Art Quotes

The beginning of a friendship, the fact that two people out of the thousands around them can meet and connect and become friends, seems like a kind of magic to me. But maintaining a friendship requires work. I don't mean that as a bad thing. Good art requires work as well.

Excellent teachers showered on to us like meteors: Biology teachers holding up human brains, English teachers inspiring us with a personal ideological fierceness about Tolstoy and Plato, Art teachers leading us through the slums of Boston, then back to the easel to hurl public school gouache with social awareness and fury.

The theme my generation explored was the relationship between capitalism and art.

The interpretation of dreams is a great art.

In art, scandal is a false narrative, a smoke screen that camouflages rather than reveals. When we don't know what we're seeing, we overreact.

Music is the art of the prophets and the gift of God.

Rhetoric may be defined as the faculty of observing in any given case the available means of persuasion. This is not a function of any other art.

Art doesn't interest me. Only artists interest me.

Modernity is the transient, the fleeting, the contingent; it is one half of art, the other being the eternal and the immovable.

To be able to endure odium is the first art to be learned by those who aspire to power.

I don't like to say I have given my life to art. I prefer to say art has given me my life.

I would love to have my own show, and whatever movies come up, that would be fun to do too. But I love TV, and I love the art of the half-hour sitcom.

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

With few exceptions, music has been for some centuries the art which has devoted itself not to the reproduction of natural phenomena, but rather to the expression of the artist's soul, in musical sound.

We live in an age when the traditional great subjects - the human form, the landscape, even newer traditions such as abstract expressionism - are daily devalued by commercial art.

Architecture is art, nothing else.

Bad people are, from the point of view of art, fascinating studies. They represent colour, variety and strangeness. Good people exasperate one's reason; bad people stir one's imagination.

The real art is not to come up with extraordinary clever words but to make ordinary simple words do extraordinary things. To use the language that we all use and to make amazing things occur.

Art is the elimination of the unnecessary.

Great nations write their autobiographies in three manuscripts - the book of their deeds, the book of their words and the book of their art.