Art Quotes

It wasn’t as though her parents approved, but then they had never approved of anything she did. Sometimes she wondered which was worse: having no family like Kathy, or having such a one as her own.

“It’s probably just a joke…”

They know how much of the support should show through as the pigment is applied, what details aren’t necessary. They suggest, and let their viewer fill in whatever else is needed to make the communication complete. They aren’t afraid…

“I shall paint a picture exactly as I like,” said Harringay, calmly.

This seemed to disconcert the picture a little. “You can’t paint a picture without an inspiration,” it remarked.

“But I had an inspiration – for this…”

We are entering a very singular world together. The world of public discourse – political, social, diplomatic, commercial – has so corrupted language that we are rightly more suspicious of the meaning of words than we are convinced of…

So help me God it gets more and more preposterous, it corresponds less and less to what I remember and what I expect as if the force of life were centrifugal and threw one further and further away from one’s purest memories…

I dance and dance. A beautiful serpent coils itself along the Persian carpet, an Egyptian amphora tilts forward, pouring forth a cascade of perfumed hair, a blue and stormy cloud rises and floats away, a feline beast springs forwards…

You must dismiss at once as a delusion the hope that has been sometimes cherished, that you can have a building which is a work of art, and is therefore above all things properly built, at the same price as a building which only pretends to be this: never forget when people talk…

Otherwise why should we hurt one another? No, the remission I am seeking, and will be granted perhaps, is not one I shall ever see in the bright friendly eyes of Melissa or the sombre brow-dark gaze of Justine. We have all of us…

Style for the writer, no less than colour for the painter, is a question not of technique but of vision: it is the revelation, which by direct and conscious methods would be impossible, of the qualitative difference, the uniqueness of…

It is quite true that for the production of boots or loaves division of labor is very advantageous, and that the bootmaker or baker who need not prepare his own dinner or fetch his own fuel will make more boots or loaves than if he had to busy himself about these matters. But…

So, in the compass of the single mind,
The seeds and pregnant forms in essence lie,
That make all worlds. Great poet, ‘t was thy art
To know thyself, and in thyself to be
Whate’er love, hate, ambition, destiny,
Or the firm fatal purpose of the heart…

I showed my masterpiece to the grown-ups, and asked them whether the drawing frightened them.

But they answered: “Frightened? Why should anyone be frightened by a hat?”