Top 100 Art And Artists Quotes
#1. What is great about art and artists is that we get to ask the questions, even though we may never know the answers.
Dennis Quaid
#3. I grew up going to museums. I was privileged to discover art and artists in a very personal way.
Thelma Golden
#4. Men talk about art, and artists make art, but should artists talk?
Leos Carax
#5. A world turned into a stereotype, a society converted into a regiment, a life translated into a routine, make it difficult for either art or artists to survive. Crush individuality in society and you crush art as well. Nourish the conditions of a free life and you nourish the arts, too.
Franklin D. Roosevelt
#6. Melodrama is one of the most stunning art forms. These are stories where the emotions are big, and the situations are big, and the artists believe in the situation dramatically. There's no irony or distance.
James Gray
#7. The big pay-off was to work as an artist and gain some shred of respect from your friends, who were also artists. But there was never any notion that you could make a living out of art. On the rare occasions you had a gallery show, and sold a little work, well, that was just gravy.
Edward Ruscha
#8. Timid young artists, adding parental fears to their own, often give up their sunny dreams of artistic careers, settling into the twilight world of could-have-beens and regrets.
Julia Cameron
#9. There is a great promise for our cultural growth, but this promise is achieved only when our artists recognize that all great art has nationality, an imprimatur achieved with the keenest remembrance of time and place.
F. Sionil Jose
#10. I've had people come up to me with the strangest interpretations of what my lyrics might mean, and I'm like, "You go! I never thought of that, but that works,"...I think that true art is a universal reflection, and true artists are just messengers of that reflection or, at best, skilled presentors.
Serj Tankian
#11. Everyone knows of the talking artists. Throughout all of the known history of the world they have gathered in rooms and talked. They talk of art and are passionately,almost feverishly, in earnest about it. They think it matters much more than it does.
Sherwood Anderson
#12. People assume that artists must talk about art and beauty and the sublime whenever we get together, but no, we usually talk about money.
Christopher Bram
#13. Artists must be men of wit, consciously or unconsciously philosophers; read, study and think a great deal of life ...
Robert Henri
#14. I realised the bohemian life was not for me. I would look around at my friends, living like starving artists, and wonder, 'Where's the art?' They weren't doing anything. And there was so much interesting stuff to do, so much fun to be had ... maybe I could even quit renting.
P. J. O'Rourke
#15. My dad's side of the family had lots of artists and musicians. There's an emotional, quite sentimental quality to Slavic culture. It's very open, it loves art, it loves music, it loves literature. It's very warm, it's very up, it's very down. I would celebrate that.
Nick Clegg
#16. I like the fact that I can rep New York, but my style does not - I'm not trapped in a New York thing. I can do art songs with other artists and it's seamless.
Talib Kweli
#17. A person's work allows their character to form and provides a creative outlet for their inner world of imaginative thoughts and creative impulses. A person whom fails to find suitable work that allows their soul room to grow will quickly begin eroding into a withered and desiccated being.
Kilroy J. Oldster
#18. An angry artist tells people what (he thinks) they need to hear. A hungry artist tells people what (he thinks) they want to hear.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
#19. Creative arts, new inventions, and new ideas spring from those blessed with imagination, and magic stimulates imagination. It is no coincidence that many artists, writers, and dancers are interested in magic.
Vivianne Crowley
#20. And remember whatever discipline you're in, whether you're a musician or a photographer, fine artist or a cartoonist, writer, a dancer, a singer, a designer... whatever you do, you have a thing that's unique. You have the ability to make art.
Neil Gaiman
#21. Taffy bounds up to him and gives him a sloppy, drunken hug. "Oh my God, I knew your art would be awesome!" she gushes.
Bitch. How dare she intrude on our private moment!
Kitsy Clare
#22. At the age of four, you were an artist. And at seven, you were a poet.
Seth Godin
#23. Female artists are the perfect example of a creator: They know how to make life and art with their bodies. Life comes from their bodies, so on a very basic level, they have more to write about.
Brandon Boyd
#24. Great art is always a way of concentrating, reinventing what is called fact, what we know of our existence- a reconcentration ... tearing away the veils, the attitudes people acquire of their time and earlier time. Really good artists tear down those veils
Francis Bacon
#25. I don't see many artists who are not trying to bring their work to the public - -to the contrary I see artists nearly desperate to get attention for their art and, failing that, often for themselves.
