The only honest art
form is laughter, comedy. You can't fake it . . . try
to fake three laughs in an hour — ha ha ha ha ha — they'll take you away, man. You can't.
— Lenny Bruce
A lot of pop music is about stealing pocket money from
children.
— Ian Anderson (British rock musician)
Being good in business is the most fascinating kind of
art
. . . Making money is art and working is art and good business is the best art.
— Andy Warhol
Great art is never produced for its own sake. It is too difficult to be worth the effort.
— George Bernard Shaw
There's no retirement for an artist, it's your way of
living so there's no end to it.
— Henry Moore
Great art is the contempt of a great man for small art.
— F. Scott Fitzgerald
It’s rare that you see an artist in his 30s or 40s able to really
contribute something amazing.
— Steve Jobs in Playboy
interview
The moment you think you understand a great work of art, it's dead for you.
— Robert Wilson
It is very good
adviceto believe only what an artist does, rather than
what he says about his work.
— David Hockney
It is the eye of ignorance that assigns a fixed and unchangeable color to every object; beware of this
stumbling block.
— Paul Gauguin
People sometimes inquire what form of government is most suitable for an
artist to live under. To this question there is only one answer. The form of government that is most
suitable to the artist is no government at all.
— Oscar
Wilde
A painter can hang his pictures, but a writer can only hang
himself.
— Edward Dahlberg
Artists can color the sky red because they know it's blue. Those of us who aren't
artists must color things the way they really are or people might think we're stupid.
— Jules Feiffer
Art is what we call . . . the thing an artist does.
It's not the medium or the oil or the price or whether it hangs on a wall or you eat it. What matters, what
makes it art, is that the person who made it overcame the resistance, ignored the voice of doubt and made
something worth making. Something risky. Something human.
Art is not in the eye of the beholder. It's in the soul of the artist.
— Seth Godin
The artist is a member of the leisured classes who cannot pay for his
leisure.
— Cyril Connolly
Art teaches nothing, except the significance of life.
— Michael Korda
All profoundly original art looks ugly at first.
— Clement Greenberg
I can't tell you what art does and how it does it, but I know that often art has judged the judges,
pleaded revenge to the innocent and shown to the future what the past suffered, so that it has never been
forgotten. . . . Art, when it functions like this, becomes a meeting-place of the invisible, the
irreducible, the enduring, guts, and honour.
— John Berger
Art is the unceasing effort to compete with the beauty of flowers — and
never succeeding.
— Marc Chagall
Art is a jealous mistress, and, if a man have a genius for painting, poetry, music, architecture or
philosophy, he makes a bad husband and an ill provider.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson
Art! Who comprehends her? With whom can one consult concerning this great
goddess?
— Ludwig van Beethoven
All works of art are commissioned in the sense that no artist can create one by a simple act of will but
must wait until what he believes to be a good idea for a work "comes" to him.
— W. H. Auden
The rule in the art world is: you cater to the masses or you kowtow to the
elite; you can't have both.
— Ben Hecht
Nothing can be rushed. Things must grow, they must grow upward.
— Paul Klee
Why should I paint dead fish, onions and beer glasses? Girls are so much
prettier.
— Marie Laurencin, French Painter
You have to hang on in periods when your style isn't popular, because if it's good, it'll come back, and
you'll be a recognized beauty once again.
— Andy Warhol
When actors begin to think, it's time for a change. They are not fitted
for it.
— Stephen Leacock
An artist needn't be a clergyman or a churchwarden, but he certainly must
have a warm heart for his fellow men.
— Vincent Van Gogh
Van Gogh became a painter because he had no ear for music.
— Nikki Harris
Nobody can count themselves an artist unless they can carry a picture in their head before they paint
it.
— Claude Monet
Art is a collaboration between God and the artist, and the less the artist
does the better.
— Andre Gide
It is a good idea, particularly when you are doing the eyes, to get the sitter to look at you. In this
way the portrait will look in every direction and at everyone who looks at it. This is something much
praised by those who do not understand how it is done.
— Antoinio Palomiono Y Velasco
The artist doesn't have time to listen to the critics. The ones who want
to be writers read the reviews, the ones who want to write don't have the time to read reviews.
— William Faulkner
Michelangelo was a pornographer.
— Camille Paglia
When I did my self-portrait, I left all the pimples out because you always should. Pimples are a
temporary condition and they don't have anything to do with what you really look like. Always omit the
blemishes — they're not part of the good picture you want.
— Andy Warhol
It is a mistake for a sculptor or a painter to speak or write very often
about his job. It releases tension needed for his work.
— Henry Moore
Whoever wishes to devote himself to painting should begin by cutting out his own tongue.
— Henri Matisse
The first prerogative of an artist in any medium is to make a fool of
himself.
— Pauline Kael
There is only one difference between a madman and me. I am not mad.
— Salvador Dali
We all know that Art is not truth. Art is a lie that makes us realize
truth, at least the truth that is given us to understand.
— Pablo Picasso
You study, you learn, but you guard the original naivete. It has to be within you, as desire for drink
is within the drunkard or love is within the lover.
