Quotes on Art

I've decided that art is a habit-forming drug. That's all it is, for the artist, for the collector, for anybody connected with it.

If I were only allowed to read or enjoy art or listen to music made by people whose opinions and beliefs were the same as mine, I think the world would be a pretty dismal sort of a place.

Back then, I didn't have a big organization around me. I was just a kid with a guitar, traveling around. My responsibility basically was to the art, and I had extra time on my hands. There is no extra time now. There isn't enough time.

Nature does not create works of art. It is we, and the faculty of interpretation peculiar to the human mind, that see art.

A lot of country music is sad. I think most art comes out of poverty and hard times. It applies to music. Three chords and the truth - that’s what a country song is. There is a lot of heartache in the world.

I hope martial artists are more interested in the root of martial arts and not the different decorative branches, flowers or leaves.

The aim of art is to project an inner vision into the world, to state in aesthetic creation the deepest psychic and personal experiences of a human being. It is to enable those experiences to be intelligible and generally recognized within the total framework of an ideal world.

Unfortunately, now in boxing people are only allowed to punch. In Judo, people are only allowed to throw. I do not despise these kinds of martial arts. What I mean is, we now find rigid forms which create differences among clans, and the world of martial art is shattered as a result.

Before I studied the art, a punch to me was just like a punch, a kick just like a kick. After I learned the art, a punch was no longer a punch, a kick no longer a kick. Now that I've understood the art, a punch is just like a punch, a kick just like a kick. The height of cultivation is really nothing special. It is merely simplicity; the ability to express the utmost with the minimum.

Martial arts, like any art, is an unrestricted athletic expression of an individual soul.

Only in men's imagination does every truth find an effective and undeniable existence. Imagination, not invention, is the supreme master of art as of life.

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.

This is what the real, no bullshit value of your liberal arts education is supposed to be about: how to keep from going through your comfortable, prosperous, respectable adult life dead, unconscious, a slave to your head and to your natural default setting of being uniquely, completely, imperially alone day in and day out.

Acting: An art which consists of keeping the audience from coughing.

Literature is the art of writing something that will be read twice; journalism what will be grasped at once.

The artist one day falls through a hole in the brambles, and from that moment he is following the dark rapids of an underground river which may sometimes flow so near to the surface that the laughing picnic parties are heard above.

I have not collected art. Art collected me. I never found paintings. They found me. I have never even owned a work of art. They owned me.

But what does interest me is the notion that if you do a lot of work it means there's a potential for other people to understand that a lot of things are possible with a sustained effort and that the broadening of experiences is possible and I think that's all art can be.

I always try to balance the light with the heavy - a few tears of human spirit in with the sequins and the fringes.

It is necessary to keep one's compass in one's eyes and not in the hand, for the hands execute, but the eye judges.

Good painting is the kind that looks like sculpture.