ART QUOTES VI

quotations about art

Art quote

The perfection of art is to conceal the sources.

AUSTIN O'MALLEY

Keystones of Thought

Tags: Austin O'Malley


When Nature begins to reveal her open secret to a man, he feels an irresistible longing for her worthiest interpreter, Art.

JOHANN WOLFGANG VON GOETHE

The Maxims and Reflections of Goethe

Tags: Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, nature


A craftsman knows in advance what the finished result will be, while the artist knows only what it will be when he has finished it.

W. H. AUDEN

"A Poet of the Actual", Forewords and Afterwords

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An artist cannot speak about his art any more than a plant can discuss horticulture.

JEAN COCTEAU

Newsweek, May 16, 1955

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Art is always aimed (like a rifle, if you wish) at the middle class. The working class has its own culture and will have no truck with fanciness of any kind. The upper class owns the world and thus needs know no more about the world than is necessary for its orderly exploitation. The notion that art cuts across class boundaries to stir the hearts of hoe hand and Morgan alike is, at best, a fiction useful to the artist, his Hail Mary. It is the poor puzzled bourgeoisie that is sufficiently uncertain, sufficiently hopeful, to pay attention to art. It follows (as the night the day) that the bourgeoisie should get it in the neck.

DONALD BARTHELME

"On the Level of Desire"

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But art consists not so much in the knowledge of principles, as in the manner of applying them; to reveal them to ignorant people is to put a razor in the hand of a monkey.

HONORÉ DE BALZAC

Physiology

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The arts stop society going rotten and mad.

VANESSA REDGRAVE

interview, FT Magazine, Apr. 26, 2013

Tags: Vanessa Redgrave, society


The final purpose of art is to intensify, even, if necessary, to exacerbate, the moral consciousness of people.

NORMAN MAILER

Western Review, winter 1959

Tags: Norman Mailer, morality


When I reflect that the task which the artist implicitly sets himself is to overthrow existing values, to make of the chaos about him an order which is his own, to sow strife and ferment so that by the emotional release those who are dead may be restored to life, then it is that I run with joy to the great and imperfect ones, their confusion nourishes me, their stuttering is like divine music to my ears.

HENRY MILLER

Tropic of Cancer

Tags: Henry Miller, chaos


All art is a kind of confession, more or less oblique. All artists, if they are to survive, are forced, at last, to tell the whole story, to vomit the anguish up.

JAMES BALDWIN

Esquire, April 1960

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Art is awkward until technique has become an unconscious habit.

AUSTIN O'MALLEY

Keystones of Thought

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Art is not a handicraft, it is the transmission of feeling the artist has experienced.

LEO TOLSTOY

What is Art?

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Art, true art, is the desire of a man to express himself, to record the reactions of his personality to the world he lives in.

AMY LOWELL

Tendencies in Modern Poetry

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I start a picture and I finish it. I don't think about art while I work. I try to think about life.

JEAN-MICHEL BASQUIAT

"Riding with Death: The Final Years", Jean-Michel Basquiat: 1960-1988

Tags: life


Like any artist without an art form, she became dangerous.

TONI MORRISON

Sula

Tags: Toni Morrison, artists


Nature is a haunted house -- but Art -- a House that tries to be haunted.

EMILY DICKINSON

letter to T. W. Higginson, 1876

Tags: Emily Dickinson, Nature


Now the culture is made of old things, it's a collage. Art made out of art is not art. You're supposed to make art out of life.

FRAN LEBOWITZ

interview, Paper Magazine, September 17, 2014

Tags: Fran Lebowitz


The idea of a new art based upon science, in opposition to the art of the old world that was based on imagination, an art that should explain all things and embrace modern life in its entirety, in its endless ramifications, be, as it were, a new creed in a new civilization, filled me with wonder, and I stood dumb before the vastness of the conception, and the towering height of the ambition.

GEORGE MOORE

Confessions of a Young Man

Tags: George Moore, science


There is no abstract art. You must always start with something. Afterward you can remove all traces of reality.

PABLO PICASSO

Picasso on Art: A Selection of Views

Tags: Pablo Picasso, reality


True art, like nature, ever bears
Suggestions of some higher thing;
As more than form or tint of bird
We prize the song he stops to sing.

EDITH WILLIS LINN FORBES

"A Landscape in Oils"