Famous Quotes about Arts and Artists (253 Quotations)

For us artists there waits the joyous compromise through art with all that wounded or defeated us in daily life; in this way, not to evade destiny, as the ordinary people try to do, but to fulfil it in its true potential –the imagination.

Fortunately art is a community effort –a small but select community living in a spiritualized world endeavoring to interpret the wars and the solitudes of the flesh.

Good art however ''immoral'' is wholly a thing of virtue. Good art can NOT be immoral. By good art I mean art that bears true witness, I mean the art that is most precise.

Great art is never produced for its own sake. It is too difficult to be worth the effort.

Great art is the contempt of a great man for small art.

He bores me. He ought to have stuck to his flying machine. [On Leonardo Da Vinci]

Humanity is the rich effluvium, it is the waste and the manure and the soil, and from it grows the tree of the arts.

I am an artist? I am here to live out loud.

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 honor.

I can't work without a model. I won't say I turn my back on nature ruthlessly in order to turn a study into a picture, arranging the colors, enlarging and simplifying; but in the matter of form I am too afraid of departing from the possible and the true.

I choose a block of marble and chop off whatever I don't need. [when asked how he managed to make his remarkable statues.]

I don't want life to imitate art. I want life to be art.

I have seen, and heard, much of Cockney impudence before now; but never expected to hear a coxcomb ask two hundred guineas for flinging a pot of paint in the public's face.

I see little of more importance to the future of our country and of civilization than full recognition of the place of the artist. If art is to nourish the roots of our culture, society must set the artist free to follow his vision wherever it takes him.

I'm still an artist. I'm never gonna do a shit movie, because I've got my modeling to support me.

I'm the artist formally known as Beck. I have a genius wig. When I put that wig on, then the true genius emerges. I don't have enough hair to be a genius. I think you have to have hair going everywhere.

If art is to nourish the roots of our culture, society must set the artist free to follow his vision wherever it takes him.

If I didn't start painting, I would have raised chickens.

If I spit, they will take my spit and frame it as great art.

If that's art, I'm a Hottentot!