— Henri Matisse
Art is an absolute mistress; she will not be coquetted with or slighted;
she requires the most entire self-devotion, and she repays with grand triumphs.
— Charlotte Cushman
Bob [Rauschenberg] knocked on the door to my studio one day, and brought in a painting he had just
finished. It was a new one in the black series. I think he felt my reaction to it was not sufficiently
enthusiastic. I had been very enthusiastic about his work, and he may have felt I was disappointed. In any
case, I suddenly realized that he was terribly upset, close to tears. Well, I gave him a good talking-to
about that. I told him he simply could not be dependent on anyone's opinion, that he could never, never
look to another person for that sort of support.
— John Cage
Three things are needed for success in painting and sculpture: to see
beauty when young and accustom oneself to it, to work hard, and to obtain good advice.
— Gianlorenzo Bernini
Does it seem to you that it is possible to speak of Art? It would be the same as explaining love!
— Eleonora Duse
In the arts, the critic is the only independent source of information. The
rest is advertising.
— Pauline Kael, American Film Critic
To me, the whole process of being a brushstroke in someone else's
painting is a little difficult.
— Madonna
The notion of making money by popular work, and then retiring to do good
work, is the most familiar of all the devil's traps for artists.
— Logan Pearsall Smith
The true artist will let his wife starve, his children go barefoot, his mother drudge for his living at
seventy, sooner than work at anything but his art.
— George Bernard Shaw
We artists are indestructible; even in a prison, or in a concentration
camp, I would be almighty in my own world of art, even if I had to paint my pictures with my wet tongue on
the dusty floor of my cell.
— Pablo Picasso
Artists are the monks of the bourgeois state.
— Cesare Pavese
One of the reasons why I have no regular job and why I haven't had a regular job for years is
quite simply that my ideas differ from those of the gentlemen who hand out jobs.
— Vincent van Gogh
The primary distinction of the artist is that he must actively cultivate that state which most men,
necessarily, must avoid: the state of being alone.
— James Baldwin
All art is quite useless.
— Oscar Wilde
There really is no such thing as Art. There are only artists.
— E. H. Gombrich
Artists are, above all, men who want to become inhuman.
— Guillaume Apollinaire
Artists have a right to be modest and a duty to be vain.
— Karl Kraus
Only he is an artist who can make a riddle out of a solution.
— Karl Kraus
Art is a jealous mistress, and, if a man have a genius for painting,
poetry, music, architecture or philosophy, he makes a bad husband and an ill provider.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson
Great artists have no country.
— Alfred de Musset
Being an artist means ceasing to take seriously that very serious person we are when we are not an
artist.
— José Ortega y Gasset
The artist is extremely lucky who is presented with the worst possible ordeal which will not actually
kill him. At that point, he's in business.
— John Berryman
Success is dangerous. One begins to copy oneself, and to copy oneself is
more dangerous than to copy others. It leads to sterility.
— Pablo Picasso
There is only one art, whose sole criterion is the power, the authenticity, the revelatory insight, the
courage and suggestiveness with which it seeks its truth. . . . Thus, from the standpoint of the work and
its worth it is irrelevant to which political ideas the artist as a citizen claims allegiance, which ideas
he would like to serve with his work or whether he holds any such ideas at all.
— Václav Havel
The toughest thing about success is that you've got to keep on being a
success. Talent is only a starting point in this business. You've got to keep on working that talent.
Someday I'll reach for it and it won't be there.
— Irving Berlin
The artistic temperament is a disease that affects amateurs. . . . Artists of a large and wholesome
vitality get rid of their art easily, as they breathe easily or perspire easily. But in artists of less
force, the thing becomes a pressure, and produces a definite pain, which is called the artistic
temperament.
— G. K. Chesterton
What garlic is to food, insanity is to art.
— Augustus Saint-Gaudens
An artist is only an ordinary man with a greater potentiality — same stuff, same make up, only more
force. And the strong driving force usually finds his weak spot, and he goes cranked, or goes under.
— D. H. Lawrence
Artists must be sacrificed to their art. Like bees, they must put their lives into the sting they
give.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson
For art to exist, for any sort of aesthetic activity or perception to
exist, a certain physiological precondition is indispensable: intoxication.
— Friedrich Nietzsche
Were I called on to define, very briefly, the term Art, I should call it "the reproduction of what the
Senses perceive in Nature through the veil of the soul." The mere imitation, however accurate, of what is
in Nature, entitles no man to the sacred name of "Artist."
— Edgar Allan Poe
An artist is a creature driven by demons. He don't know why they choose him and he's usually too busy to
wonder why. He is completely amoral in that he will rob, borrow, beg, or steal from anybody and everybody
to get the work done.
— William Faulkner
An artist's originality is balanced by a corresponding conservatism, a superstitiousness, about it;
which might be boiled down to "What worked before will work again."
— Nancy Hale
It seems likely that many of the young who don't wait for others to call them artists, but simply
announce that they are, don't have the patience to make art.
— Pauline Kael
No artist is ahead of his time. He is his time; it is just that others are behind the times.
— Martha Graham
I had rather be called a journalist than an artist.
