All worthy work is open to interpretations the author did not intend. Art isn’t your pet — it’s your kid. It grows up and talks back to you.

If you find yourself pulled beyond all practicality toward doing something — writing poetry, building a business, restoring old cars, planting a secret garden; if at four in the morning the right word comes to...

The GatheringAccording to the Kabbalah, in the beginning everything was God. When God contracted to make room for creation, spiritual energy filled the void. The energy poured into vessels which strained to hold the great...

What follows is the sum and substance of a remarkable year in a great artist’s life—Alexander Wainwright. He was at the pinnacle of his career when his art took a strange turn and I began...

Hey, Meg,” she said without preamble. I need you to write a letter of recommendation for me. I’m applying for grad school.”Meghann screamed into the phone. “Oh, my God! I’m so proud of you. I’m...

poetry is when a natural melancholy what keep singing a melody

The painter is not simply someone who looks and who sees. Above all, the artist is someone who exposes a personal vision by rendering it visible. The painter shows or allows the seeing of “something”...

My art is an act of creation and destruction, with all the sorrow and joy these engender as well as all the shadow and light these contain.

I reread these negative remarks and realize that I do not know whether music can despair of music or marble of marble. I do know that literature is an art that can foresee the time...

In the dynamics of the main family of the story, a rising socialist in England’s postwar government expects his grandparents to be pleased that the local aristocrat’s garden is commandeered to allow the people to...

The architect had not stopped to bother about columns and porticos, proportions or interiors, or any limitation upon the epic he sought to materialize; he had simply made a servant of Nature – art can...

If you’re a struggling artist having money problems just superglue a brick in the middle of a blanket, and call it art. Someone will buy it.

I love him in ways that I can’t explain to other people. They don’t understand… it’s not their fault.

The notion of making money by popular work, and then retiring to do good work, is the most familiar of all the devil’s traps for artists.

Music is the divine way to tell beautiful, poetic things to the heart..

Whatever the source of emotion that drives me to create, I want to give it a form which has some connection with the visible world, even if it is only to wage war on that...

I paint objects as I think them, not as I see them.

The world of technology has made it easier for people to get in touch with their modern muses regardless of the genres that they are trying to utilize and even if they create a new...

eloquence.” A few centuries later, Saint Augustine wrestled with the value of eloquence, associating it with his pagan background and training in Greek rhetoric while simultaneously employing it winsomely in his Christian writings. Such suspicion...

Later it would occur to him that a new life – to be a new man – would require him to take chances, to act on whim

Art evokes the mystery without which the world would not exist

Ads are the cave art of the twentieth century.

The one thing the world will never have enough of is the outrageous.

It often seems to me that art conceals the artist far more completely than it ever reveals him.

No respect for beauty – that was characteristic of today’s society. The work of the great masters were at most employed as ironic references or in advertising. Michelangelo’s “The Creation of Adam ” where you...

Is being burnt a requisite for the making of art? Personally, I don’t think it is. But art is poultice for a burn. It is a privilege to have, somewhere within you, a capacity for...

No matter how hard they try, they’ll never create anything so perfectly beautiful as what plays out in my own imagination.

A man’s work is nothing but this slow trek to rediscover, through the detours of art, those two or three great and simple images in whose presence his heart first opened.

Artist is not human, but humanity.

I asked Geertrui the other day what she thought love is-real love, true love. She said that for her real love is observing another person and being observed by another person with complete attention. If...

My heart balloons with admiration for these talented artists, which I so desperately want to be

Be curious about the world in which you live. Look things up. Chase down every reference. Go deeper than anybody else–that’s how you’ll get ahead.

I will always know the glory of the beautiful and rare, as they will know security from labour and prayer. As they will hear the laughter of the children they gave life, I will know...

Art serves a purpose. It expands our horizons, frees our minds, and opens us up to new experiences. It opens the imagination. All these great discoveries of our time — without the desire to reach...

You have to have time to be sorry for yourself to be a good Abstract Expressionist.

La única comunicación adecuada con el espectador es ésta: permanecer fiel a sí mismo. Sin concesión alguna a ese ochenta por ciento de espectadores de cine que, por motivos indescifrables, exigen de nosotros, los directores,...

Telle une pierre philosophale, l’authenticité semble ainsi avoir le pouvoir de transformer en or l’assemblage de toile et de pigments que constitue un tableau.

The importance of resolution over craft is one of the most important shifts in art making besides the creation of Photoshop.

Make art and live simply.

je dis civilisé le peuple qui compose ses danses, malgré qu’il ne soit pour les danses ni récolte ni greniers. Alors que je dis brut le peuple qui aligne sur ses étagères des objets, fussent-ils...

The art of biography is more difficult than is generally supposed.

The notes I can handle no better than many pianists. But the pauses between the notes-ah, that is where the art resides.

Sholem [a painter] was saying that freedom, for him, is having the technical facility to be able to execute whatever he wants, just whatever image he has in his mind. But that’s not freedom! That’s...

Paint what you know, especially if it looks like something you shouldn’t know.

Every man’s work, whether it be literature, or music or pictures or architecture or anything else, is always a portrait of himself.

His art springs out of bubbling underground necessity, as if he’s somehow dipping himself into the river that gave him life; he’s making dream material visible.

Being an innovator is something that most people just won’t get. It’s still yummy doing this thang over here though. The older I get I’ve come to place where I just love to create so...

Art should comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable.

One picks one’s way about through the glass and aluminum doors, the receptionists’ smiles, the lunches with too much alcohol, the openings with more, the mobs of people desperately trying to define good taste in...

Art is personal, criticism shouldn’t be.