Paintings In Quotes

#1. He looked like those paintings of baby angels - what do you call them, hubbubs? No cherubs. That's it. He looked like a cherub who'd turned middle-aged in a trailer park.

Rick Riordan

#2. You will be remembered, in the long haul, for the quality of your work, not the quantity of your work. No one evaluates Picasso based on the number of paintings he churned out.

Tom Peters

#3. Only when the habit of one's consciousness to see in paintings bits of nature, madonnas and shameless nudes ... has disappeared, shall we see a pure painting composition.

Kazimir Malevich

#4. On the walls were a series of paintings depicting the Duke in various elaborate situations. The Duke on a battlefield, the Duke at hunt, the Duke overlooking his lands, the Duke on the shitter. I made up that last one.

Daniel Polansky

#5. What really interests me about capturing and suspending movement is that I get to experience something invisible and inaudible, as elusive and fleeting as thought itself, and give it form ... Maybe my paintings are all just little fragments of the Cosmic Dance suspended in time.

James Nares

#6. The only slight disconcertance being that in the middle of looking at a paintings [in the Museum of Modern Art] she always found herself desperately needing to take a pee. And grandmother's voice in her ear.
'My dear, if you really have to, only clean, very clean rest rooms will do.

J.P. Donleavy

#7. Sculpture is more divine, and more like Nature, That fashions all her works in high relief, And that is Sculpture. This vast ball, the Earth, Was moulded out of clay, and baked in fire; Men, women, and all animals that breathe Are statues, and not paintings.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

#8. I believe in reverencing anything in the life of man which has the testimony of the ages as being unexcelled, whether it be literature, paintings, poetry, tombs -- even a golf hole.

C.B. MacDonald

#9. The real change that paintings undergo is in the perceptions of the viewer.

Arthur Smith

#10. Some books had shiny pages that showed paintings of landscapes unlike anything Matty had ever seen, or of people costumed in odd ways, or of battles, and there were many quiet painted scenes of a woman holding a newborn child.

Lois Lowry

#11. In the paintings I was always interested in taking elements of space and the reality that we know and dissolving it into patterns.

Francesca DiMattio

#12. I experience a period of frightening clarity in those moments when nature is so beautiful. I am no longer sure of myself, and the paintings appear as in a dream.

Vincent Van Gogh

#13. I absorbed as many Impressionist paintings as I could, in Parisian museums and in many museums in the United States and in books, looking for clues to architecture, clothing, settings.

Susan Vreeland

#14. I am very invested in the physical activity and the decision-making that is involved with making paintings - nothing else is quite like it.

Stephen Beal

#15. I think the nice thing about showing work in New York is that other artists come to see it. When you show work in Switzerland or somewhere else, everywhere else seems to be the provinces in a certain way. You wonder what your paintings are doing on the walls and you wonder who's looking at them.

Julian Schnabel

#16. In my 20s, when I was a photojournalist in Beijing. I joined an underground art group and put on clandestine exhibitions of my paintings.

Ma Jian

#17. And I looked closer and it totally did say Latoya. But in my defense, it looked like "Labia" from a distance. Much like tacos. Or Georgia O'Keeffe paintings.

Jenny Lawson

#18. Mom and I often talked about the trip we'd someday take together to the 'city of eternal spring' where she was born. In Kunming, she said, the fruits are sweeter, the mountains look like Chinese paintings, and the weather is always perfect.

Tess Gerritsen

#19. WHEN I LOOK UP again, the paintings in my foyer, my Madonnas, bring a mirthless smile to my lips. The idealization of motherhood. All of them gazing at their infants, or staring inauspiciously down at me.

E.L. James

#20. Learn to trust yourself. That's very vital ... Just stand with yourself. Remember, in his lifetime, Van Gogh sold only two paintings. I personally sold even fewer.

Eric Idle

#21. Sometimes images may emerge from some chord in my subconscious, the way a dream might. Even in those paintings where an image unconsciously develops, a certain kind of experience is usually necessary in order to perceive it.

Robert Motherwell

#22. I hope I have made it clear that the work is about perfection as we are aware of it in our minds but that the paintings are very far from being perfect - completely removed in fact - even as we ourselves are.

Agnes Martin

#23. I've had phases where the compass point seems lost. It can happen for various reasons, among them, that you're trying to do something outside your skill set; your skills have to catch up with the things you see in your head. But it's important to make all of those paintings, even the failed ones.

