#67. We're not talking about an elite art form from the price point of view. We have a building in L.A. that is incredibly open, exciting, inviting, and all that, and there's no reason for this music not to be part of everybody's everyday life.

Esa-Pekka Salonen

#68. We're all going about trying to make beauty in the world and trying to make order out of chaos. And that's what art is.

Rebecca Makkai

#69. I'm still totally going out and sleeping on people's floors so I can play a house show and give away music. Of course I would. That's how I started. All that sort of stuff reminds you to stay true to the essence of what art is about.

Geoff Rickly

#70. I'm all about freedom in art. I'm from Texas, so when someone tells you which way to ride your horse, you think 'I'll just go to a different ranch. You guys are riding it backwards anyway.

Robert Rodriguez

#71. The wonderful thing about a book is that you have a canvas that is 300 pages wide, and it's all free space. You can make a piece of art as big as you want and whatever shape you want.

Stephan Pastis

#72. To me that's part of my working day, and I would never refuse a job where I'm under several hours of makeup, because as an actor, I enjoy performing. It's about the creation of the character and the art to me, not about being comfortable and how long it all takes.

Warwick Davis

#73. There are loads of fan sites for the 'Edge,' including deviant art, song lyrics using 'Edge' language, multiple entries on Wikipedia, there are even some 'Who Wants To Be A Millionaire?' games all about the 'Edge.'

Chris Riddell

#74. All good art is about something deeper than it admits.

Roger Ebert

#75. Art teaches something we all need to learn, especially about people who are different from ourselves: To see things the way they truly are, sometimes you have to look more deeply.

Ron Hall

#76. There must be something about art ... almost all cultures have done art. It's a refining of the senses, which are there to keep us alive. As far as we know, no other animals do that.

Roy Lichtenstein

#77. I'm awake as soon as the sun crests the eastern hills. I guess I'm motivated because I love just about everything about my life - the writing, the many critters, the art, and all the rest.

Linda Lael Miller

#78. I am all for art's finding a large audience. But the way that's happening now, with big works filling big galleries and bigger shows, is mostly stopping statements from being made. Or heard. Or talked about. Or really examined. It's watering things down.

Jerry Saltz

#79. I'm a black American playwright. I couldn't be anything else. I make my art out of black American culture; they're all cut out of the same cloth. That's who I am; that's who I write about.

August Wilson

#80. All this talk about what a marvelous future science'll bring us? Art can change things just as much.' She stubbed out her cigarette. 'Maybe better.'
'Why's that?'
'Art doesn't kill anyone.

Ellen Klages

#81. There is something about giving everything to your profession. In Italian, an obsession is not necessarily negative. It's the art of putting all your energy into one thing; it's the art of transforming even what you eat for lunch into architecture.

Renzo Piano

#82. It's not words, but years we should be editing. Remember: time spent on bad art is a form of redundancy, doing the same thing twice is a form of tautology, and wasting precious moments complaining about life is a form of pleonasm. We should all learn to live our lives concisely.

Anthony Marais

#83. The wonderful thing about theater as an art form is it's a purely empirical art form. It's all about what works. And every show, every production, is created anew right from the moment you go into the rehearsal hall.

Terry Teachout

#84. And how that lady Suz was all wrong: art is not all about chaos, about taking things apart. True art, Emma will tell them, is about finding a way to make what's broken whole.

Jennifer McMahon

#85. We should all realize that we can only talk about the bad forgeries, the ones that have been detected; the good ones are still hanging on the walls

Frank Wynne

#86. My work is all about creating new paths for thinking about the possibilities inherent in all art; another world is possible!

DJ Spooky

#87. Stand-up is an amazing art form, I think, because it's all about you having complete control of the situation, but absolutely none.

Jim Gaffigan

#88. Everything a writer learns about the art or craft of fiction takes just a little away from his need or desire to write at all. In the end he knows all the tricks and has nothing to say.

Raymond Chandler

#89. I want to burn with excitement or anger and bleed, bleed out my words. I want to get all fucked up and write raw and ugly about all these things I see and am and could be.

Charlotte Eriksson

#90. Dumbing down takes many forms: art that is good for you, museums that flatter you, universities that increase your self-esteem. Culture, after all, is really about you.

Denis Dutton

#91. 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

#92. Freedom. Writing should be all about freedom. Free yourself from societal constraints when you write. Create true Art.

Isabeau Kelm

#93. The art market was very different before the mid-1980s: then, art was all about passion, whereas now it's become a commodity.

Adam Clayton

#94. The art was just a way of hooking people in, saying: "Hey, maybe there's something cool about the tenant meeting. If the picture's really cool and weird, maybe I should check this out." And I think all of my art has really developed out of that realization.

Eric Drooker

#95. We could go work on curing cancer. We could go work on building spaceships. We could go work on art projects. What's fun about working at Asana is we get to work on all of them at the same time.

Justin Rosenstein

#96. You cannot define good or bad in art. It's all about the way you look at things around you", I replied.

Deepak Ranjan

#97. We have basic urges all the time. They just manifest themselves in different scenarios, and we have to turn those weaknesses into our strengths. Art is very much about making your weaknesses your strength.

Nicolas Winding Refn

#98. I think middle America has changed very, very much. I think people are way more open-minded. I think - I think it's because the Internet. I think they're exposed to so much. All the men talked about how much they love their wife, which I don't hear all the time in art communities.

John Waters

#99. There should be a law that no ordinary newspaper should be allowed to write about art. The harm they do by their foolish and random writing it would be impossible to overestimate - not to the artist, but to the public, blinding them to all but harming the artist not at all.

Oscar Wilde

#100. I think about art a lot only in two contexts. One is narrative.The other thing that I'm interested in, which is tangential, but not unrelated ... All art to me is about problem solving.

Steven Soderbergh