Top 48 Paris Art Quotes
#1. New York is what Paris was in the twenties ... the center of the art world. And we want to be in the center. It's the greatest place on earth ... I've got a lot of friends here and I even brought my own cash.
John Lennon
#2. I have looked for the center of the art scene. I went to Paris as a student. I lived in Venice, California.
Eleanor Coppola
#3. The art galleries of Paris contain the finest collection of frames I ever saw.
Humphry Davy
#4. Far from being dominated by ideas from Paris and New York, Latin American artists were often the innovators. They were doing drip paintings in advance of Pollock, creating language art before the American conceptualists, and fashioning shaped canvases decades before Kelly or Stella.
Mari Carmen Ramirez
#5. I was in Paris last year, where there's a great appreciation of many different aspects of African culture and of black culture. The music ... the art ... whatever ... And I kind of went with that.
Lenny Kravitz
#6. The important thing about Paris is not so much that one sees exciting work, but one meets people who feel that art is worth living completely for. This whole atmosphere is very good for work.
John Olsen
#7. If you feel joy when you do something unselfish for him, and would just as soon do it in secret as openly, then that rings of the true metal
Susan Vreeland
#8. Every human activity, whether it be love, philosophy, art, or revolution, is carried on with a special intensity in Paris.
Rebecca West
#10. General sentiment, had a poll been taken, was that eventually the negative media would die down, Egypt's head of antiquities would return to Cairo, and St. Louis would enjoy her treasure. But treasures sometimes have a higher price than their acquisition cost.
Michele Bonnell
#11. As a result of World War II, European artists migrated to America, enlarging the scene and diminishing Paris as the center. America was beginning its dominance of the art world with the emergence of the Abstract Expressionists.
Arne Glimcher
#12. I'm doing the absolute opposite of giving myself away. As far as I'm concerned, I'll be completely visible. If the painting sells, I'll be in Paris, hanging on a wall. If anything, I'm being selfish. It's perfect; all the freedom of creation, with none of the fuss.
Jessie Burton
#13. Washington, D.C., has everything that Rome, Paris and London have in the way of great architecture - great power bases. Washington has obelisks and pyramids and underground tunnels and great art and a whole shadow world that we really don't see.
Dan Brown
#14. ... she was a pudding of immaturity and precocious wisdom that had not yet set into a stable mold.
Mark Zero
#15. That was the dream of Montparnasse: to live for the moments of the greatest intensity, to find in them a truthful inspiration, and to hell with all the rest.
Philip Sington
#16. Have you ever taken a good look at a public garbage can in Paris, a paving stone in Rio de Janeiro, or a doorway in Dublin? Trust me -- the man or woman responsible for making those utilitarian objects was creating art.
Shawn Coyne
#17. The whole of Paris is a vast university of Art, Literature and Music ... it is worth anyone's while to dally here for years. Paris is a seminar, a post-graduate course in everything.
James Thurber
#18. Paris with its multitude of art directions calls continuously to the deepest penetration and recognition of your inner essence. Only in this way it is possible to create work that refers the time span.
Bram Van Velde
#19. It was just too hard from my standpoint to apply myself properly for the lessons from art school and also work 6 hours a day at the Ben Paris restaurant in downtown Seattle. There was just no time to have a life.
Mike Royer
#20. How can you be kissing at a time like this? Have you no respect for the dead?
Mark Zero
#21. If you criticize what you're doing too early you'll never write the first line.
[Paris Review, interview with Jodi Daynard, The Art of Fiction No. 113, Winter II 1989]
Max Frisch
#22. I did exhibitions with the Surrealists (in Paris, in 1929) because their attitude revolted against 'art' and their attitude toward life itself was wise, as was Dada's.
Hans Arp
#23. I'd like to go back to Paris someday and visit the Lourve museum, get a good running start, and hurl myself at the wall.
Warren Zevon
#24. I regard the theater as the greatest of all art forms, the most immediate way in which a human being can share with another the sense of what it is to be a human being. This supremacy of the theater derives from the fact that it is always "now" on the stage.
