Quotes on Art

A work of art is one through which the consciousness of the artist is able to give its emotions to anyone who is prepared to receive them.

I'm enamored with the art world. Anytime you look at anything that's considered artistic, there's a commercial world around it: the ballet, opera, any kind of music. It can't exist without it.

The artist brain is the sensory brain: sight and sound, smell and taste, touch. These are the elements of magic, and magic is the elemental stuff of art. In filling the well, think magic. Think delight. Think fun. Do not think duty. Do not do what you should do-spiritual sit-ups like reading a dull but recommended critical text. Do what intrigues you, explore what interests you; think mystery, not mastery.

I believe entertainment can aspire to be art, and can become art, but if you set out to make art you're an idiot.

Journalism is not a precise science, it's a crude art

I can’t stand these damn shows on museum walls with neat little frames, where you look at the images as if they were pieces of art. I want them to be pieces of life!

Cinema is an art form that is designed to go across borders. And as a filmmaker, the only way I can direct a movie is when I feel close to my culture.

In my view, art and the approach to life through art, using it as a vehicle for education and even for doing science is so vital that it is part of a great new revolution that is taking place. I believe we are entering a whole new epoch.

Without imagination we can go nowhere. And imagination is not restricted to the arts. Every scientist I have met who has been a success has had to imagine.

The condition every art requires is, not so much freedom from restriction, as freedom from adulteration and from the intrusion of foreign matter.

There is one plain rule of life. Try thyself unweariedly till thou findest the highest thing thou art capable of doing, faculties and outward circumstances being both duly considered, and then do it.

I think art is a healing force, and if we give in to the joy that can be found in art, then we are able to sustain ourselves in spite of ourselves.

I've been very fortunateit's just been an amazing piece of luck. I haven't had to suffer for my art but I've suffered enough inside to hopefully be called an artist.

Imagination is an almost divine faculty which, without recourse to any philosophical method, immediately perceives everything: the secret and intimate connections between things, correspondences and analogies.

Some people become cops because they want to make the world a better place. Some people become vandals because they want to make the world a better looking place.

What we want from art is whatever is missing from the lives we are already living and making. Something is always missing, and so art-making is endless.

Art is our defense against hysteria and death.

The best art is realized when you can share the experience of making of it and not just the presentation of it, so that the audience is part of the creation and not just part of the consumption. Then it becomes much more full-bodied and robust.

Creativity is more about taking the facts, fictions, and feelings we store away and finding new ways to connect them. What we're talking about here is metaphor. Metaphor is the lifeblood of all art, if it is not art itself. Metaphor is our vocabulary for connecting what we are experiencing now with what we have experienced before. It's not only how we express what we remember , it's how we interpret it - for ourselves and others.

Art is not like other culture because its success is not made by its audience. The public fill concert halls and cinemas every day, we read novels by the millions, and buy records by the billions. 'We the people' affect the making and quality of most of our culture, but not our art.

When you are a Bear of Very Little Brain, and you Think of Things, you find sometimes that a Thing which seemed very Thingish inside you is quite different when it gets out into the open and has other people looking at it.