Each work of art excludes the world, concentrates attention on itself. For the time it is the only thing worth doing /to do just that; be it a sonnet, a statue, a landscape, an outline...

…how absurd human beings are and how magnificent.

For me, Art is the restoration of order. It may discuss all sort of terrible things, but there must be satisfaction at the end. A little bit of hunger, but also satisfaction.

Can you remember how you felt when you were communicating through your artwork? Not just the sense of completion, but the sense of rightness- the sense that you had brought to life something that could...

It starts with this: put your desk in the corner, and every time you sit down there to write, remind yourself why it isn’t in the middle of the room. Life isn’t a support system...

You don’t make a photograph just with a camera. You bring to the act of photography all the pictures you have seen, the books you have read, the music you have heard, the people you...

The job is what you do when you are told what to do. The job is showing up at the factory, following instructions, meeting spec, and being managed.Someone can always do your job a little...

We don’t value craftsmanship anymore! All we value is ruthless efficiency, and I say we deny our own humanity that way! Without appreciation for grace and beauty, there’s no pleasure in creating things and no...

I want to touch people with my art. I want them to say ‘he feels deeply, he feels tenderly.’

The act of tattooing one’s skin was a tranformative declaration of power, an announcment to the world: I am in control of my own flesh.

Artists must be sacrificed to their art.

Great art comes from passion, from a need to expose human spirit in the face of mortality, the small cruelties and heroisms that make up daily life — that’s where great work comes from, and...

In life, as in art, talking vitiates doing.

Of course they won’t bloody remember, they’ll be dead.’ Then she called him a name in a dead language that translated, roughly, to ‘poop on a stick,’ but sounded more succinct, like this: ‘Of course...

It was a miserable machine, an inefficient machine, she thought, the human apparatus for painting or for feeling; it always broke down at the critical moment; heroically, one must force it on.

tools” we truly possess in life.

The art is not one of forgetting but letting go. And when everything else is gone, you can be rich in loss.

An artist without ideas is a mendicant; barren, he goes begging among the hours.

I appreciated art, long before I could produce it.

The only real influence I’ve ever had is myself.

The most effective way of destroying art is the canonization of one given form. And one philosophy.

And this is what being an artist means, being a poet? To sacrifice yourself for your art, sacrifice your heart for your art, because it’s only through something broken that something beautiful can grow.

A work of art has no importance whatever to society. It is only important to the individual.

Since art is a virtue of the intellect, it demands to communicate with the entire universe of the intellect. Hence it is that the normal climate of art is intelligence and knowledge: its normal soil,...

Lines are results, do not draw them for themselves. … Lines give birth to lines. Drawing is not following a line on the model, it is drawing your sense of the thing. … Make a...

I believe that in the history of art and of thought there has always been at every living moment of culture a ‘will to renewal’. This is not the prerogative of the last decade only....

In the Somme valley, the back of language broke. It could no longer carry its former meanings. World War I changed the life of words and images in art, radically and forever. It brought our...

In my early work, I tried to hide my personality, my psychological state, my emotions. This was partly due to my feelings about myself and party due to my feelings about painting at the time....

As a songwriter, I’m gathering clues and possibilities all the time, whether I see a piano that day or not. I’ve tried to explain to people how I collect these dispatches, because I think anybody...

I’m collector of stuff that people make with their brain. I keep them in little jars and I take them out and play with them sometimes too. The stuff, not the people.

The power of any art is limited

The Christian in the one whose imagination should fly beyond the stars.

Thinking is not a thing that can undo itself. It can never be its own solution.

The world was so unbearably pretty, and it continued being so all the way down the mountain to school. I felt slightly high because of the beauty, and the inside of my head tickled. I...

Love is an art. Mine could fill a museum the size of your heart.

If a novel’s salient aim is virtue, I want to throw it against the wall.

The world, every day, is New. Only for those born in, say, 1870 or so, can there be a meaningful use of the term postmodernism, because for the rest of us we are born and...

Literary criticism can be no more than a reasoned account of the feeling produced upon the critic by the book he is criticizing. Criticism can never be a science: it is, in the first place,...

One of the most valuable things one of my art teachers said to me was, ‘Don’t get upset by criticism. Value the fact that at least someone noticed what you did.

Little decisions over time make a big impact on our lives.

the great strength is that the art worked outside of galleries and museums. It did not need them. (They need it.)

An ice sculpture in the Sahara makes about as much sense as donkey left open gaping wagon, Sergeant (add cream cheese sparingly).

Your impression of me is different than my impression of me. But that’s OK, because your impression is impressionistic, like a Monet painting, while mine is realistic, like a Rembrandt.

All art is a kind of confession, more or less oblique. All artists, if they are to survive, are forced, at last, to tell the whole story; to vomit the anguish up.

If my clone were a painter, he’d be an impressionist.

What people say realistic, may not necessarily the same as what we think. At the end we will know which one Is ourselves, which one is not.

Works of art make rules; rules do not make works of art.

Modern art has to be what is called ‘intense.’ it is not easy to define being intense; but, roughly speaking, it means saying only one thing at a time, and saying it wrong.

Because art, for all its adventuresomeness, is also capable of being the most recidivist of human activities, forever falling back in reaction to what was itself a reaction to something else.

Philosophy is to the mind of the architect as eyesight to his steps. The Term ‘genius’ when applied to him simply means a man who understands what others only know about. A poet, artist or...