Joe Bradley

#24. Think of Florence, Paris, London, New York. Nobody visiting them for the first time is a stranger because he's already visited them in paintings, novels, history books and films. But if a city hasn't been used by an artist, not even the inhabitants live there imaginatively.

Alasdair Gray

#25. One of her best paintings, Woman Enjoying a Quick Snack at Starbucks, is hanging in their dining room.

Meg Cabot

#26. The paintings of Francis Bacon to my eye are very beautiful. The paintings of Bosch or Goya are to my eye very beautiful. I've also stood in front of those same paintings with people who've said, 'let's get on to the Botticellis as soon as possible.' I have lingered, of course.

Clive Barker

#27. In your works, you have realized what I, albeit in uncertain form, have so greatly longed for in music. The independent progress through their own destinies, the independent life of the individual voices in your compositions is exactly what I am trying to find in my paintings.

Wassily Kandinsky

#28. I am planning a one-man art show of original Batman oil paintings that I will show in New York City.

Bob Kane

#29. Why not fall in love with an artist? Otherwise there are no letters, pictures, paintings and songs for you when you wake up.

Darnell Lamont Walker

#30. When she sings that song you're with that elderly couple in that pub in Deptford and the mundane becomes romantic and beautiful and I think that's probably the great thing about any sort of paintings or music or something, is just when nothing becomes everything

Jools Holland

#31. In every respect, fantasy is like doing abstract paintings.

Lance Henriksen

#32. All memories soften with age, and the good ones are also the most perishable ( ... ) conjured up till they faded to nothing. Like cave paintings by candlelight, she could only glimpse them now in the dark from the corner of her eye.

Ann-Marie MacDonald

#33. A critic in my house sees some paintings. Greatly perturbed, he asks for my drawings. My drawings? Never! They are my letters, my secrets.

Paul Gauguin

#34. Very few people have a natural feeling for painting, and so, of course, they naturally think that painting is an expression of the artist's mood. But it rarely is. Very often he may be in greatest despair and be painting his happiest paintings.

Francis Bacon

#35. Some people have recognized their friends in my paintings, but I'm not directly responsible for any hooking up as far as I know!

Sophie Blackall

#36. The old, sad art colors are gone. Now I paint bright colors. I paint paintings which are happy, where children are laughing and playing with animals. I paint paradise on Earth. I still paint sadness sometimes, but there is sadness in the world, too.

Margaret Keane

#37. Like in the paintings, there has to be moments that are completely right to be able to feel how wrong it is when the space gets flattened or the space collapses. It's the same with the technique in the sculptures: for some to feel really wrong, you have to have parts be really right.

Francesca DiMattio

#38. Since the tubes of paint used by the artist are manufactured and ready-made products, we must conclude that all the paintings in the world are 'ready-mades aided' and also works of assemblage.

Marcel Duchamp

#39. I love Christmas tree bulbs, and I started putting them in my paintings. You've got to plug this painting in, and it's got a rig in the back, so that each one can be replaced if it burns out.

David Lynch

#40. I've been a huge Psychedelic Furs fan for a long time. I love Butler's paintings, too. I like all their songs. I'll even crank 'Pretty in Pink,' I don't care.

Norman Reedus

#41. I believe in originality, primarily. However, it's important to know what there has been before to aim in that direction. Art history informs us. It informs our mind. I like to look at books, exhibitions, paintings, as a computer, subconsciously taking on information.

Philip Treacy

#42. There could be a hundred paintings in every one painting, depending on when you stop.

Peter Doig

#43. I realize that protest paintings are not exactly in vogue, but I've done many.

Robert Indiana

#44. Some men like to go in for polo, for example, and spend thousands of dollars on ponies. Some go nuts for paintings, and give half a million for a hunk of canvas in a fancy frame. But my passion is baseball.

Tom Yawkey

#45. Does any art have a practical value? People love to talk about how expensive a painting is. That's the only way we can talk about paintings in this century.

John Guare

#46. You have to love dancing to stick to it. It gives you nothing back, no manuscripts to store away, no paintings to show on walls and maybe hang in museums, no poems to be printed and sold, nothing but that single fleeting moment when you feel alive.

Merce Cunningham

#47. I continue to make paintings of people and their moments in our time because I am of that time. Out of that I hope to make pictures that are timeless.

Burton Silverman

#48. The Realists
HOPE that you may understand!
What can books of men that wive
In a dragon-guarded land,
Paintings of the dolphin-drawn
Sea-nymphs in their pearly waggons
Do, but awake a hope to live
That had gone
With the dragons?

