Selected art quotes

1. Gertrude Stein, all courage and will, is a soldier of minimalism. Her work, unlike the resonating silences in the art of Samuel Beckett, embodies in its loquacity and verbosity the curious paradox of the minimalist form. This art of the nuance in repetition and placement she shares with the orchestral compositions of Philip Glass.

2. Whereas Freud was for the most part concerned with the morbid effects of unconscious repression, Jung was more interested in the manifestations of unconscious expression, first in the dream and eventually in all the more orderly products of religion and art and morals.

3. He was not of an age, but for all time.

4. 'Cage's Music of Changes was a further indication that the arts in general were beginning to consciously deal with the 'given' material and, to varying degrees, liberating them from the inherited, functional concepts of control.'

5. Irresponsibility is part of the pleasure of all art; it is the part the schools cannot recognize.

6. Everything will pass, and the world will perish, but the Ninth Symphony will remain.

7. Let me stop there, but my God, how beautiful Shakespeare is, who else is as mysterious as he is; his language and method are like a brush trembling with excitement and ecstasy. But one must learn to read, just as one must learn to see and learn to live.

8. A good picture is equivalent to a good deed.

9. Do not quench your inspiration and your imagination; do not become the slave of your model.

10. I can't change the fact that my paintings don't sell. But the time will come when people will recognize that they are worth more than the value of the paints used in the picture.

11. I can't work without a model. I won't say I turn my back on nature ruthlessly in order to turn a study into a picture, arranging the colors, enlarging and simplifying; but in the matter of form I am too afraid of departing from the possible and the true.

12. I consciously choose the dog's path through life. I shall be poor; I shall be a painter...

13. 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.

14. I feel that there is nothing more truly artistic than to love people.

15. In spite of everything I shall rise again: I will take up my pencil, which I have forsaken in my great discouragement, and I will go on with my drawing.

16. Keep your love of nature, for that is the true way to understand art more and more.

17. Of course my moods change, but the average is serenity. I have a firm faith in art, a firm confidence in its being a powerful stream which carries a man to a harbor, though he himself must do his bit too; at all events, I think it such a great blessing when a man has found his work that I cannot count myself among the unfortunate. I mean, I may be in certain relatively great difficulties, and there may be gloomy days in my life, but I shouldn't like to be counted among the unfortunate, nor would it be correct if I were.

18. One may have a blazing hearth in one's soul and yet no one ever came to sit by it. Passers-by see only a wisp of smoke from the chimney and continue on their way.

19. Paintings have a life of their own that derives from the painter's soul.

20. Poetry surrounds us everywhere, but putting it on paper is, alas, not so easy as looking at it.

21. The more I think about it, the more I realize there is nothing more artistic than to love others.

22. The more ugly, older, more cantankerous, more ill and poorer I become, the more I try to make amends by making my colours more vibrant, more balanced and beaming.

23. There is no blue without yellow and without orange.

24. What a splendid thing watercolour is to express atmosphere and distance, so that the figure is surrounded by air and can breathe in it.

25. When I have a terrible need of - shall I say the word - religion. Then I go out and paint the stars.

26. By working hard, old man, I hope to make something good one day. I haven't yet, but I am pursuing it and fighting for it.

27. How rich art is; if one can only remember what one has seen, one is never without food for thought or truly lonely, never alone.

28. It is not the language of painters but the language of nature which one should listen to. . . . The feeling for the things themselves, for reality, is more important than the feeling for pictures.

29. It is only too true that a lot of artists are mentally ill- it's a life which, to put it mildly, makes one an outsider. I'm all right when I completely immerse myself in work, but I'll always remain half crazy.

30. The only time I feel alive is when I'm painting.

31. What am I in the eyes of most people - a nonentity, an eccentric, or an unpleasant person - somebody who has no position in society and will never have; in short, the lowest of the low. All right, then - even if that were absolutely true, then I should one day like to show by my work what such an eccentric, such a nobody, has in his heart. That is my ambition, based less on resentment than on love in spite of everything, based more on a feeling of serenity than on passion. Though I am often in the depths of misery, there is still calmness, pure harmony and music inside me. I see paintings or drawings in the poorest cottages, in the dirtiest corners. And my mind is driven towards these things with an irresistible momentum.

32. Beauty, thou wild fantastic ape Who dost in every country change thy shape!

33. The cinema is a place of intrinsic indiscernibility between art and non-art.

34. Art attests to what is inhuman in man.

35. Our father the novelist; my husband the poet. He belongs to the ages - just don't catch him at breakfast. Artists, celebrated for their humanity, they turn out to be scarcely human at all.

