He had a sense—honed by experience—that what he’d contrived might achieve something of the effect he wanted. That, Martinius had always said, was the best any man in this fallible world could expect. [p. 67]

Music gives color to the air of the moment.

Long looking at paintings is equivalent to being dropped into a foreign city, where gradually, out of desire and despair, a few key words, then a little syntax make a clearing in the silence. Art…...

Great artists are people who find the way to be themselves in their art. Any sort of pretension induces mediocrity in art and life alike.

Scientists know more and more and so science advances. Artists know less and less and so art advances.

All creative work begins as play. The more one plays, the better one works.

I wish I could say we all lived happily ever after. I can’t. But I can say we lived. Our love for Nate lives, and he’s left us this piece of himself in his art;...

The beauty of any work of art is related to the pleasure it gives us when we know it well.

I’d stumbled upon the inner sanctuary of a woman who loved the world. Loved the faces of people she saw. Loved the way a hand looked when it was relaxed. Loved the way a woman...

Vital lives are about action. You can’t feel warmth unless you create it, can’t feel delight until you play, can’t know serendipity unless you risk.

What modern art required was an imagination drawn to possibilities, rather than braced by smug presumptions.

As [William] Valentiner noted in his uncompleted memoirs Remembering Artists, [Diego] Rivera’s [Detroit Industry] murals rooted the Detroit Institute of Arts to the many-faceted jewel of its central court because of the harmonious, fertile relationship...

I would no more quarrel with a man because of his religion than I would because of his art.

Work on.” Work as if every time you started with and every time you finish.

I don’t believe in art. I believe in artists.

Threshold is where the madness ends and the magic begins.

We have been buying a lot of contemporary art, but we add great monuments like this whenever we can.

Goya’s savage verve, his harsh, brutal genius, captivated Des Esseintes. On the other hand, the universal admiration his works had won rather put him off, and for years he had refrained from framing them, for...

The mask of art is the means through which corruption is spread. The mask makes vice seem beautiful, turns squalor and nastiness into glamorous thrill, seduces the onlooker into the game – and leaves him...

In our modern world, this elemental quality of storytelling is denied. We live today in a world in which everything has its place and function and nothing is left out of place. Storytelling is thus...

I could watch him do this until morning — never asking questions and never interrupting his work. I worship quietly — his intense focus and attention to detail and then, out of no where, I...

The Fall will always be yours and mine…

Airplane Dream #13′ told the story, more or less, of a dream Rosa had had about the end of the world. There were no human beings left but her, and she had found herself flying...

We all know that Art is not truth. Art is a lie that makes us realize truth at least the truth that is given us to understand. The artist must know the manner whereby to...

Museums are just a lot of lies, and the people who make art their business are mostly imposters. We have infected the pictures in museums with all our stupidities, all our mistakes, all our poverty...

But in a still life, there is no end to our looking, which has become allied with the gaze of the painter; we look in and in, to the world of things, in their ambiance...

There is a LOT of bad news every day. The world seems to be getting more and more crazy. So every time you see some bad news, go do something nice for someone or go...

For me, art in our time is strongest when it is aware of science, includes science, is inspired by science, or is about science. On the linguistic level, the new words coined by scientists to...

Il n’ya pas de sommet dans l’art, il ya seulement l’escalade continue!

The enemy of art is the absence of limitations.

it reflects the fascination of the wider and wider public with fine art and the art market.

Every morning when I wake up, I experience an exquisite joy —the joy of being Salvador Dalí— and I ask myself in rapture: What wonderful things is this Salvador Dalí going to accomplish today?

I regard the theatre as the greatest of all art forms, the most immediate way in which a human being can share with another the sense of what it is to be a human being.

The curious mind embraces science; the gifted and sensitive, the arts; the practical, business; the leftover becomes an economist

In a world of lies and liars, an honest work of art is always an act of social responsibility.

The awakening an artist must be ruthless, not only with herself but with others.

So you have to be humble in dealing with the spaces and make sure they are used according to their unique purpose for which there is no alternative…art, if you like, is really a lack...

(speaking of Ann Radcliffe) A work of art worthy of the name is one which gives us back the freshness of the emotions of childhood.

The curious fact is that biology tells us nothing about desire. And, when you think about it, culture — novels, movies, opera, and quite a lot of painting — is about desire, how we manage...

For me, this is when the act of watching transforms into the act of witnessing.To witness something implies a responsiveness, the response/ability of the viewer toward the performer. It is radically different from what we...

You’re making something new. Don’t forget that when it starts to hurt.

The only problem i had with literature that I simply couldn’t figure out was that the correct answer was the first thing that comes to your mind after reading the question, the most obvious one....

You have no control over how your story begins or ends. But by now, you should know that all things have an ending. Every spark returns to darkness. Every sound returns to silence. Every flower...

The artist has a duty to be calm. He has no right to show his emotion, his involvement, to go pouring it all out at the audience. Any excitement over a subject must be sublimated...

She soon learned, though, that giving weight to other people’s opinions was creative nihilism; it was like being banished from the Land of No Words and exiled to the Land of All Bullshit.

He ached for creation. For life to somehow rise from the drawings in his sketching book. For his own energy, his own impressions to swirl and spin on a canvas. For a dream city he...

Only the mediocre artist is always at his best.

Millions of people can draw. Art is whether there is a scream in you wanting to get out in a special way.

Enjoy the brush strokes of life and try not to worry about filling the canvas.

It is in dialogue with pain that many beautiful things acquire their value. Acquaintance with grief turns out to be one of the more unusual prerequisites of architectural appreciation. We might, quite aside from all...