Sally Mann
#27. 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
#28. Unfortunately, I haven't thought sufficiently about art. What I never realized - and it's really stupid - is the art world is the art world because all these thousands of famous and not-famous artists do things, over centuries. This hadn't occurred to me.
Peter Saul
#29. I wanted my art to deal with very formal concerns and to deal with very material concerns, and to deal with antecedents and art history, which for me go very far beyond just the influence of African-American artists.
Rashid Johnson
#30. With the manipulation of abstract
symbols, an artist can send you information without sound, change your feelings and,
sometimes, even beliefs. Artists convey the unspeakable. Artists inspire.
Jonathan Culver
#31. 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
#32. You are an artist," she said. "But then all scientists are artists, my father used to say. You think like an artist, at any rate, and I can see that you want what you create to be a work of art.
Pearl S. Buck
#33. Dive again and again into the river of uncertainty. Create in the dark, only then can you recognize the light.
Jyrki Vainonen
#34. I see football as an art and all players are artists.
If you are a top artist, the last thing you would do is paint a picture somebody else has already painted.
Cristiano Ronaldo
#35. You know how creative people are, we have to try everything until we find our niche.
E.A. Bucchianeri
#36. I'm pretty hard to impress, and I'm pretty exacting, in terms of what I want from my props department and art department. We spend many, many hours going over visual research and finding the right artists to create the material.
Cary Fukunaga
#37. The art world can be very intimidating because it's just so vast. You talk to people who are really clued in to all the young artists and coming into it you're never going to be able to catch up immediately, even though there's pressure to.
Daniel Radcliffe
#38. The great artists of the world are never Puritans, and seldom even ordinarily respectable.
H.L. Mencken
#39. My mother supported my every artistic ambition. I don't wonder why. I'm beyond grateful. But when I think of my grandparents barely surviving the war, I feel so pampered. What an indulgence to be an artist. So this is it, this is all I can offer, to the living and to the dead.
Leela Corman
#40. I think art, if it's meaningful at all, is a conversation with other artists. You say something, they say something, you move back and forth.
John Baldessari
#41. People assume that a lot of pop artists don't write their songs. That, for me, is super frustrating because I think it detracts from some of the art and some of the craft of what we do. I'm at the helm of it, and I think that is what people don't see.
Ricki-Lee Coulter
#42. The greatest artists have never been men of taste. By never sophisticating their instincts they have never lost the awareness of the great simplicities, which they relish both from appetite and from the challenge these offer to skill in competition with popular art.
Jacques Barzun
#43. I have always believed and still believe that artists who live and work with spiritual values cannot and should not remain indifferent to the conflict in which the highest values of humanity and civilization are at stake.
Pablo Picasso
#44. To be a writer and political is a dangerous thing. To be a writer and apolitical is even more dangerous. Art is right, left; in truth, it has only one direction and that is forward.
Chris Campanioni
#45. If you are handed something, it's a blessing and a curse. Look at hip hop artists, they produced everything themselves. Even people like Robert De Niro are getting into production. Again, it's art vs. marketing. Not everyone can take the risk. You have to break a few eggs to make a good omelet.
Michael Winslow
#46. By translating their inner turmoil or understanding into art, artists challenge the accepted notions of reality and create new ones.
Wes Nisker
#47. Emphasizing the body as art, these artists amplified the role of process over product and shifted from representation objects to presentational modes of action.
Kristine Stiles
#48. I feel like Adele is a diva. Not in the bad way. She is one of the greatest voices of this industry and of her own art. What she offers is so unique that she's risen to such a status that very few artists can enjoy.
Xavier Dolan
#49. Much of my writing has taken the form of a pilgrimage: to sacred places that represent the best of America, to musicians and other artists who represent the best of their art.
William Zinsser
#50. I wish to be of service to the artists of our own day, by showing them how a small beginning leads to the highest elevation, and how from so noble a situation it is possible to fall to utmost ruin, and consequently, how these arts resemble nature as shown in our human bodies.
Giorgio Vasari
#51. It's really interesting with art-movies too, but art especially - to see how your attitude toward artists and works and your level of appreciation of them is always shifting and changing over the years.
Richard Hell
#52. That kind of pursuit is not beneficial to mankind: art for self aggrandizement at the cost of love.
