Quotes About Books And Art

#1. I hate all that woozy political and psychotherapeutic crap applied to books and art.

Dave Hickey

#2. Paris and Fashion. Books and Art. What would one be ... without the other?

Peggy Kopman-Owens

#3. It may be true too that I would not have encountered the most important books and art and ideas of my life had I not chased down a Ph.D. I've thought about that a lot ... MAYBE I would have found the same books on my own, but I can't know for sure.

Lidia Yuknavitch

#4. I feel like all this stuff that we make: books and art and music, all of it. There's this energy that circles the world that wants to be made manifest, and it is just looking for someone to come through. And it's dying for you to make it. And if you don't do it, it will go find somebody else.

Elizabeth Gilbert

#5. Overall, books and art were a safer escape from reality than sleep.

Lisa Cach

#6. You are welcome to your intellectual pastimes and books and art and newspapers; welcome, too, to your bars and your whisky that only makes me ill. Here am I in the forest, quite content.

Knut Hamsun

#7. As a mother, I love the Leapster handheld because it really delivers on educating children while they play. My daughter enjoys it because it's fun and touches on all of the activities she is interested in - videos, books and art.

Marcia Gay Harden

#8. It's true that I had a bucolic, truly peaceful childhood, growing up in a house next to our family's orchard. We had a lot of books and art, but no electricity until I was eight years old. Since then, I have seen a lot of inner-city life, though.

Virginia Euwer Wolff

#9. I think the biggest thing - and this I think is true of songs but also of movies and books and art in general - is when you have this moment where you hear a song or whatever and you say, "Hey, I've felt that exact way as a human being," and there's no easy way to describe it.

Craig Finn

#10. If we expose kids to books and art, nothing but good can come from it.

Kevin Henkes

#11. I owe it all to art books, chocolate and young men.

Beatrice Wood

#12. Art was a way for me to express myself and for me to also escape because it was tough growing up as a child. We didn't have a lot of money. I was always creating. I was writing stories. I was doing comic books. I made my own universe.

Michelle Phan

#13. Three films a day, three books a week and records of great music would be enough to make me happy to the day I die.

Francois Truffaut

#14. Our existence has always and everywhere been tragic, but man has converted these numberless tragedies into works of art. I know of nothing more astonishing or more wonderful than this transformation.

Maxim Gorky

#15. We probably put about four or five comic books out a year and probably about two or three art books and various trade paperbacks - maybe four or five of those a year - and that's what we do now.

Glenn Danzig

#16. Gather knowledge ... Visit galleries, museums, art and craft fairs ... Read books and magazines. Take workshops. Use your senses. Experience stimulates your memory and imagination.

Nita Leland

#17. We live through books; we have adventures in them, we lead alternative lives through them. We expand our memories through them. And that sometimes art can offer us more intense experiences of the world than life itself can.

Anthony Doerr

#18. The art of injudicious reading, the art of miscellaneous reading which every normal man ought to cultivate, is a very fine and satisfactory art; for the best guide to books is a book itself. It clasps hands with a thousand other books.

Maurice Francis Egan

#19. the best of Cervantes is untranslatable, and this undeniable fact is in itself an incentive [for one and all] to learn Spanish.

Aubrey F.G. Bell

#20. Every book begins and ends with other people- the readers who suggest the book to us and encourage us to read it, the talented author who crafted each word, the fascinating individuals we meet inside the pages- and the readers we discuss and share the book with when we finish.

Donalyn Miller

#21. Creating art (music, books, films, etc.) can be beautiful and liberating, but trying to sell art, well, that is the movie business. There are few winners, and lots and lots of losers.

Ronnie Apteker

#22. Be true to yourself.
Make each day your masterpiece.
Help others.
Drink deeply from good books.
Make friendship a fine art.
Build a shelter against a rainy day.
Pray for guidance and give thanks for your blessings every day.

John Wooden

#23. 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

#24. I struggle to listen, to sit, and to study-
I would rather play and create art with my brushes and putty.

I wish I could focus on things that I know-
Like cars, Mars, and playing with dough.

Brenda Lochinger

#25. I long ago ran out of bookshelf space and so, like a museum with its art, simply rotate my books from the boxes to the shelves and back again.

Michael Dirda

#26. As for the common men apart, Who sweat to keep their common breath, And have no hour for books or art
What dreams have these to hide from death!

