Art - Quotes

Every artist joins a conversation that's been going on for generations, even millennia, before he or she joins the scene. - John Barth

Every artist writes his own autobiography. - Havelock Ellis

Every portrait that is painted with feeling is a portrait of the artist, not of the sitter. - Oscar Wilde

Every production of an artist should be the expression of an adventure of his soul. - W. Somerset Maugham

Everyone has doors in the living room of their lives that they assume are locked. Doors that lead to artistic expression. People say "I have no talent – I can't dance or sing or paint or write poetry or play an instrument." More often than not the doors are not locked, just closed. One may turn the handle, open the door and pass through into a larger life space. - Robert Fulghum

Good art means the ability of any one man to pin down in some permanent and intelligible medium a sort of idea of what he sees in Nature that nobody else sees. In other words, to make the other fellow grasp, through skilled selective care in interpretative reproduction or symbolism, some inkling of what only the artist himself could possibly see in the actual objective scene itself. - H.P. Lovecraft

Good artists copy; great artists steal. - Pablo Picasso

Great art picks up where nature ends. - Marc Chagall

Great works of art are only great because they are accessible and comprehensible to everyone. - Leo Tolstoy

I believe art is utterly important. It is one of the things that could save us. We don't have to rely totally on experience if we can do things in our imagination.... It's the only way in which you can live more lives than your own. You can escape your own time, your own sensibility, your own narrowness of vision. - Mary Oliver

I start a picture and I finish it. I don't think about art while I work. I try to think about life. - Jean-Michel Basquiat

If art is to nourish the roots of our culture, society must set the artist free to follow his vision wherever it takes him. - John F. Kennedy

If I could say it in words there would be no reason to paint. - Edward Hopper

If they who understand the utmost refinement of any art will enjoy the perfection of it in a manner superior to other men, will they not amply pay for that advantage in feeling more than other men the imperfection of it, which in the natural course of things must so much oftener fall in their way? - Fluke Greville

In art there are two principal schools between which each aspirant has to choose – one distinguished by its close adherence to nature, and the other by its strenuous efforts to get above it. - Christian Nestell

In art, the hand can never execute anything higher than the heart can imagine. - Ralph Waldo Emerson

It is the function of art to renew our perception. What we are familiar with we cease to see. The writer shakes up the familiar scene, and as if by magic, we see a new meaning in it. - Anais Nin

It was the job of art to bring true feelings alive. To shock people into awareness. - Michael Crichton