Anuradha Bhattacharyya
#53. Contemporary curators orbit in the place of distribution and consumption, and less and less in the space of artists. I think it has become a lazy profession in regard to its relationship to the artists and the vigorous state of art making.
Michelle Grabner
#54. Music is art, art is life, and we are who we are, and all of these aforementioned women, unless they should choose not to, will be performing well into the next many decades because they are great artists.
Lara St. John
#55. A great magician is as divine as God and his stage is as majestic as the paradise.
Amit Kalantri
#56. By art alone we can get out of ourselves, find out what another person sees of this universe which is not the same as ours ... Thanks to art, instead of seeing only one world, we see it multiplied, and we have as many different worlds at our disposition as there are original artists.
Marcel Proust
#57. I did hate those people ... those false artists whose work consists of the poses they strike: saying outrageous things, cultivating complicated tastes and appetites, being artificial, irritating, unbearable. People who, in fact, take from art only what is false and external ...
Mario De Sa-Carneiro
#58. When I was looking at the Russian Constructivists, these agitprop artists actually painted on trains. It was a heavy influence. They were bringing art to the people, to the masses, and breaking it out of the clubbiness of the art world, which is a monolith.
Jeffrey Deitch
#59. It has always been recognized that chess is an art, and its best practitioners have been described as artists.
Alexander Kotov
#60. The universe constantly and obediently answers to our conceptions; whether we travel fast or slow, the track is laid for us. Let us spend our lives in conceiving then. The poet or the artist never yet had so fair and noble a design but some of his posterity at least could accomplish it.
Henry David Thoreau
#61. While I recommend studying the art from artists, Nature is and must be the fountain which alone is inexhaustible, and from which all excellences must originally flow.
Joshua Reynolds
#62. In place of an intensive cooperation among artists, there is a battle for goods. Hatred, partisanship, cliques, jealousy, and intrigues are the natural consequences of an aimless, materialist art.
Wassily Kandinsky
#63. So you have to be humble in dealing with the spaces and make sure they are used according to their unique purpose for which there is no alternative...art, if you like, is really a lack of alternatives."
-Jonathan Meese
Prestel Publishing
#64. I would begin by collecting lithographs and etchings. It's a way of coming in and benefiting from real quality art. Even younger artists make wonderful prints. Prints can become very valuable. That's how I began collecting.
Arne Glimcher
#65. These days, newish art can be priced between $10,000 and $25,000. When I tell artists that a new painting by a newish artist should go for around $1,200, they look at me like I'm a flesh-eating virus.
Jerry Saltz
#66. Ingres was one of those artists to whom the outline was something sacred and magical, and the reason is that it was the means of reconciling the major conflict in his art, the conflict between abstraction and sensibility.
Kenneth Clark
#67. [Who are the artists you admire, Surrealist or otherwise?]
Remedios Varo, Max Ernst, Charlotte Salomon, Goya, Aubrey Beardsley. Beardsley is not so much about the impossible as he is about freaks and deformities, but those are interesting to me too.
Audrey Niffenegger
#68. Most great artists define a new and unique region of hell.
Scott Miller
#69. 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
#70. During my time at high school and university in Kreuzlingen and St. Gallen, I traveled around Europe looking at art, visiting artists, studios, galleries and museums.
Hans Ulrich Obrist
#71. I have hundreds of art books and the biographies of artists I love, such as Thomas Eakins and Edgar Degas.
Jamie Wyeth
#72. Tattooing, when understood in its entirety, must be seen as a religious act. The human being brings forth images from the center of the self and communicates them to the world. Fantasy is embodied in reality and the person is made whole.
Spider Webb
#73. We have artists with no scientific knowledge and scientists with no
artistic knowledge and both with no spiritual sense of gravity at all,
and the result is not just bad, it is ghastly.
Robert M. Pirsig
#74. We do have Museums of African American Art in the United States, and there is a National Museum of Women's Art. However, I believe Latinos are best served by displaying their art next to the art of other groups, particularly North American, European, and even Asian artists.
Mari Carmen Ramirez
#75. [Art] would have helped us survive in the Pleistocene - in the period, say, 1.6 million years ago until fairly recently. The kind of imaginative abilities that artists have and that we all have in the appreciation of art - to appreciate Jane Austen, the late quartets of Beethoven.
