top of page
.png){kind=small}
Art Quotes
"Everything that has ever been called folk art has always reflected domination."
38
"All are born to observe order, but few are born to establish it."
38
"It was a haunting tune, unresigned, a cry of heartache for all in the world that fell apart. As ash rose black against the brilliant sky, Fire's fiddle cried out for the dead, and for the living who stay behind and say goodbye."
38
"Photographs are very interesting, and you can look into them a million times and still find a new meaning in them, something in the past that was caught in the film itself."
38
"As the scripts come in they are sent to the artists, and the artists are either very busy, or ready to start."
38
"A photograph may speak to the photographer's envy or disappointment just as much as it may reveal his anger or disapproval. And even if a photograph records a joyous occasion, behind it there may still be more than a small measure of heartbreak on the part of the photographer. A small measure of heartbreak? One might think such a thing is impossible--if your heart is broken, then surely it is broken completely. Yet the truth is that we can live with a minor fault-line in the heart--most of us do, in one way or another."
38
"In art, the only one who really knows whether what you've done is honest is the artist."
38
"I write the right. I do the left."
38
"Mr. Freeman: You are getting better at this, but it's not good enough. This looks like a tree,but it is an average, ordinary, everyday, boring tree. Breathe life into it. Make it bend - trees are flexible, so they don't snap. Scar it, give it a twisted branch - perfect trees don't exist. Nothing is perfect. Flaws are interesting. Be the tree."
38
"I think of art, at its most significant, as a DEW line, a Distant Early Warning system that can always be relied on to tell the old culture what is beginning to happen to it."
38
"Art is the process of evoking pity and terror, which is not abstract at all but very human. What the self-styled modern artists are doing is a sort of unemotional pseudointellectual masturbation . . . whereas creative art is more like intercourse, in which the artist must seduce -- render emotional -- his audience, each time."
38
"At the art college in Edinburgh someone arranged for some London groups to come up and play. I was in a supporting band, with Bernie Green I think. Derek Bailey was one of the visiting musicians. He seemed to like my playing and asked me to come down to London."
38
"What are all these writers fighting for? For their own victory or for the victory of their profession?"
38
"There are at least 50 cities in the world that would have liked to obtain the Getty Collection."
38
"Photographs shock insofar as they show something novel."
38
"I am looking at him, I am witnessing a unique physiological phenomenon: John Shade perceiving and transforming the world, taking it in and taking it apart, re-combining its elements in the very process of storing them up so as to produce at some unspecified date an organic miracle, a fusion of image and music, a line of verse."
38
"Metal rusts, music lasts forever."
38
"I think a smart person today realizes that you have to be part of the art films that are done just for the sake of the art."
38
"The art galleries of Paris contain the finest collection of frames I ever saw."
38
"The artist's job is not to succumb to despair but to find an antidote for the emptiness of existence."
38
"Make films that purify the soul with the flow of rational, vigorous and compassionate thinking."
38
"One of the few things I know about writing is this:spend it all, shoot it, play it, lose it, right away, every time. Do not hoard what seems good for a later place in the book, or for another book; give it, give it all, give it now. The impulse to save something good for a better place later is a signal to spend it now. Something more will arise later, something better. These things fill from behind, from beneath, like well water."
38
"If there can be a better way for the real world to include the one of images, it will require an ecology not only of real things but of images as well."
38
"The still watersWrap my lips,Eyes, nose and ears,A clearCellophane I cannot crack."
38
"Literature is the art of discovering something extraordinary about ordinary people, and saying with ordinary words something extraordinary."
38
"Then I moved down to the Bowery to this building where Debbie Harry lived. It was there that I started combining some clothes for her and continued doing the art and photography."
37
"Poetical appreciation is only newly bursting on me."
37
"Courage is the art of being the only one who knows you're scared to death."
37
bottom of page