Lola Ridge

#27. A life without books is a thirsty life, and one without poetry is ... like a life without pictures.

Stephen King

#28. I don't want to sound pretentious, but I love art, I like to go to museums, and I like to read books.

Rainn Wilson

#29. I've done 80 books and if anyone has entertained the idea of owning one of my books, I think this is the book that covers all the bases. I'm very proud of it.

Art Wolfe

#30. I just love comic books. I've always loved comic book art, and I just think it's amazing.

Zayn Malik

#31. I have lots of passions - gardens, art, music and reading. I have eclectic taste and read a huge variety of books.

Zoe Wanamaker

#32. Most of the books that I've adapted I'm doing because I love the book and I feel like it's a great work of art in itself, and when it's a great book I feel as a director or a writer that I have a responsibility to rise to the level of the original. It makes me try to reach higher.

James Franco

#33. I like people who love books and movies and art and want to talk about it all the time, because that's basically what I want to talk about. Intellectuals that are funny.

Greta Gerwig

#34. Books and movies are different art forms with different rules. And because of that, they never translate exactly.

Tom Clancy

#35. I'm going to just sit down for a couple of weeks and do nothing but read who-dunnits and Art books. I feel my work is getting a bit dull and mechanical and this proposed resting should work up some enthusiasm in me.

E. J. Hughes

#36. Even in times when it's difficult to figure out, how do you go forward, art - and books - always help.

Alice Hoffman

#37. The secret of genius is to suffer no fiction to exist for us; to realize all that we know; in the high refinement of modern life,in arts, in sciences, in books, in men, to exact good faith, reality, and a purpose; and first, last, midst, and without end, to honor every truth by use.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

#38. Since the choice of what we curl up with is often crucial for our solace and sanity, we need to learn how to nurture the talent of selection. Book browsing is a meditative art ... Books are as essential as breathing.

Sarah Ban Breathnach

#39. I think jazz and comic books are probably the two uniquely American art forms.

Len Wein

#40. Because it's so easy to medicate our need for self-worth by pandering to win followers, 'likes' and view counts, social media have become the metier of choice for many people who might otherwise channel that energy into books, music or art - or even into their own Web ventures.

Neil Strauss

#41. I don't read a lot of inspirational books for life. But for writing, I think the two best books are The War of Art and William Zinsser's On Writing Well. I read a lot of classics;

Donald Miller

#42. We are liable to miss the best of life if we do not know how to tingle, if we do not learn to hoist ourselves just a little higher than we generally are in order to sample the rarest and ripest fruit of art which human thought has to offer.

Vladimir Nabokov

#43. Books should be like magical jewelled boxes. It's the writer's job to tell the story. My job [the artist] is to make you want to pick up the box, and to peer inside.

Thomas Canty

#44. We are not immune to the lure of wonder and mystery and awe: we have music and art and literature, and find that the serious ethical dilemmas are better handled by Shakespeare and Tolstoy and Schiller and Dostoyevsky and George Eliot than in the mythical morality tales of the holy books.

Christopher Hitchens

#45. A paradox: The things you don't need to live - books, art, cinema, wine, and so on - are the things you need to live.

Matt Haig

#46. The audience for comics has shifted dramatically. And the boundaries between books and fine arts have blurred. Maybe it's the globalization of fine art through the Internet - it's easy for certain groups to coalesce around a certain kind of work or medium.

Shaun Tan

#47. I have hundreds of art books and the biographies of artists I love, such as Thomas Eakins and Edgar Degas.

Jamie Wyeth

#48. Reader, if thou intendest to go any farther, I would entreat thee to stay here a little. If thou art, as many in this pretending age, a sign or title gazer, and comest into books as Cato into the theatre, to go out again, - thou hast had thy entertainment; farewell!

John Owen

#49. I live making comics. Comics is an industrial art but less suffering, because comics are for young people who are more adventurous. I do that. I live off comics, and then I write books, but when you want movies, you cannot make movies without money.

Alejandro Jodorowsky

#50. Last year, [Pope Francis] was asked about his secret to happiness. He said slow down. Take time off. Live and let live. Don't proselytize. Work for peace. Work at a job that offers basic human dignity. Don't hold on to negative feelings. Move calmly through life. Enjoy art, books and playfulness.