Thornton Wilder
#25. I congratulate you on your success stealing the painting.
Mark Zero
#26. Paris is the only city in the world where starving to death is still considered an art.
Carlos Ruiz Zafon
#27. Never run upstairs when someone's chasing you. Don't try to quick-draw a man who already has his gun out. Never light a match in the dark in a strange building. Half of staying safe is just keeping your head and being prudent.
Mark Zero
#28. Paris and Fashion. Books and Art. What would one be ... without the other?
Peggy Kopman-Owens
#29. The sculptor, the painter the musician the dancer, or any artist, if he can first obtain celebrate in Paris, acquires very easily the esteem and eulogy of other countries.
Swami Vivekananda
#30. If you see the world as gloomily as I see it, the only thing to do is laugh or shoot yourself.
John Le Carre
#32. The scent of flowers is the glory of gardens and the scent of art is the glory of Paris!
Mehmet Murat Ildan
#33. (Jean) Fautrier's exhibition (in Paris 1945,fh) made an extremely strong impression on me. Art had never before appeared so fully realised in its pure state. The word 'art' had never before been so loaded with meaning for me.
Jean Dubuffet
#35. I never had the idea of moving to Paris and becoming something. I liked the idea of living in Paris because it seemed to have so many parts of life I really enjoyed. The people there seemed to prize literature and art, food and drinking, a more hedonistic way of living.
Rosecrans Baldwin
#36. When I was younger, I had no interest. But after I went to Paris to see the collections for the first time a few years ago, they made a huge impression on me. I realized that fashion is an art form, like acting or painting.
Camilla Belle
#37. The Cubist paintings in the Centre Pompidou in Paris were strange but amazing. The big fat magical cat said they made her eyes hurt.
Jim Shanahan
#38. ... my books are derived from city images, and the city of my dreams or nightmares is Mexico City. (The Art of Fiction, No. 68. The Paris Review, No. 82, Winter 1981.)
Carlos Fuentes
#39. Between 18 and 19 years old [in the 1950s] I came to Paris. I studied art. And that experience really did change my life. I was living hand to mouth. I walked everywhere. I thought, this city is incredible but you really have to experience it by walking it.
Robert Redford
#40. God manifests himself to us in the first degree through the life of the universe, and in the second degree through the thought of man. The second manifestation is not less holy than the first. The first is named Nature, the second is named Art.
Victor Hugo
#41. The French have a penchant for absolutism, for thinking that things are all one way or all another, which is why their politics are marked by a general inability to compromise and why they tend to hold their personal opinions until the bitter end, even after they have clearly lost an argument.
Mark Zero
#42. Ironically, even the fashion in New York or Paris or Milan or whatever, or music in Berlin, or art in, I don't know, Madrid - all these scenes come and go. Everything leads back to Hollywood.
Nicolas Winding Refn
#43. And I had just kissed my ex-girlfriend, who had cried, while my current girlfriend was in jail. So far, it had not been my best day.
Mark Zero
#44. Picasso created blank spaces through which an imagination could fly.
Peggy Kopman-Owens
#45. Since 2000, I've been based in Paris at the Musee d'Art Moderne de la Ville, curating the programme there. Internationally, it's a very open situation that goes beyond national boundaries; directors and curators move from one country to another, which has opened up the museum landscape.
Hans Ulrich Obrist
#46. When you're used to being in dangerous situations, you develop a sixth sense about your surroundings, about where possible enemies might be lurking, how many steps it will take to reach the next corner on a dead run, the best hiding places if bullets start to fly...
Mark Zero
#47. To my mind, a picture should be something pleasant, cheerful, and pretty, yes pretty! There are too many unpleasant things in life as it is without creating still more of them.
Pierre-Auguste Renoir
#48. I love New York City. The energy, the theatre, the art, the food, the people, the parks and streets. But I could say the same of London or Paris, too.
Pierce Brosnan