W.B.Yeats

#49. Paintings exist in the present tense, yet somehow, because of how it's structured, it can move backwards through time as well.

Joe Bradley

#50. Flat, uninteresting parts of paintings are, in fact, a ruse to get the viewer to see what needs to be seen.

Robert Genn

#51. Artists hide their identities in the brushstrokes of their paintings, the verses in their cantos, and the sentences in their novels. The true face of an artist is never on his face and this is what he prefers. Others misunderstand this displaced melancholy with an absence of melancholy.

Bruce Crown

#52. When I was in the NFL, whenever I got cut from a team I would do paintings of the players, they would pay me $4,000 to $5,000 to do their painting of their family, and that's how I survived until another team picked me up.

Terry Crews

#53. Some say they see poetry in my paintings; I see only science.

Georges Seurat

#54. I have realised how exciting and easy it is to be a time traveller by looking at paintings and films and architecture and playing music or listening to it. I don't think you necessarily have to live in the present all the time.

Jools Holland

#55. My paintings are about light, about the way things look in their environment and especially about how things look painted. Form, colour and space are at the whim of reality, their discovery and organization is the assignment of the realist painter.

Ralph Goings

#56. What is bad painting? Picabia made some deliberately bad paintings, but they were by him, so great in a way.

Peter Doig

#57. In a sense, every work you do is a self-portrait because your paintings always reveal more about you than about your subject. Your experience of something, not the something itself, is the true underlying subject of every work you do.

Richard Schmid

#58. By painting colors and lines and forms seen in quickened mood I was seeking to make this mood vibrate as a phonograph does. This was the origin of the paintings in The Frieze of Life.

Edvard Munch

#59. I have tried to draw the human effigy (and all the other subjects dealt with in my paintings) in an immediate and effective way without any reference to the aesthetic.

Jean Dubuffet

#60. If you're a painter, it's simply taken for granted that you'll spend a lot of time in museums studying great paintings, but if you're a cartoonist, it used to be very hard to see an original cartoon drawing.

Bill Watterson

#61. If someone stands in front of one of my paintings and says, 'This is just a mess', the word 'just' is not so good, but 'mess' might be right. Why not a mess? If it makes you say, 'Wow, I've never seen anything like that', that's beautiful.

Albert Oehlen

#62. I never had any flesh and blood children, you know. Only words, and paintings, and images of light that flickered in the darkness, and were too soon over.

Neil Gaiman

#63. Sometimes I'll dream that I saw a show and then I'll wake up in the morning and realize that I didn't see the show, that it was my dream. And I just remember what the paintings look like in the dream and I think, "Oh, nobody painted those. I can do that."

Julian Schnabel

#64. I noticed that the large windows between the paintings [in the Musee d'Art Moderne] interested me more than the art exhibited. From then on, painting as I had known it was finished for me.

Ellsworth Kelly

#65. All my paintings are usually done in drawing form, very small. I make notations in drawings first, and then I make a collage for color. But drawing is always my notation.

Ellsworth Kelly

#66. An avalanche descends onto the city. A hurricane. Teacups drift off shelves. Paintings slip off nails. In another quarter second, the sirens are inaudible. Everything is inaudible. The roar becomes loud enough to separate membranes in the middle ear.

Anthony Doerr

#67. If you're a guest [at my $113 million house], you'll be able to call up on screens throughout the house almost any image you like - presidential portraits, reproductions of High Renaissance paintings, pictures of sunsets, airplanes, skiers in the Andes, a rare French stamp, the Beatles in 1965.

Bill Gates

#68. I like all paintings. I always look at the paintings, good or bad, in barbershops, furniture stores, provincial hotels. I'm like a drinker who needs wine. As long as it is wine, it doesn't matter which wine.

Pablo Picasso

#69. Like writing, paintings seem to hint at a topsy-turvy world in which, so to speak, time's arrow moves the other way.

Martin Amis

#70. The black person is the protagonist in most of my paintings. I realized that I didn't see many paintings with black people in them.

Jean-Michel Basquiat

#71. In Sparta , paintings have been taken out of certain walls by cutting through the bricks, then have been placed in wooden frames, and so brought to the Comitium to adorn the aedileship of [C. Visellius] Varro and [C. Licinius] Murena.

Marcus Vitruvius Pollio

#72. When Robert Benton was doing the movie 'In the Still of the Night,' I'd choreographed the auction scene and supplied the paintings and had a bit part - I was bidding against Meryl Streep.

