Quotes on Art

In the 1960s when the recording studio suddenly really took off as a tool, it was the kids from art school who knew how to use it, not the kids from music school. Music students were all stuck in the notion of music as performance, ephemeral. Whereas for art students, music as painting? They knew how to do that.

It is my art. I am better at it than I ever was. And I will do it as long as I can. When you reach a certain age you can slough off what is unnecessary and concentrate on what is. And why not?

Politics is the art of the next best.

To injure an opponent is to injure yourself. To control aggression without inflicting injury is the Art of Peace.

If you think about the way we experience art, the paradigm is still Western European. If I go to the National Gallery, what am I going to see the most of? I'm not going to see a whole lot of black figures in pictures.

The slightest living thing answers a deeper need than all the works of man because it is transitory. It has an evanescence of life, or growth, or change: it passes, as we do, from one stage to another, from darkness to darkness, into a distance where we, too, vanish out of sight. A work of art is static; and its value and its weakness lie in being so: but the tuft of grass and the clouds above it belong to our own traveling brotherhood.

But I really resist categories – that naming is a closing down of meaning. Women's art, political art – those categorisations perpetuate a certain kind of marginality which I'm resistant to. But I absolutely define myself as a feminist.

An art whose medium is language will always show a high degree of critical creativeness, for speech is itself a critique of life: it names, it characterizes, it passes judgment, in that it creates.

There is not room for Death, Nor atom that his might could render void: Thou - Thou art Being and Breath, And what Thou art may never be destroyed.

The art of conversation lies in listening.

Our God, who art our winged self, it is thy will in us that willeth. _x000D_ It is thy desire in us that desireth. _x000D_ It is thy urge in us that would turn our nights, which are thine, into days which are thine also. _x000D_ We cannot ask thee for aught, for thou knowest our needs before they are born in us: _x000D_ Thou art our need; and in giving us more of thyself thou givest us all.

It is my dream to create an art which is filled with balance, purity and calmness, freed from a subject matter that is disconcerting or too attention-seeking. In my paintings, I wish to create a spiritual remedy, similar to a comfortable armchair which provides rest from physical expectation for the spiritually working, the businessman as well as the artist.

An architect is given a program, budget, place, and schedule. Sometimes the end product rises to art - or at least people call it that.

When they remain in garrison, soldiers are maintained with fear and punishment; when they are then led to war, with hope and reward.

To me this is the first principle of life, the foundational principle, and a lesson you can't learn at the feet of any wise man: Get up! The art of living is simply getting up after you've been knocked down.

I continue to write essays about art. The visual is always part of my work, and it gives me immense pleasure to make up the words of art and create them verbally rather than build them.

We will, of course, without hesitation use art to parody, ridicule, debunk, or criticize ideologies.

Fortunately or otherwise we live at a time when the average individual has to know several times as much in order to keep informed as he did only thirty or forty years ago. Being "educated" today requires not only more than a superficial knowledge of the arts and sciences, but a sense of inter-relationship such as is taught in few schools. Finally, being "educated" today, in terms of the larger needs, means preparation for world citizenship; in short, education for survival.

All married couples should learn the art of battle as they should learn the art of making love. Good battle is objective and honest - never vicious or cruel. Good battle is healthy and constructive, and brings to a marriage the principles of equal partnership.

I want to write poems that are natural, luminous, deep, spare. I dream of an art so transparent that you can look through and see the world.

Present wars impoverish the lords that win as much as those that lose.