Timothy Egan

#51. Books can ignite fires in your mind, because they carry ideas for kindling, and art for matches.

Gary D. Schmidt

#52. Dirty Freds ... I love this filthy old place. I love the dust and the dirt, the crappy old books and the objects of art.

Alan C. Martin

#53. I think that those of us who are what are called intellectuals make a terrible mistake in overvaluing the yen we have for the arts, books, etc. There is a sweet, fine quality in life that has nothing to do with this, and more and more I find myself valuing myself with those people.

Sherwood Anderson

#54. The art (as opposed to the technology) of reading requires that you develop a beautiful tolerance for incomprehension. The greatest books are the books that you come to understand more deeply with time, with age and with rereading.

Michael Silverblatt

#55. The meaning of culture is nothing less than the conduct of life itself, fortified, thickened, made more crafty and subtle, by contact with books and with art.

John Cowper Powys

#56. As I read you I fell in love with the holes between your words and I loved you most on the days you could not love yourself.

Jenim Dibie

#57. I liked drawing and painting, because the only failure would be to listen to the doubters who wanted me to stop drawing and painting because 'you aren't going to make a living doing that.' I liked looking in art books at the work of painters.

Billy Childish

#58. Publishers are businesses and I don't blame them for that. If they didn't make money by publishing books, there wouldn't be any books.

Johnny Rich

#59. In England, there is a dividing line between artists and illustrators, who are thought inferior to painters. Well, that's absolute rubbish. Some of the most creative work is being done in children's books. In Japan, everything is art. They don't say painting is better than ceramics or dress design.

Brian Wildsmith

#60. Once upon a time, I thought faeries lived only in books, old folktales, and the past. That was before they burst upon my life as vibrant, luminous beings, permeating my art and my everyday existence, causing glorious havoc.

Brian Froud

#61. Compared with my brother, I always felt like Richard III, some clever humpbacked thing who surpassed him in the end. He was the one who read books, but I became the writer. He painted and drew, but I was the one who got accepted by the High School of Music and Art.

Jerome Charyn

#62. My favorite books, art pieces, films, and music, always have something jarring about them.

Pink

#63. I have tons of art books. I have them all over the place. They are in my car, in my bag, and in my studio. There are books around me all the time.

Barry McGee

#64. The clerisy are those who seek, and find, delight and enlargement of life in books. The clerisy are those for whom reading is a personal art.

Robertson Davies

#65. The shaping of taste is essentially the science of merchandising, whether of detergents or cars or books or objects of fine and decorative art.

Russell Lynes

#66. The subject may be crude and repulsive. Its expression is artistically modulated and balanced. This is style. This is art. This is the only thing that really matters in books.

Vladimir Nabokov

#67. In art school, I started to see Pettibon in magazines, and I figured it out backward. I was into the idea that someone could show work in galleries while making album covers and photocopied books.

Michael Dumontier

#68. And I know I'm supposed to feel guilty for wanting people to buy my books ... and books in general? Novels and poetry, they belong to the realm of art. How dirty of us to try to hawk art! But, after a decade of hand-wringing and apologies, I can't quite muster the guilt anymore.

Julianna Baggott

#69. Each one seems to be, in some way, essentially different from the others, and each is a surprise to me. I think that making books, or any kind of art, might also be like mining. The artist digs into his or her life and imagination and never knows what they'll find. That's the adventure.

Mordicai Gerstein

#70. I read whenever possible, and I buy books all the time, sometimes online, but mostly from bookshops. I love literature. If you want to understand art, it's important to understand what is also happening in literature, in music, in science, in architecture.

Hans Ulrich Obrist

#71. Art is amoral; so is life. For me there are no obscene pictures or books; there are only poorly conceived and poorly executed ones.

Irving Stone

#72. I'm a big illustration and comic book fan. In my eyes, comic books and illustration are the same kind of art forms.

Mika.

#73. ... 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

#74. As a kid, I used to go to the library and take out all the art books.

Cheech Marin

#75. The commentator may be excused for repeating what he has stressed in his own books and lectures, namely that "offensive" is frequently but a synonym for "unusual;" and a great work of art is of course always original, and thus by its very nature should come more or less as a shocking surprise.

