Artist Quotes · Page 354

“I think the general’s job is harder than the painter’s; canvas doesn’t fight back, after all.”

— Django Wexler

“True art was based upon despair, and the important thing was to make yourself and those around you as miserable as possible.”

— David Sedaris

Today the function of the artist is to bring imagination to science and science to imagination, where they meet, in the myth.

— Cyril Connolly

An hour or two of learning from the masters is usually enough to recharge my artistic batteries.

— James Dean

Modern art to me is nothing more than the expression of contemporary aims of the age that we're living in.

— Jackson Pollock

I feel like, as an artist and a songwriter, I have to reach certain audiences and give people a little bit of…

— Romeo Santos

“A work that aspires, however humbly, to the condition of art should carry its justification in every line.”

— Joseph Conrad

“Sorrow fades," he muttered as he retrieved the last fragment, "grief dies, but Art lives forever.”

— Kenyon Gambier

Over the years, I developed an extreme hostility towards the non-profit art organization gulag. I formed the opinion that it's actually a…

— Mark Flood

I consider an human soul without education like marble in the quarry, which shows none of its inherent beauties till the skill…

— Joseph Addison

I really don't like art where you need to know so much theory to understand. If the theory is removed, it doesn't…

— Marina Abramovic

Futurism and Cubism are comparable in importance to the invention of perspective, for which they substituted a new concept of space. All…

— Gino Severini

I love and collect contemporary art and go to all the art fairs. I love Damien Hirst and Matthew Barney. I grew…

— Nouriel Roubini

I think that one wants from a painting a sense of life. The final suggestion, the final statement, has to be not…

— Jasper Johns

Art is not meant to change the world, but when you see people interacting, when you see an impact on their lives,…

— JR

I have tried to draw the human effigy (and all the other subjects dealt with in my paintings) in an immediate and…

— Jean Dubuffet

When I got into graffiti, it was the most-exciting art form and it changed the course of my life.

— Ben Eine

When I started I would have called myself an artist but the discipline I chose in art was music and text.

— Blixa Bargeld

I feel sometimes an American artist must feel, like a baseball player or something - a member of a team writing American…

— Willem de Kooning

“It is sometimes said that the tragedy of an artist's life is that he cannot realize his ideal.”

— Oscar Wilde

The public wants to understand and learn in a single day, a single minute, what the artist has spent years learning.

— Paul Gauguin

Ann Winder-Boyle's small-scale encaustic pictures always reward a second look - they have an intriguing edge of darkness about them.

— Andrew Graham-Dixon

“The arts (painting, poetry, etc.) are not just these. Eating, drinking, walking are also arts; every act is an art.”

— César Vallejo

“I think we should throw money at artists, not at girls who take their clothes off because they made a bad choice…

— Darnell Lamont Walker

I've always been a looker. Loads of people say, "I never saw that" - but that's what artists do.

— David Hockney

So while our art cannot, as we wish it could, save us from wars, privation, envy, greed, old age, or death, it…

— Ray Bradbury

The artist fills space with an attitude. The attitude never comes from himself alone.

— Willem de Kooning

Now there are no priests or philosophers left, artists are the most important people in the world.

— Anonymous

I should have been, I don't know, a con-man, a robber or a prostitute. But it was vanity that made me choose…

— Francis Bacon

Aesthetic matters are fundamental for the harmonious development of both society and the individual.

— Friedrich Schiller

In 'The Pianist,' Polanski transformed his ghastly knowledge of the camps into an act of artistic self-expression.

— Victoria Coren Mitchell

All a work of art can do is present the surface. I can't know the insides of people. I know very little…

— John Banville

Artists must be men of wit, consciously or unconsciously philosophers; read, study and think a great deal of life...

— Robert Henri

I make art to figure out what I'm thinking, not to tell people what I think.

— Glenn Ligon

Well, first of all it's entertainment. That stops us becoming too pretentious or thinking we're great artists.

— Richard Thompson

Nothing in Art is achieved by will alone. It is achieved by docilely submitting to the subconscious.

— Odilon Redon

Dada was an extreme protest against the physical side of painting. It was a metaphysical attitude.

— Marcel Duchamp

“Three erotic paintings by Isa - $ 20K; chasing said artist in Benz SLS Coupe - $ 195K; the look on her…

— Ella Dominguez

The power of art can break the shackles that bind and divide human beings.

— Daisaku Ikeda

Every art expression is rooted fundamentally in the personality and temperament of the artist.

— Hans Hofmann