Explore Quotes on Art

Of all the arts, abstract painting is the most difficult. It demands that you know how to draw well, that you have a heightened sensitivity for composition and for colors, and that you be a true poet. This last is essential.

Each period of a civilisation creates an art that is specific in it and which we will never see reborn. To try and revive the principles of art of past centuries can lead only to the production of stillborn works.

My art is about paying attention - about the extremely dangerous possibility that you might be art.

Painting relates to both art and life. Neither can be made - I try to act in the gap.

You begin with the possibilities of the material.

I want to make exalted art. A successful image has pictorial lift. I am looking for whatever is up there

All art is a memory of age-old things, dark things, whose fragments live on in the artist.

Making art is complicated because the categories are always changing. You just have to make your own art, and whatever categories it falls into will come later.

The more horrible this world (as today, for instance), the more abstract our art, whereas a happy world brings forth an art of the here and now.

I like real art. It's difficult to define 'real' but it is the best word for describing what I like to get out of art and what the best art has. It has the ability to convince you that it's present - that it's there. You could say it's authentic... but real is actually a better word, broad as it may be.

The art of tomorrow will be a collective treasure, or it will not be art at all.

Being creative is not so much the desire to do something as the listening to that which wants to be done: the dictation of the materials.

Or art thou but / A dagger of the mind, a false creation, / Proceeding from the heat-oppressed brain?

Where in the wide history of the world do we find art created by the excessively wealthy, powerful, or educated?

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?

I think the job of the artist is to remind people of what they have chosen to forget.

A playwright... is... the litmus paper of the arts. He's got to be, because if he isn't working on the same wave length as the audience, no one would know what in hell he was talking about.

To be an artist is to fail, as no other dare fail, that failure is his world and the shrink from desertion, art and craft, good housekeeping, living.

Art is a microscope which the artist fixes on the secrets of his soul, and shows to people these secrets which are common to all.

Great works of art are only great because they are accessible and comprehensible to everyone.

Art lifts man from his personal life into the universal life.