— H. G. Wells
One of the dangers of the American artist is that he finds himself almost exclusively thrown in with
persons more or less in the arts. He lives among them, eats among them, quarrels with them, marries
them.
— Thornton Wilder
If Botticelli were alive today he'd be working for Vogue.
— Peter Ustinov
I would venture to warn against too great intimacy with artists as it is very seductive and a little
dangerous.
— Victoria
The only legitimate artists in England are the architects.
— Benjamin Haydon
A vandal is somebody who throws a brick through a window. An artist is somebody who paints a picture on
that window. A great artist is somebody who paints a picture on the window and then throws a brick through
it.
— A-One, graffiti artist quoted in New Yorker
All art is autobiographical; the pearl is the oyster's autobiography.
— Federico Fellini
Love art. Of all lies, it is the least untrue.
— Gustave Flaubert
The object of art is to give life a shape.
— Jean Anouilh
PAINTING, n. The art of protecting flat surfaces from the weather and
exposing them to the critic.
— Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary
The history of art is the history of revivals.
— Samuel Butler
The artist, like the God of the creation, remains within or behind or beyond or above his handiwork,
invisible, refined out of existence, indifferent, paring his fingernails.
— James Joyce
Art does not reproduce the visible; rather, it makes visible.
— Paul Klee
Art is the objectification of feeling, and the subjectification of nature.
— Suzanne K. Langer
The whole of art is an appeal to a reality which is not without us but in our minds.
— Desmond MacCarthy
Art is a revolt against fate.
— Andre Malraux
A work of art has no importance whatever to society. It is only important
to the individual.
— Vladimir Nabokov
There are painters who transform the sun to a yellow spot, but there are others who with the help of
their art and their intelligence, transform a yellow spot into sun.
— Pablo Picasso
Art is the right hand of nature. The latter only gave us being, but the former made us men.
— Friedrich von Schiller
Contrary to general belief, an artist is never ahead of his time but most people are far behind
theirs.
— Edgard Varese
A work of art has an author and yet, when it is perfect, it has something which is anonymous about
it.
— Simone Wiel
Art happens-no hovel is safe from it, no Prince may depend upon it, the vastest intelligence cannot
bring it about, and puny efforts to make it universal end in quaint comedy, and coarse farce.
— James McNeill
All art is at once surface and symbol. Those who go beneath the surface do
so at their peril.
— Oscar Wilde
Surely all art is the result of one's having been in danger, of having gone through an experience all
the way to the end, where no one can go any further.
— Rainer Maria Rilke
An artist is a man of action, whether he creates a personality, invents an expedient, or finds the issue
of a complicated situation.
— Joseph Conrad
An artist is forced by others to paint out of his own free will.
— Willem de Kooning
If the man who paints only the tree, or flower, or other surface he sees before him were an artist, the
king of artists would be the photographer. It is for the artist to do something beyond this: in portrait
painting to put on canvas something more than the face the model wears for that one day; to paint the man,
in short, as well as his features.
— James McNeill Whistler
Astrology is not an art, it is a disease.
— Maimondides (1135-1204)
An artist must be a reactionary. He has to stand out against the tenor of the age and not go flopping
along.
— Evelyn Waugh
If we are to change our world view, images have to change. The artist now has a very important job to
do. He's not a little peripheral figure entertaining rich people, he's really needed.
— David Hockney
In free society art is not a weapon. . . . Artists are not engineers of the soul.
— John F. Kennedy
America is no place for an artist: to be an artist is to be a moral leper,
an economic misfit, a social liability. A corn-fed hog enjoys a better life than a creative writer,
painter, or musician. To be a rabbit is better still.
— Henry Miller
In other countries, art and literature are left to a lot of shabby bums
living in attics and feeding on booze and spaghetti, but in America the successful writer or
picture-painter is indistinguishable from any other decent businessman.
— Sinclair Lewis
Without poets, without artists, men would soon weary of nature's monotony. The sublime idea men have of
the universe would collapse with dizzying speed. The order which we find in nature, and which is only an
effect of art, would at once vanish. Everything would break up in chaos. There would be no seasons, no
civilization, no thought, no humanity; even life would give way, and the impotent void would reign
everywhere.
— Guillaume Apollinaire
His work was that curious mixture of bad painting and good intentions that
always entitles a man to be called a representative British artist.
— Oscar Wilde
I don't know anything about music. In my line you don't have to.
— Elvis Presley
Working in the theater has a lot in common with unemployment.
— Arthur Gingold
Extraordinary how potent cheap music is.
— Noël Coward
The camera can represent flesh so superbly that, if I dared, I would never
photograph a figure without asking that figure to take its clothes off.
— George Bernard Shaw
A hundredth of a second here, a hundredth of a second there — even if you put them end to
end, they still only add up to one, two, perhaps three seconds, snatched from eternity.
— Robert Doisneau, French photographer
A photograph is a secret about a secret. The more it tells you the less you know.
— Diane Arbus, American photographer
Very few people possess true artistic ability. It is therefore both
unseemly and unproductive to irritate the situation by making an effort. If you have a burning, restless
urge to write or paint, simply eat something sweet and the feeling will pass.
— Fran Lebowitz
