There are no rules. That is how art is born.

Sometimes I think my scars are beautiful, but then I remember not everyone shares the same love of art.

After a few months in my parents’ basement, I took an apartment near the state university, where I discovered both crystal methamphetamine and conceptual art. Either one of these things are dangerous, but in combination...

The longer Ellen Cherry thought about it, the more convinced she became that the mission of the artist in an overtechnologized, overmasculinized society was to call the old magic back to life.Could it be done?...

Time and death: It’s the ultimate vision of an artist at the end of everything. It’s just what’s there. It was not something I planned to do.

Make yourself interesting to history. Master some aspect of life, and then find a different area and do something crazy. Become a painter, then round up a herd of cattle and slaughter them with your...

Speak against unconscious oppression,Speak against the tyranny of the unimaginative,Speak against bonds.

There are no lungs like the ones that breathe poetry.

a woman lives behind this door, and she writes with the door open to the night. she writes with the door open to the seasons, even winter, though perhaps less so then. there are birds...

No art can possibly comfort HER then, even though art is credited with so many things, especially an ability to offer solace. Sometimes, of course, art creates the suffering in the first place.

…There are issues worth advancing in images worth admiring; and the truth is never “plain,” nor appearances ever “sincere.” To try to make them so is to neutralize the primary, gorgeous eccentricity of imagery in...

Invisible prose only!” rules out the sparkling style of [writers]. . . For [whom] vivid prose, and the visionary mind it evinces, rich with speculation, insight, and subjectivity, is the craft and offers a unique...

I collect information. But not just any information, I collect misinformation. I am the museum of misinformation. I’m also the artist and curator. And Docent.

Who art thou? Are you art, or a guy named Art? Doesn’t matter. What does matter is, Are you for sale?

This is my own personal logo

He saw the world more vividly than other people, and reacted to what he saw with laughter, horror, indignation, and sometimes sobs.

We now have more clarity on that [prior art] issue for them.

Color is my daylong obsession, joy, and torment.

work.” You know what’s fun, indie filmmakers? Being paid for your time.

To devote yourself to the creation and enjoyment of beauty, then, can be a serious business—not always necessarily a means of escaping reality, but sometimes a means of holding on to the real when everything...

Simplicity and repose are the qualities that measure the true value of any work of art.

Asking an artist to talk about his work is like asking a plant to discuss horticulture.

Keep in mind that when we talk of a great painting we are not really talking about anything great. We are talking of only a painting.

Life is a blank canvas, and you need to throw all the paint on it you can.

To speak of these things and to try to understand their nature and, having understood it, to try slowly and humbly and constantly to express, to press out again, from the gross earth or what...

The cinema is not an art which films life: the cinema is something between art and life. Unlike painting and literature, the cinema both gives to life and takes from it, and I try to...

For me, Chanel is like music. There are certain notes and you have to make another tune with them

Art is not documentary. It may incidentally serve that function in its own way but its true effort is to open to us dimensions of the spirit of the self that normally lie smothered under...

People have to create some sort of art so they have something to think about other than their shitty lives.

The only valid rule for a work of art is that it be true to itself.

An artist’s work is one long conversation with life.

People regard art too highly, and history not enough

You don’t create or write to be successful; you don’t create or paint to be famous or to increase your wealth. You do all of these things because your soul is calling you to do...

I unconsciously decided that, even if it wasn’t an ideal world, it should be so and painted only the ideal aspects of it – pictures in which there are no drunken slatterns or self-centered mothers...

You want to know why God gave us people to love? Because that’s the only way we can understand how he feels about us. Desperate and jealous.

Art seems to me to be a state of soul more than anything else.

An as-yet-unpublished poet in Boulder, Colorado, once said to me that anything worth doing was worth doing badly. I may seem, in the foregoing sketchy pages, to have followed her advice rather too well.

Submitting to history allows us to remember our society’s past. Although writing and art express history, it’s our humanity which keeps all of us striving for an improved future.

I am the Constellation of my own

The hardest thing is to do something which is close to nothing because it is demanding all of you.

Yet the ivory gods, And the ebony gods, And the gods of diamond-jade, Are only silly puppet gods That people themselves Have made.-

Only by examining our personal biases can we truly grow as artists; only by cultivating empathy can we truly grow as people.

He thought that the rose was to be found in its own eternity and not in his words; and that we may mention or allude to a thing, but not express it.

I think that’s what art is: art is communication made in the hope that interesting miscommunications will arise.

The canvas is the door to another dimension. The paintbrush is the key.

We must have design in a picture even at the expense of truth. You are using nature for your artistic needs.

Please… Whoever you are, whatever you are… I believe in you even though I don’t completely understand you. I feel you around me even though I can’t exactly describe what I’m feeling. Sometimes things happen...

I don’t ever want to hurt anyone, but I really wish there was something like a reset button on my life.

Parameters are the things you bounce off to create art.

Give me a museum and I’ll fill it.