Denis Dutton
#76. I've always felt that a lot of modern art is a con, and that the most successful painters are often better salesmen and promoters than they are artists.
Donald J. Trump
#77. I became a degenerate artist. My parents were shaped by their own experiences, and artists weren't so useful in the death camps.
Art Spiegelman
#78. Artists are people driven by the tension between the desire to communicate and the desire to hide.
D.W. Winnicott
#79. God and other artists are always a little obscure ...
Oscar Wilde
#80. More and more in the art world are becoming moralistic, telling artists and critics what they should and shouldn't write, do, or make art about. Never mind the intellectual hypocrisy of this: Those who violate the clublike code are made out to be wrong, immoral, corrupt.
Jerry Saltz
#81. General belief is "There is no real magic, only tricks" but a great magician compel people not to trust that belief and make them believe, after all "There does exist a real magic".
Amit Kalantri
#82. The art stream is filled with snags and has no volume so it has no support. If you finally choose art, no amount of reason or common sense can discourage you. You must selfishly carry on.
Theresa Sjoquist
#83. People shouldn't trust artists and they shouldn't trust art. Part of the fun of art is that it invites you to interpret it.
Tony Kushner
#84. The trouble is that we have a bad habit, encouraged by pedants and sophisticates, of considering happiness as something rather stupid. Only pain is intellectual, only evil interesting. This is the treason of the artist; a refusal to admit the banality of evil and the terrible boredom of pain.
Ursula K. Le Guin
#85. The current climate doesn't represent a threat to the production of art but to the market. I think it's time for artists to get over auction houses, galleries, and high-production-value exhibitions and start using our voices again.
Maurizio Cattelan
#86. I've been arrested a few times, but I've never been in real trouble. Because what I do is art and even if it is illegal, Art is a universal activity, and artists are generally respected.
Invader
#87. That DMC Act is a disgrace. And the problem with independent art in this country is that independent artists have been economically blacklisted.
Lloyd Kaufman
#88. It's impossible for a creative artist to be either a Puritan or a Fascist, because both are a negation of the creative urge. The only things a creative artist can be opposed to are ugliness and injustice.
Liam O'Flaherty
#89. Nothing seems to me more tragic than the pressures we put on artists to do what we think we'll like, and our refusal to prize what is most ornery and special about them.
Marcia B. Siegel
#90. If an artist wants to be original, he should not look to art for inspiration, for art seeks its model in life, not art - and only life is rich enough to simulate originality.
Anthony Marais
#91. The image of feeling created by artists, in every kind of art
plastic, musical, poetic, balletic
serves to hold the reality itself for our labile and volatile memory, as a touchstone to test the scope of our intellectual constructions.
Susanne Katherina Langer
#92. Back then: to be regarded as well-known, one had to be great. Today: to be regarded as great, one has to be well-known.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
#93. In the linchpin economy, the winners are once again the artists who give gifts. Giving a gift makes you indispensable. Inventing a gift, creating art - that is what the market seeks out, and the givers are the ones who earn our respect and attention.
Seth Godin
#94. Artists are people who are subject to irrational convictions of the sacred. Baudelaire said that an artist is a child who has acquired adult capacities and discipline. Art education should help build those capacities and that discipline without messing over the child.
Peter Schjeldahl
#95. He said, one has to learn that painting well - in the academic and technical sense - comes right at the bottom of the list. I mean, you've got that ability. So have thousands.
John Fowles
#96. On certain occasions art can shake very ordinary spirits, and whole worlds can be revealed by its clumsiest interpreters.
Gustave Flaubert
#97. Fantasy, abandoned by reason, produces impossible monsters; united with it, she is the mother of the arts and the origin of marvels.
Francisco De Goya
#98. As the art world changes, artists have more and more responsibility. You don't have a lot of luxury to be super secluded.
Frances Stark
#99. For artists it's a lot easier to make art in bad times than it is in good times. When you've got no money it's easy to just drink your way through it and make great art. But if you're making lots of money it can be very problematic.
Damien Hirst
#100. Early in this century a group of passionate artists in Russia claimed that the essence of art was to make the familiar seem strange. Perhaps this is also one of the roles of the exotic, to alter and sharpen our perceptions.
SueEllen Campbell
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