Famous quotes
Quotes by famous people, credited to who said them. Your own quotes must not match any of these. More are added all the time. 1,158,269 quotes Who coined it · How we decide
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“Craft, I would argue, is not an essential part of art, though skill is. That skill may indeed find its expression in draughtsmanship or carving, realised through the hand of the artist, but it may also be directed towards the selection of material or the choice of an expert fabricator.”
Nicholas Serota (born 1946) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“He opened the door that so many of us went through, the door of possibility, by saying anything an artist makes is art.”
Peter Blake (born 1932) first seen 2005 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Serena Davies, "In the studio:Peter Blake, The Daily Telegraph, 2005-12-13
“I don't think artists should be sponsored. You should not rely on grants. You either make a success of your art or you don’t. I worked as an artist for a number of years without making much money – I have never had any financial backing in that way. Things are now very good for me but for a lot of the time things were not.”
Peter Blake (born 1932) first seen 2006 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Colin Serjent, "Blake's 08, Nerve (Autumn 2006).
“The aim of every authentic artist is not to conform to the history of art but to release himself from it, in order to replace it with his own history. However the historical pattern is drawn, it will not fit the developing sensibility of the individual.”
Harold Rosenberg (1906–1978) said by 1978 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“How much the work of an artist owes to an art movement to which he belongs can never be determined exactly, if only because the movement derives its character from the individual creations of its members.”
Harold Rosenberg (1906–1978) said by 1978 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Both art and the artist lack identity and define themselves only through their encounter with each other.”
Harold Rosenberg (1906–1978) said by 1978 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Dear William Shakespeare. I am a 14 year old and I’m queer like you. I’m learning art. I wanted to be a queer artist like Leonardo or Michaelangelo. But I like Francis Bacon best I read Alan Ginsberg, Rimbaud. I like Tchaikovsky, if I make films I will make them like Eisenstein, Murnau, Pasolini, Visconti. Love from Derek.”
Derek Jarman (1942–1994) first seen 1992 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Letter to the Minister (1992).
“There must be understanding between the artist and the people. In the best ages of art that has always been the case. Genius can probably run on ahead and seek out new ways. But the good artists who follow after genius — and I count myself among these — have to restore the lost connection once more.”
Käthe Kollwitz (1867–1945) first seen 1916 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Diary entry (21 February 1916).
“Art should be free, like sunlight and beauty. The only compensation for the artist is the chance to feed hungry hearts. ("Brothers")”
Anzia Yezierska (1880–1970) said by 1970 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I had given up [around 1950] any ambition of making a career as an artist.. .I had lost all interest in the art shown in galleries and museums, and I no longer aspired to fit in that world. I loved the paintings done by children, and my only desire was to do the same for my own pleasure.”
Jean Dubuffet (1901–1985) said by 1985 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Where there is true art and genuine virtuosity the artist can paint an incomparable masterpiece without leaving even a trace of his identity.”
Orhan Pamuk (born 1952) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Art is created in a state of delirium. Anyting else is the restoration of monuments. Collectors are artist that do not have a home. they have to make one for themselves.”
Günter Brus (1938–2024) first seen 2003 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: P. 226 (2003)
“And lest I offend art lovers, it should be pointed out that even an old master, bought from the the artist for $100 and sold 350 years later for $10,000,000, has returned only 3.34% per year.”
William J. Bernstein (born 1948) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“There are no holidays for art; and that’s just fine with the artist.”
Elfriede Jelinek (born 1946) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The exercise of drawing from the life brings out the individuality of the (artist) in the man. When the door has been closed on completion of an academic rendering, no matter how rendered to the resemblance of the anatomic stress and strain, it is still only saying the things you already know... it is still a lifeless drawing in the light of modern art.”
David Bomberg (1890–1957) said by 1957 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: The Bomberg Papers", An Anthology From X (Oxford University Press, 1988) p. 88.
“Tagore once said– art has to be beautiful, but, before that, it has to be truthful. Now, what is truth? There is no eternal truth. Every artist has to learn private truth though a painful private process. And that is what he has to convey.”
Ritwik Ghatak (1925–1976) said by 1976 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I have come to the conclusion that a work of art restricted to what the artist has put in it is only a part of itself. It only attains full stature with what people and time make of it. It involves the whole complex of human relation to life. It is a mode of thinking, acting, perceiving and living.”
Naum Gabo (1890–1977) first seen 1937 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Quote, 1937; in Gabo's letter to Herbert Read; cited in: Cyril Connolly (1944) Horizon: a review of literature and art. Vol 9-10. p. 58
“There is no indication of success up to now in the bringing together of art and science. To achieve success the artist must be spiritually at home in the field of science so he can think and feel in the same way as the scientist. A spiritual union, not a technical one, is requested.”
