Somebody once asked me where I come up with my stuff. I replied, “Who knows? Where does yellow snow come from? It’s just a gift from God I guess.

He took his pain and turned it into something beautiful. Into something that people connect to. And that’s what good music does. It speaks to you. It changes you.

I have a good ear for music, just like Van Gogh had a good ear for art.

For art to exist, for any sort of aesthetic activity or perception to exist, a certain physiological precondition is indispensable: intoxication.

It’s not Art. And Art is not Design.

It reminded us that propaganda in some form or other lurks in every book, that every work of art has a meaning and a purpose — a political, social and religious purpose — that our...

One thing that struck me early is that you don’t put into a photograph what’s going to come out. Or, vice versa, what comes out is not what you put in.

You could say my book is the best book ever (or worst book ever), and it wouldn’t make it any better (or worse) than it is. All art exists outside and beyond criticism.

I make art like I make love—slowly, so I get the most for my money.

The Man With A Green Apple For A Nose.” This is not a joke.

The surpluses will have to be expended somehow, and trust the oligarchs to find a way. Magnificent roads will be built. There will be great achievements in science, and especially in art. When the oligarchs...

Criticism talks a good deal of nonsense, but even its nonsense is a useful force. It keeps the question of art before the world, insists upon its importance.

If all of the steps of surrender are present, then a great Rembrandt or Monet will evoke love because the artist is simply there in all his naked humanity.

As Henry Moore carvedor modelled his sculpture every day,he strove to surpass Donatello4. and failed, but woke the next morningelated for another try.

We wish we could have been there for you. We didn’t have many role models of our own–we latched on to the foolish love of Oscar Wilde and the well-versed longing of Walt Whitman because...

LatelyI’ve been dreaming about youAbout usSharing our secretsTalking, even if we arguedKept talking, till we sleptMaybe I woke upOn the wrong side of bedMaybe I thought about youJust a little too much

Fair as the moon and joyful as the light;Tot wan with waiting, not with sorrow dim; Not as she is, but was when hope shone bright;Not as she is, but as she fills his dreams.

I realized that the “thing” and the “concept” were substituted for feeling and understood the falsity of the world of will and idea

Technique is just a means of arriving at a statement.

When you make music or write or create, it’s really your job to have mind-blowing, irresponsible, condomless sex with whatever idea it is you’re writing about at the time.

The Question is actually the answer

In the history of art there are periods when bread seems so beautiful that it nearly gets into museums.

Art is enchantment and artists have the right of spells. … The success of later Shakespeare is the success of spells, where every element, however uneven, however incredible, is fastened to the next with perfect...

If you have walked into a museum recently – whether you did so to attend an art exhibition or to escape from the police – you may have noticed a type of painting known as...

The craving for recognition is every artist’s Achilles heel.

Painting, it is true, was undergoing a series of -isms reminiscent of the whims of a pregnant woman.

We must live with our hearts in our hands – like Mary.We must hold the blood-red heart and no be disappointedwhen others look away.

Though a living cannot be made from art, art makes life worth living. It makes starving, living.

In art, either as creators or participators, we are helped to remember some of the glorious things we have forgotten, and some of the terrible things we were asked to endure…

If art made you think, then this was Art. Staring at the ball, made of layers and layers of cloth, I wondered about the glass marble at its heart. What if you wanted to reach...

I wanted to paint a picture some day that people would stand before and forget that it was made of paint. I wanted it to creep into them like a bar of music and mushroom...

A picture lives by companionship, expanding and quickening in the eyes of the sensitive observer. It dies by the same token. It is therefore risky to send it out into the world. How often it...

The painter will produce pictures of little merit if he takes the works of others as his standard.

I want to overhear passionate arguments about what we are and what we are doing and what we ought to do. I want to feel that art is an utterance made in good faith by...

Visual and performing artists produce art that lives in the present world. The art of the writer exists in another dimension. Through strings of words and phrases writers inspire their readers to imagine, to conjure...

… but he did not tell her, for he realised how petty it would appear to her, and how different from what she had expected, less sensational and less touching; he was afraid, too, lest,...

Art is a side product of a perfect frendship or the lack of it…

In the future, as in the present, as in the past, black people will build many new worlds.This is true. I will make it so. And you will help me.

Everything worthwhile ends. We are in the perpetual process now: creation, maturation, cessation.

No form of Nature is inferior to Art; for the arts merely imitate natural forms

The creative act is not pure.

I want you to trust yourself, baby. Love is all that matters and you’ve always known that. You’ve known, since you were a very little girl, what your life is meant to be about…

You can’t, if you can’t feel it, if it neverRises from the soul, and swaysThe heart of every single hearer,With deepest power, in simple ways.You’ll sit forever, gluing things together,Cooking up a stew from other’s...

To create, and to confront, one has to be an outcast.

Everyone wants to understand art. Why not try to understand the song of a bird? Why does one love the night, flowers, everything around one, without trying to understand them? But in the case of...

The people no longer seek consolation in art. But the refined people, the rich, the idlers seek the new, the extraordinary, the extravagant, the scandalous.

Not merely hope, but any burdensome yearning: ambition, hatred, love (especially love) – how rarely do our emotions meet the object they seem to deserve? How hopelessly we signal; how dark the sky; how big...

This was no longer art: it even destroyed the harmony of the portrait itself. They were alive, they were human eyes! It seemed as if they had been cut out of a living man and...

Bad art is always basically creepy; that is its first and most obvious identifying sign

Erik Satie died on July 1, 1925; his last words were ‘Ah, the cows…