Famously Said Random quote

Quotes about art

621 quotes from 285 people

Most readBy personPage 29 of 42

I would like to say to you, to the leaders of the left, and the leaders of the right, I sing… I sing for everyone. My song has no flag, my song has no party.
Leonard Cohen1934–2016Warsaw concert (1985)
- Music
- Politics
Nobody, I think, ought to read poetry, or look at pictures or statues, who cannot find a great deal more in them than the poet or artist has actually expressed.
Nathaniel Hawthorne1804–1864The Marble Faun (1860), Chapter XLI: Snowdrops and Maidenly Delights
- Poetry
I always love it when people write me and say “I was having a rotten time, and I walked into a cinema and saw one of your movies, and it made such a difference.”
Audrey Hepburn1929–1993How to be Lovely‎ (2005)
- Movies
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 Baldwin1924–1987“The Precarious Vogue of Ingmar Bergman” in Esquire (April 1960); republished as “The Northern Protestant”, also in The Price of the Ticket (1985)
People call me the painter of dancing girls. It has never occurred to them that my chief interest in dancers lies in rendering movement and painting pretty clothes.
Edgar Degas1834–1917Ambroise Vollard, Degas: An Intimate Portrait (1927), “As He Grows Old”, p. 87
- Dancing
I had to resign myself, many years ago, that I’m not too articulate when it comes to explaining how I feel about things. But my music does it for me, it really does.
David Bowie1947–2016Livewire interview (2002)
- Music
Schoenberg’s music leads us into a realm where musical experience is a matter not of the ear but of the soul alone, and at this point the music of the future begins.
Wassily Kandinsky1866–1944Concerning the Spiritual in Art (1911), tr. Michael T. Sadler (1914); Dover reprint (1977), p. 17
- Music
The most regretful people on earth are those who felt the call to creative work, who felt their own creative power restive and uprising, and gave to it neither power nor time.
MOMary Oliver1935–2019Blue Pastures (1995)
- Work
All poets adore explosions, thunderstorms, tornadoes, conflagrations, ruins, scenes of spectacular carnage. The poetic imagination is not at all a desirable quality in a statesman.
W. H. Auden1907–1973The Dyer’s Hand, and Other Essays (1962)
- Poetry
- Politics
Customs and convictions change; respectable people are the last to know, or to admit, the change, and the ones most offended by fresh reflections of the facts in the mirror of art.
John Updike1932–2009The New Yorker (30 July 1990)
- Change
An artist must possess Nature. He must identify himself with her rhythms, by effort that will prepare the mastery which will later enable him to express himself in his own language.
Henri Matisse1869–1954Letter to Henry Clifford (14 February 1948)
- Nature
Nature can afford to be prodigal in everything, the artist must be frugal down to the last detail.
Nature is garrulous to the point of confusion, let the artist be truly taciturn.
Paul Klee1879–1940Diary entry (Munich, 1909), # 857, in The Diaries of Paul Klee, 1898-1918; University of California Press, 1968, p. 236
- Nature
I will repeat what I once said to Guillaume Apollinaire: “For my part I have never avoided the influence of others. I would have considered it cowardice and a lack of sincerity toward myself.”
Henri Matisse1869–1954‘Interview with Henri Matisse’ by Jacques Guenne, in ‘L’Art Vivant’ (15 September 1925)
The Chinese authorities think of artists as prostitutes. And in reality it’s true: in the Communist system artists just represent what the power structure seeks them to represent. It is prostitution.
Ai Weiweiborn 1957Truth to Power, 2008
- Politics
Sometimes one’s very angry and preaches, but I know that to clinch a point is to close it. To leave the reader free to decide what your work means, that’s the real art; it makes the work inexhaustible.
Ursula K. Le Guin1929–2018“The magician” by Maya Jaggi in The Guardian (17 December 2005)
- Writing