Naum Gabo (1890–1977) first seen 1969 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Quote of Naum Gabo (1969), in Studio international. Vol.178. p. 64
“Science looks and observes and art see and foresees. Every great scientist has experienced a moment when the artist in him saved the scientist.”
Naum Gabo (1890–1977) first seen 1937 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Naum Gabo (1937) "Editorial", p. 9
“John Cage said that music is the moral evaluation of sound. We might generalize his remark: when we speak of art, we make a moral evaluation of the relative worth of the various contributions to a work. It is no surprise that many of the participants differ with more conventional evaluations and rank their own contributions as more important than that of the artist as conventionally defined.”
Howard S. Becker (1928–2023) said by 2023 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“An artist can't produce great art unless he has a philosophy.He can't say something unlee he has something to say.”
L. S. Lowry (1887–1976) said by 1976 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“For an artist there is no more serious and, at the same time, more joyous task than to create, through art, a new aesthetic, and ultimately, a new way of being.”
Karel Zeman (1910–1989) said by 1989 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Quoted in Pauline Sameshima, Seeing Red: A Pedagogy of Parallax: an Epistolary Bildungsroman on Artful Scholarly Inquiry (Youngstown, NY: Cambria Press, 2007), pp. 156–157, accessed 26 August 2013
“The great artist may be, outside the confines of his art, cruel, weak, arrogant and foolish, but within them he can transcend his own condition and become noble, passionate and truthful beyond the range of ordinary men.”
Vernon Scannell (1922–2007) said by 2007 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Like art, science is born of itself, not of nature. There is no neutral naturalism. The artist, no less than the writer, needs a vocabulary before he can embark on a 'copy' of reality.”
Ernst Gombrich (1909–2001) first seen 1962 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: E. H. Gombrich (1962), quoted in: Robert Maxwell Young. Mind, Brain, and Adaptation in the Nineteenth Century, 1970. p. 101.
“The true miracle of the language of art is not that it enables the artist to create the illusion of reality. It is that under the hands of a great master the image becomes translucent. In teaching us to see the visible world afresh, he gives us the illusion of looking into the invisible realms of the mind - if only we know, as Philostratus says, how to use our eyes.”
Ernst Gombrich (1909–2001) said by 2001 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Art in its unblemished nature, like religion and the search for truth, is thus literally a sacrament. The artist's calling and genius are sacred, and the men of old spoke with strict accuracy when they called the poet holy, and directed that he be venerated as a prophet.”
George Holmes Howison (1834–1916) said by 1916 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I'm trying to change the world or at least to make the horrors of the global capitalism visible. I don't care much about art. I used to be a total artist but now I'm more a human being.”
Riiko Sakkinen (born 1976) first seen 2013 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: More a Human Being than an Artist" (6 February 2013)
“The essence of our nature is to give birth, not to destroy. To create. We see this in the love of mother and child and in the love of artist for his or her art. The dilemma is that the very powers we possess for creativity can just as easily become employed to destroy with.”
Matthew Fox (priest) first seen 2002 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Creativity (New York: Penguin, 2002), ch. one.
“All my life as an artist I have asked myself: What pushes me continually to make sculpture? I have found the answer — at least the answer for myself. Art is an action against death. It is denial of death.”
Jacques Lipchitz (1891–1973) said by 1973 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“In the artist/theorist tradition of Robert Smithson, Joseph Nechvatal is a pioneer in the field of digital image making who challenges our perceptions of nature by altering conventional notions of space and time, gender, and self... Nechvatal successfully plunged into the depths where art, technology and theory meet.”
Joe Lewis (artist) first seen 2003 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Joseph Nechvatal at Universal Concepts Unlimited," in: Art in America Magazine, March 2003. pp.123-124.
“I’d like to think I have somehow connected or tapped to our collective subconscious, but in a sense I am just pulling ideas off the morning news. The real challenge is to make art out of these bits and pieces of our reality. I am a third-generation artist raised in the ghetto who was classically educated. This had its assets and liabilities.”
Joe Lewis (artist) first seen 2015 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Walter Robinson. "Joe Lewis: Clairvoynace" at artnet.com, 2015.
“Cultural confinement takes place when a curator imposes his own limits on an art exhibition , rather than asking an artist to set his limits. Artists are expected to fit into fraudulent categories. Some artists imagine they've got a hold on this apparatus, which in fact has got a hold of them. As a result, they end up supporting a cultural prison that is out of their control.”
