Quotes on Art

A lot of what making art is, is just being open, and empty. And putting yourself in the right place for things to, literally, come together.

People expect things from art that are horrible for us who make it! They put the things we make in these restrictive places called 'museums,' then don't want to hear another word from us.

You are just as qualified as any expert to make a judgment and have a feeling or a response to any work of art.

All art is unstable. Its meaning is not necessarily that implied by the author. There is no authoritative voice. There are only multiple readings.

I believe that all great art holds the power to dissolve things: time, distance, difference, injustice, alienation, despair. I believe that all great art holds the power to mend things: join, comfort, inspire hope in fellowship, reconcile us to our selves. Art is good for my soul precisely because it reminds me that we have souls in the first place.

Art can never exist without naked beauty displayed.

I realized that the longing for art, like the longing for love, is a malady that blinds us, and makes us forget the things we already know, obscuring reality.

The whole art of teaching is only the art of awakening the natural curiosity of young minds for the purpose of satisfying it afterwards.

It's forgiveness that makes us what we are. Without forgiveness, our species would've annihilated itself in endless retributions. Without forgiveness, there would be no history. Without that hope, there would be no art, for every work of art is in some way an act of forgiveness. Without that dream, there would be no love, for every act of love is in some way a promise to forgive. We live on because we can love, and we love because we can forgive.

There is no excellent beauty that hath not some strangeness in the proportion.

Creativity is an act of defiance.

An artist observes, selects, guesses, and synthesizes.

Life is, if anything, the art of combination. Of discrimination. Of freely picking one's own personal pattern out of a hundred choices. Not letting it be picked for you—either by the Establishment, or by the Rebels. Conformity of Hip is no better than Conformity of Square.

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.

In the big picture, architecture is the art and science of making sure that our cities and buildings fit with the way we want to live our lives.

Those who educate children well are more to be honored than they who produce them; for these only gave them life, those the art of living well.

It's a European art form, and you're used to seeing a certain type of person as a ballerina. And I don't look like a lot of the girls around me.

Anybody that creates anything is just creating new compositions of things that have existed before. We're all creating something, we're all creating our own personal works of art in ourselves.

I feel the need of attaining the maximum of intensity with the minimum of means. It is this which has led me to give my painting a character of even greater bareness.

Sometimes I think creativity is magic; it's not a matter of finding an idea, but allowing the idea to find you.

All creative art is magic, is evocation of the unseen in forms persuasive, enlightening, familiar and surprising.