36. I despise the comic industry, but I will always love the comic medium.

37. There is an inverse relationship between imagination and money.

38. We turn our backs on nature; we are ashamed of beauty. Our wretched tragedies have a smell of the office clinging to them, and the blood that trickles from them is the color of printer's ink.

39. Like great works, deep feelings always mean more than they are conscious of saying.

40. I am enough of an artist to draw freely upon my imagination. Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world.

41. A Sonnet is a moment's monument,- Memorial from the Soul's eternity To one dead deathless hour.

42. Put on your red shoes , and dance the blues.

43. In one gallery they actually had a notice which said 'No Sketching.' How obnoxious! I said, 'How do you think these things got on the walls if there was no sketching?'

44. We live in an age where the artist is forgotten. He is a researcher. I see myself that way.

45. In the end nobody knows how it's done - how art is made. It can't be explained. Optical devices are just tools. Understanding a tool doesn't explain the magic of creation. Nothing can.

46. Teaching people to draw is teaching people to look.

47. All art is contemporary, if it's alive. And if it's not alive, what's the point of it?

48. If you want to know what true art is, go outside on a clear night, wait until it gets very, very dark, then look up. You will see no rules of composition; no evidence of superior technique. Yet, you will be staring into the very face of pure, unadulterated beauty and wonder. That is the unattainable ideal for which I must constantly strive.

49. No matter how much utter disdain I have for the work of a particular artist, I would still rather that he had created those works than hadn't.

50. What can be considered human emotions? Surely not only lyricism, sadness, tragedy? Doesn't laughter also have a claim to that lofty title? I want to fight for the legitimate right of laughter in 'serious' music.

51. A great piece of music is beautiful regardless of how it is performed. Any prelude or fugue of Bach can be played at any tempo, with or without rhythmic nuances, and it will still be great music. That's how music should be written, so that no-one, no matter how philistine, can ruin it.

52. Music is a means capable of expressing dark dramatism and pure rapture, suffering and ecstasy, fiery and cold fury, melancholy and wild merriment - and the subtlest nuances and interplay of these feelings which words are powerless to express and which are unattainable in painting and sculpture.

53. I think it is clear to everyone what happens in the Fifth. The rejoicing is forced, created under threat, as in Boris Godunov. It's as if someone were beating you with a stick and saying, 'Your business is rejoicing, your business is rejoicing,' and you rise, shaky, and go marching off, muttering, 'Our business is rejoicing, our business is rejoicing.'

54. 'I always try to make myself as widely understood as possible; and if I don't succeed, I consider it my own fault.'

55. 'I write music, it's performed. After all, my music says it all. It doesn't need historical and hysterical commentaries. In the long run, any words about music are less important than the music.'

56. 'Football is the ballet of the masses.'

57. Many consider that Shostakovich is the greatest 20th-century composer. In his 15 symphonies, 15 quartets, and in other works he demonstrated mastery of the largest and most challenging forms with music of great emotional power and technical invention:All his works are marked by emotional extremes - tragic intensity, grotesque and bizarre wit, humour, parody, and savage sarcasm.

58. Humor can be dissected, as a frog can, but the thing dies in the process and the innards are discouraging to any but the pure scientific mind.

59. I'd rather learn from one bird how to sing than teach ten thousand stars how not to dance.

60. Every artist's strictly illimitable country is himself. An artist who plays that country false has committed suicide;and even a good lawyer cannot kill the dead. But a human being who's true to himself - whoever himself may be - is immortal;and all the atomic bombs of all the antiartists in spacetime will never civilize immortality.

61. Music, when combined with a pleasurable idea, is poetry; music without the idea is simply music; the idea without the music is prose from its very definitiveness.

62. With me poetry has been not a purpose, but a passion; and the passions should be held in reverence: they must not - they cannot at will be excited, with an eye to the paltry compensations, or the more paltry commendations, of mankind.

63. Were I called on to define, very briefly, the term 'Art,' I should call it 'the reproduction of what the Senses perceive in Nature through the veil of the soul.' The mere imitation, however accurate, of what is in Nature, entitles no man to the sacred name of 'Artist.'

64. A painting requires a little mystery, some vagueness, and some fantasy. When you always make your meaning perfectly plain you end up boring people.

65. The moods of sadness that come over anyone who takes up art... these dismal moods have very little compensation.

66. The present day composer refuses to die!

67. As for the usefulness of poetry, its uses are many. it is the deification of reality. It should make our days holy to us. The poet should speak to all men, for a moment, of that other life of theirs that they have smothered and forgotten.

68. Of writing many books there is no end; And I who have written much in prose and verse For others' uses, will write now for mine,- Will write my story for my better self, As when you paint your portrait for a friend, Who keeps it in a drawer and looks at it Long after he has ceased to love you, just To hold together what he was and is.