Robert Smithson (1938–1973) said by 1973 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Art is internal and external. The repose a person feels in aesthetic creation comes from his, for the time, feeling he is what he is and also what he is not. Ego and otherness don't fight for the while. The artist feels he has reached form in the deepest places of his personality, because things outside himself have been see courageously, truly, respectfully by him.”
Eli Siegel (1902–1978) said by 1978 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“When I blow up a balloon, I am breathing my soul into an object that becomes eternal. [Manzoni's quote of 1960, referring to his art-work 'Artist's Breath']”
Piero Manzoni (1933–1963) said by 1963 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: In: 'Piero Manzoni', exhibition catalogue, Serpentine Gallery, London 1998, p.144
“The work of art has its origin in an unconscious impulse that springs from collective substrata of universal values common to all men, from which all men draw their gestures, and from which the artist derives the 'archaic' of organic existence. Every man of his own accord extracts the human element from this base, without realizing it, and in an elementary and immediate way.”
Piero Manzoni (1933–1963) said by 1963 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The immobility that the artist creates is not at all that of the photograph. A worth of art contains latent life, possibility of movement; a grimace made eternal does not represent life. One always talks of w:Donatello, but never of della Quercia. Yet della Qercia invented w:Michelangelo’s style before Michelangelo.”
Aristide Maillol (1861–1944) said by 1944 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It is harder to see than it is to express. The whole value of art rests in the artist's ability to see well into what is before him.”
Robert Henri (1865–1929) said by 1929 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“What about your art?”... “I gave it up.” “Gave it up? How could you give it up?” He was shaken at the news. Molly no longer an artist? He didn’t know artists could even do that; he thought it was a lifetime thing, like a sentence.”
K. A. Bedford (born 1963) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Art is much more than a hobby or a pastime. It has an eternal message from the past to the future. Every true artist should try to make efforts to convey this message both to his nation and to the humanity at large.”
Fatima Jinnah (1893–1967) first seen 1951 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: August 1951, Speech delivered to YWCA, quoted in Speeches, Messages and Statements of Mohtarama Fatima Jinnah, p. 32
“The pursuit of perfection in art must always be a noble duty to the artist, but.. .Here [at the Drachenfels ] he feels, more than in any other place, too vividly his inability.. .Stop it, painter! Just please yourself with the impression it makes on your soul; try, if you can, to keep this impression pure, it will teach you how to create ...”
Barend Cornelis Koekkoek (1803–1862) said by 1862 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Each of us is descended from poetry ancestors. It’s the same for any art, any occupation. There is a lineage of style, knowledge and culture passed from generation to generation, one artist to another. Ultimately all poetry is related in the family tree of poetry…”
“I call myself a citizen artist, because one of the things I do is try to get my playwrights — especially my graduate playwrights — interested in the world. It’s about how you connect art to culture and community here and now, and how we are vital to the expression of our community...”
Luis Alfaro (born 1963) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Art is inevitably the expression of external conditions, modified though they be by the genius and personality of the artist.”
Alma Thomas (1891–1978) said by 1978 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“If you love the art, you must love the artist. If you love the Creation, you must love the Creator.”
Mirza Tahir Ahmad (1928–2003) said by 2003 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Renaissance art has always been my favourite subject. The realism involved in it is a challenge for me not only as an artist but also as a priest. Subjects involving human beings have always been my core area of interest.”
Stephen Rotluanga (born 1952) first seen 2009 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Nude figures, Mizo bishop's tribute to God (29 July 2009)
“If you're a gentleman and you're wandering around in a garden and you're inspired and you write a haiku, that's real creativity. But if you have to make 1,000 cakes to sell, you're not going to put your soul into it. It's a matter of scale. I think great art is often the gentleman writing the haiku, but in order to be an artist you also need to be able to make 1,000 cakes in an afternoon.”
Liana Finck (born 1986) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I would like to consider myself an artist and I have always courted the idea of being abstract and misinterpreted. Anything that can evoke a sense of emotion and passion is art for me.”
CarryMinati (born 1999) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It was an art form, and you don’t learn to be an artist. You’re either born one, or you aren’t.”
Mike Resnick (1942–2020) said by 2020 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The participants of the project are from different generations and art movements: from fine aestheticism to popular brutalism. Artist even chose types of paper to work on. This freedom to express themselves gave artists a possibility to create their subjective spaces inside the concept that works as the objective reality of the project plotted out by Alexey Parygin.”
Nikolay Blagodatov (1937–2026) first seen 2020 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Nikolay Blagodatov City: Subjective Improvisations / City as an Artist's Subjectivity. Artist's book project. Catalog. (Rus & En) — SPb: Ed. T. Markova. 2020. — 128 p. — P. 47.
“People say they want your art, but they don’t want the artist to express themselves in truth.”