Art Quotes

Writers want to summarize: What does this mean? What did we learn from this? That's a very 19th-century way of thinking about art, because it assumes that it should make our lives better or teach us something.

Every art and every inquiry, and similarly every action and choice, is thought to aim at some good; and for this reason the good has rightly been declared to be that at which all things aim.

Science and art, or by the same token, poetry and prose differ from one another like a journey and an excursion. The purpose of the journey is its goal, the purpose of an excursion is the process.

Art is about the edges and the sharp corners and those places are not conducive to activism, which is about putting on a gloss.

I made it about a three-day weekend so people wouldn't have to change their clothes a lot. We didn't have an art department; we didn't have a make-up department.

One of the most amazing things about mathematics is the people who do math aren't usually interested in application, because mathematics itself is truly a beautiful art form. It's structures and patterns, and that's what we love, and that's what we get off on.

Reason clears and plants the wilderness of the imagination to harvest the wheat of art.

Art is something that opens up and enhances your emotions and that's what I like to think I'm doing.

Today's cinema is a global art form, it is impossible to make movies for a market the size of France, representing no more than 4% of the world's total.

Art may imitate life, but life imitates TV.

Drawing is like making an expressive gesture with the advantage of permanence.

The mediator of the inexpressible is the work of art.

The leader must aim high, see big, judge widely, thus setting himself apart form the ordinary people who debate in narrow confines.

The only line that's wrong in Shakespeare is 'holding a mirror up to nature.' You hold a magnifying glass up to nature. As an actor you just enlarge it enough so that your audience can identify with the situation. If it were a mirror, we would have no art.

I'm glad I made a piece of art that can be interpreted so widely. Art is always interpreted subjectively.

The problem is that once the rules of art are debunked, and once the unpleasant realities the irony diagnoses are revealed and diagnosed, "then" what do we do?

I grew up in an artists' community in New York, in a building that was government-subsidised for artists. No one made any money, but they made art for the sake of art.

A man is a poet if difficulties inherent in his art provide him with ideas; he is not a poet if they deprive him of ideas.

People discuss my art and pretend to understand as if it were necessary to understand, when it's simply necessary to love.

I thought art was a verb, rather than a noun.

Without art, the crudeness of reality would make the world unbearable.

But, when I had this feeling and started painting sacred art, as I had this feeling to do, then it come to me: my problem is I'll get a lot of criticism and another problem is my work's not good enough to sell.

The fact is that even art is subject to fashion.

Now, to describe the process of the Wrapped Reichstag, which went from 1971 to '95, there is an entire book about that, because each one of our projects has its own book. The book is not an art book, meaning it's not written by an art historian.

Parents are usually more careful to bestow knowledge on their children rather than virtue, the art of speaking well rather than doing well; but their manners should be of the greatest concern.

Personality is everything in art and poetry.

We have no other means of recognising a work of art than our feeling for it.

The House of Commons is a great unwieldy body, which requires great Art and some Cordials to keep it loyal.

There's a lot of thought in art. People get to talk about important things. There's a lot of sex, you know, in art. There's a lot of naked women and men, and there's intrigue, there's fakery. It's a real microcosm of the larger world.

It is the addition of strangeness to beauty that constitutes the romantic character in art.