Vladimir Nabokov

#76. Well, every art requires appreciation, doesn't it? I mean people who paint, sculpt, or write books want an audience. that's the reason they're doing it for, and it's the same when you're a cook. You need somebody who savours it, not one who just says, 'Oh it's not bad.

Margaret Powell

#77. Homer begged and Rembrandt went bankrupt. Aristotle, who had money for books, his school, and his museum, could not have bought this painting of himself.
Rembrandt could not afford a Rembrandt.

Joseph Heller

#78. But this graveyard of dead books doesn't unnerve me. It reminds me that I had a deeper motive, one that only the approach of old age and death has unlocked. I wrote to answer questions I had - the motive of all art, whatever its ostensible subject. There were things I urgently needed to know.

James Atlas

#79. My mother is an artist, and I have a strong visual sense. I almost always choose the cover art for my books. I've learned that the more I collaborate, like by having someone do a soundtrack to one of my books, the more I see my own work differently.

Jeff VanderMeer

#80. He wondered what percentage of the world's art was actually kept in bank vaults and the like. Like unread books and unplayed music, did it matter that art went unseen?

Ian Rankin

#81. I'm a contemporary artist and I show in art galleries and museums. I show a number of photographs and films, but I also make television programs, books and some appetizing, all with the same concept.

Alison Jackson

#82. It takes more courage to disturb the neighborhood than it takes to disturb the universe. And the price is often higher.

E.L. Konigsburg

#83. Books to judicious compilers, are useful; to particular arts and professions, they are absolutely necessary; to men of real science, they are tools: but more are tools to them.

Samuel Johnson

#84. The problem of knowledge is that there are many more books on birds written by ornithologists than books on birds written by birds and books on ornithologists written by birds

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

#85. I live to play music, and hang out with my wife and kid, and hang out with my friends, and discover the world. Read books, watch movies, see art, see the world, meet new people.

Mark Hoppus

#86. Every year, humanity produces some 30,000 films, 2 million books and 100,000 albums, and 95 million people visit a museum or art gallery.

Alain De Botton

#87. There's been million-seller books and million-seller CDs. But there hasn't been, until now, million-seller art.

Thomas Kinkade

#88. If I can avoid doing freelance work, I prefer to. Not just because it takes me away from drawing comics, but also because it's just annoying having to deal with art editors, and having to read people's articles or books or whatever.

Chester Brown

#89. In spite the mountains of books written about art, no precise definition of art has been constructed. And the reason for this is that the conception of art has been based on the conception of beauty.

Leo Tolstoy

#90. I wasn't an academic looking in books for ideas. But I educated myself about historical work that was similar to mine, to provide a frame of reference that wasn't the usual frame of reference of the New York art world and Europe.

Michael Heizer

#91. I just see in pop culture, music, visual art, books, etc., a real hunger for the new and different, and I think that's amazing. Satisfying this hunger is part of the responsibility of a creative person.

Porochista Khakpour

#92. And yet, in terms of its emotive potential, I still find art more attractive, currently, than books, which fail at a deeper level.

Andrew Miller

#93. Nothing, it appears to me, is of greater value in a man than the power of judgment; and the man who has it may be compared to a chest filled with books, for he is the son of nature and the father of art.

Pietro Aretino

#94. We are creatures made as much by art as by experience and what we read in books is the sum of both.

Andy Miller

#95. Things that bring out your emotions are what should be in theaters and in books. That's what art is. It makes you feel things.

Dominique Swain

#96. I still feel childlike. Not childish - there's a difference. But to be childlike is to be savoured and treasured. I offer my books to those who like the things of childhood; the challenges, intrigue, joy and fun.

Graeme Base

#97. Sinclair Lewis may be ripe for a revival; his books raise several interesting issues of art and fashion.

Jane Smiley

#98. Women's books are kind of discriminated against. If a man writes a book about his family stories, people think of it as literature. If it's a woman, she's 'spilling her guts,' and it's not art.

Erica Jong

#99. Every artist wants his work to be permanent. But what is? The Aswan Dam covered some of the greatest art in the world. Venice is sinking. Great books and pictures were lost in the Florence floods. In the meantime we still enjoy butterflies.

Romare Bearden

#100. I decided that I would do my best in the future not to write books just for money. If you didn't get the money then you didn't have anything. If I did the work I was proud of and I didn't get the money, at least I'd have the work.

Neil Gaiman