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Quotes about art

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The refusal to rest content, the willingness to risk excess on behalf of one’s obsessions, is what distinguishes artists from entertainers, and what makes some artists adventurers on behalf of us all.
John Updike1932–2009On J. D. Salinger, from a review of his Franny and Zooey, in Studies in J. D. Salinger: Reviews, Essays, and Critiques of The Catcher in the Rye and other Fiction (1963) edited by Marvin Laser and Norman Fruman, p. 231
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
Where the spirit does not work with the hand, there is no art.
Leonardo da Vinci1452–1519
The painter who draws merely by practice and by eye, without any reason, is like a mirror which copies every thing placed in front of it without being conscious of their existence.
Leonardo da Vinci1452–1519I Prolegomena and General Introduction to the Book on Painting
What is fair in men, passes away, but not so in art.
Leonardo da Vinci1452–1519IX The Practice of Painting
- Beauty
Arms, and the man I sing, who, forc’d by fate,
And haughty Juno’s unrelenting hate,
Expell’d and exil’d, left the Trojan shore.
Virgil70–19 BCThe Aeneid (29–19 BC), Book IIn context
- Poetry
- War & Peace
The practice of art isn’t to make a living. It’s to make your soul grow.
Kurt Vonnegut1922–2007
The arts are not a way to make a living. They are a very human way of making life more bearable. Practicing an art, no matter how well or badly, is a way to make your soul grow, for heaven’s sake.
Kurt Vonnegut1922–2007A Man Without a Country (2005)
The only good thing about books is that they can be adapted into films.
MVMichael Votto
- Movies
- Reading
Making money is art and working is art and good business is the best art.
Andy Warhol1928–1987The Philosophy of Andy Warhol (1975), p. 92
- Business
An artist is someone who produces things that people don’t need to have but that he — for some reason — thinks it would be a good idea to give them.
Andy Warhol1928–1987The Philosophy of Andy Warhol (1975), Ch. 10: Atmosphere
The reason I’m painting this way is that I want to be a machine, and I feel that whatever I do and do machine-like is what I want to do.
Andy Warhol1928–1987‘What is Pop Art? Answers from 8 Painters’, Part 1, G. R. Swenson, in Art News 62 (November 1963)
The movie’s director is the pilot. It’s his vision. For an actor, the time to worry about flying is when you’re on the ground. If you don’t want to fly with the director, don’t get on the plane.
Denzel Washingtonborn 1954
- Movies
Wonder is not a disease. Wonder, and its expression in poetry and the arts, are among the most important things which seem to distinguish men from other animals, and intelligent and sensitive people from morons.
Alan Watts1915–1973Inside Information p. 7
- Poetry
I came to the conclusion many years ago that almost all crime is due to the repressed desire for aesthetic expression.
Evelyn Waugh1903–1966Decline and Fall (1928)
- Comedy