Arne Glimcher

#73. Who cares? Kingdoms rise and fall. Just don't burn the paintings in the Louvre, that's all.

Anne Rice

#74. Novels are like paintings, specifically watercolors. Every stroke you put down you have to go with. Of course you can rewrite, but the original strokes are still there in the texture of the thing.

Joan Didion

#75. It is a matter mostly of having the time to spare from my finished paintings to put in on travelling and sketching out of doors.

E. J. Hughes

#76. I get letters from people about my work. The thing that pleases me most is that my work touches their feelings. In fact, they don't talk about the paintings. They end up telling me the story of their life or how their father died.

Andrew Wyeth

#77. I see the things and people and events in my daily world as an endless succession of paintings.

Richard Schmid

#78. I had always loved expressionist painting, like every European. In fact I admired it all the more because these were precisely the paintings despised by my father's generation.

Georg Baselitz

#79. The paintings to me are always canvas; sculpture has always been metal, though I have made sculpture in wood, also.

Ellsworth Kelly

#80. My Dad always told me that casting agencies are like artists picturing their paintings in their mind. They know what they want for a role and not to take it too seriously [if I dont get the part].

Miley Cyrus

#81. I don't think the meaning in my paintings comes from just using broken dishes.

Julian Schnabel

#82. A kid just couldn't see the difference. It was like being color-blind or something, or preferring Frazetta to all those blobby old paintings of haystacks and French people in rowboats.

Tim Powers

#83. I love Inuit art, and most anything you would find in a folk art museum, as well as children's art or children's book illustrators or illustrators in general - all the kinds of work that my paintings would draw comparisons to.

Neil Farber

#84. My paintings and comedy have a lot in common. They are both improvisations based on observation.

Jonathan Winters

#85. The air we see in the paintings of the old masters is never the air we breathe.

Edgar Degas

#86. Imagine if all those kings and dukes hadn't commissioned those crazy cathedrals, paintings and music ... we'd still be living in sticks and mud. Because none of those things made any economic sense. Human beings' capacity to 'waste time' is a miracle - but that's exactly what art is for.

Ha-Joon Chang

#87. Drawings are only a few lines on paper. Therefore it's easy to carry around in plastic bags. Drawings are cheaper than paintings. They don't pretend they'll last forever.

Marlene Dumas

#88. It's great, I guess, when your paintings are hanging up in a museum.

Banksy

#89. My skin is an art gallery right, with paintings and crucifixes hoping to save me from all the dangers in the music business

Nas

#90. When I get a script and do my work, and then show up on set and work, it's the same zone that I'm in when I'm in front of a canvas, or when I'm writing a story about one of my paintings, or when I'm playing music. Whatever I'm doing at any given time, it's the same exact zone.

Michael Marisi Ornstein

#91. In general, my paintings are multifocal. You can't call it unfocused space, but not being fixed to a single focus is very much of our time.

Bridget Riley

#92. I am a great lover of art, in many forms: paintings, objets, textiles. I don't have the talent for painting, but I have a very good sense of colour, a love of visual beauty.

Jacqueline Bisset

#93. It may be a cliche, but cliche or not, I fear the day when the only marsh harriers or peregrines I can look at are in paintings by Joseph Wolf or Bruno Liljefors - and no matter how beautiful those works may be, life is the great thing: life, life, life.

John Burnside

#94. Musical compositions, it should be remembered, do not inhabit certain countries, certain museums, like paintings and statues. The Mozart Quintet is not shut up in Salzburg: I have it in my pocket.

Henri Rabaud

#95. My lovely wife Janet has been in a few paintings. She is basically a reserved woman who has never sought the limelight. She has always been there throughout my career and continues to be at my side.

LeRoy Neiman

#96. You think my paintings are calm, like windows in some cathedral? You should look again. I'm the most violent of all the American painters. Behind those colours there hides the final cataclysm.

Mark Rothko

#97. In my house on the ceilings I have paintings of the rooms above ... so I never have to go upstairs.

Steven Wright

#98. Music enriches people's lives in the same way paintings and literature do. Everybody deserves that.

Victoria Wood

#99. My great-grandfather, Sam Aykroyd, was a dentist in Kingston, Ontario, and he was also an Edwardian spiritualist researcher who was very interested in what was going on in the invisible world, the survival of the consciousness, precipitated paintings, mediumship, and trans-channeling.

Dan Aykroyd

#100. I can't tell a story in the white man's language, so I say what I want to say with my paintings.

Allen Sapp