Quotes on Art

When the common soldiers are too strong and their officers too weak, the result is insubordination. When the officers are too strong and the common soldiers too weak, the result is collapse.

When I say to the Moment flying; 'Linger a while -- thou art so fair!' Then bind me in thy bonds undying, And my final ruin I will bear!

The ambition of superior sensibility and superior eloquence disposes the lovers of arts to receive rapture at one time, and communicate it at another; and each labors first to impose upon himself and then to propagate the imposture.

As artists, we belong to an ancient and holy tribe. We are the carriers of the truth that spirit moves through us all. When we deal with one another, we are dealing not merely with our own human personalities but also with the unseen but ever-present throng of ideas, visions, stories, poems, songs, sculptures, art-as-facts that crowd the temple of consciousness waiting their turn to be born.

I don’t believe in “laying to rest” the past. There are wounds we won’t get over. There are things that happen to us that, no matter how hard we try to forget, no matter with what fortitude we face them, what mix of religion and therapy we swallow, what finished and durable forms of art we turn them into, are going to go on happening inside of us for as long as our brains are alive.

The Jiu Jitsu I created was designed to give the weak ones a chance to face the heavy and strong.

I can't tell you how many doctors try to sell me a facelift. I've even gone as far as having someone talk me into it, but when I went over and looked at pictures of myself, I thought 'What are they going to lift?' . . Frankly, I think that in the art of aging well there's this sexuality to having those imperfections. It's sensual.

After all perhaps the greatness of art lies in the perpetual tension between beauty and pain, the love of men and the madness of creation, unbearable solitude and the exhausting crowd, rejection and consent.

I was six when my mother taught me the art of invisible strength..."strongest wind cannot be seen."

In art and dream may you proceed with abandon. In life may you proceed with balance and stealth.

It is comforting that travel should have an architecture, and that it is possible to contribute a few stones to it, although the traveller is less like one who constructs landscapes -- for that is a sedentary task -- than like one who destroys them. . . . But even destruction is a form of architecture, a deconstruction that follows certain rules and calculations, an art of disassembling and reassembling, or of creating another and different order.

Art has always had as its test in the long term the ability to speak to our innermost selves.

Intelligence without ambition is a bird without wings.

To be creative, a person has to internalize the entire system that makes creativity possible. Creative individuals are remarkable for their ability to adapt to almost any situation and to make do with whatever is at hand to reach their goals.

Ah, well, do I wish that we lived in a world where gender didn't figure so prominently? Of course. Do I even think about myself as a woman when I go to make art? Of course not.

The production of a work of art is determined by the material and intellectual climate in which a man lives and dies.

It is a skill we learn early, the art of inventing stories to explain away the fearful scared strangeness of the world. Storytelling and make-believe, like war and agriculture, are among the arts of self-defense, and all of them are ways of enclosing otherness and claiming ownership.

No degree of knowledge attainable by man is able to set him above the want of hourly assistance, or to extinguish the desire of fond endearments and tender officiousness; and, therefore, no one should think it unnecessary to learn those arts by which friendship may be gained.

To poison a nation, poison its stories. A demoralised nation tells demoralised stories to itself. Beware of the storytellers who are not fully conscious of the importance of their gifts, and who are irresponsible in the application of their art: they

An art thief is a man who takes pictures.

Literature is the most agreeable way of ignoring life.