69. Writing is not 'the establishment of a professional reputation' as if one were a doctor or lawyer; it is not properly in the sentence with creation of a family and the purchase of a home.

70. 'Everybody gets a tag. If you listen to a Velvet Underground record, you don't think, 'Godfathers of Punk.' You just think, 'This sounds great.' The tags are there in order to help try to sell something by giving it a name that's going to stick in somebody's memory. But it doesn't describe it. So 'depressing' isn't a word I would use to describe my music. But there is some sadness in it -- there has to be, so that the happiness in it will matter.'

71. 'If you play acoustic guitar you're the depressed, sensitive guy.'

72. The impulse to think, to philosophize and spin beauty and brilliance out of mind and soul, is somehow the offspring of resistance - of an effort to overcome an apparently insurmountable obstacle. Hence cultural creativeness is more likely to flourish in an atmosphere of restriction, of an imposed pattern of thought and behavior, than in one of total freedom.

73. Delsarte tells me that Mozart stole outrageously from Galuppi, in the same way, I suppose, that Moliere stole from anybody anywhere, if he found something work taking. I said that what was Mozart had not been stolen from Galuppi, or from anyone else for that matter.

74. Art and work and art and life are very connected and my whole life has been absurd. There isn't a thing in my life that has happened that hasn't been extreme - personal health, family, economic situations...absurdity is the key word...

75. Art is the symbol of the two noblest human efforts: to construct and to refrain from destruction.

76. What the artist wishes to do - as far as you are concerned - is to take you out of yourself. As far as he is concerned, he wishes to express himself.

77. Fantasy, abandoned by reason, produces impossible monsters; united with it, she is the mother of the arts and the origin of marvels.

78. 'Form follows function' - that has been misunderstood. Form and function should be one, joined in a spiritual union.

79. I wouldn't mind seeing opera die. Ever since I was a boy, I regarded opera as a ponderous anachronism, almost the equivalent of smoking.

80. True ornament is not a matter of prettifying externals. It is organic with the structure it adorns, whether a person, a building, or a park. At its best it is an emphasis of structure, a realization in graceful terms of the nature of that which is ornamented.

81. I think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound and stab us. If the book we are reading doesn't wake us up with a blow on the head, what are we reading it for? ...we need the books that affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, like being banished into forests far from everyone, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea inside us.

82. Writing is a form of prayer.

83. But I do nothing that I don't like, such as 'inventing' up to the arty or 'down' to the corny. I happen to relish a certain type of corn. What I think is the really dangerous approach is the 'let's be artistic' attitude. I know that artistry just happens.

84. 'I'm just a musical prostitute, my dear!'

85. Appearance should never attain reality, And if nature conquers, then must art retire.

86. It is through beauty that we arrive at freedom.

87. As noble Art has survived noble nature, so too she marches ahead of it, fashioning and awakening by her inspiration. Before Truth sends her triumphant light into the depths of the heart, imagination catches its rays, and the peaks of humanity will be glowing when humid night still lingers in the valleys.

88. No doubt the artist is the child of his time; but woe to him if he is also its disciple, or even its favorite.

89. The Greeks put us to shame not only by their simplicity, which is foreign to our age; they are at the same time our rivals, nay, frequently our models, in those very points of superiority from which we seek comfort when regretting the unnatural character of our manners. We see that remarkable people uniting at once fullness of form and fullness of substance, both philosophising and creating, both tender and energetic, uniting a youthful fancy to the virility of reason in a glorious humanity.

90. Life is earnest, art is gay.

91. I speak with the Eternal through the instrument of nature, - through the world's history: I read the soul of the artist in his Apollo.

92. Aesthetic matters are fundamental for the harmonious development of both society and the individual.

93. Art is the right hand of Nature. The latter has only given us being, the former has made us men.

94. Truth exists for the wise, beauty for the feeling heart.

95. Poetry is one of the destinies of speech.... One would say that the poetic image, in its newness, opens a future to language.

96. Anybody who picks up a guitar and tells you that there's some inner message that they're trying to convey . . . it's nonsense. They're not being honest. The reason they're doing this is they wanna get lots of chicks and they don't want to work for a living.

97. The pleasures of the imagination are as it were only drawings and models which are played with by poor people who cannot afford the real thing.

98. If it is permissible to write plays that are not intended to be seen, I should like to see who can prevent me from writing a book no one can read.

99. The most perfect ape cannot draw an ape; only man can do that; but, likewise, only man regards the ability to do this as a sign of superiority.

100. 'The public want actresses, because they think all actresses bad. They don't want music or poetry because they know that both are good. So actors and actresses thrive and poets and composers starve.'