14,373 Quotes About Art

What does one prefer? An art that struggles to change the social contract, but fails? Or one that seeks to please and amuse, and succeeds?

A deliberate plan is not always necessary for the highest art; it emerges.

Imitation is not inspiration, and inspiration only can give birth to a work of art. The least of man's original emanation is better than the best of borrowed thought.

I do strongly feel that among the greatest pieces of luck for high achievement is ordeal. Certain great artists can make out without it, Titian and others, but mostly you need ordeal. My idea is this: the artist is extremely lucky who is presented with the worst possible ordeal which will not actually kill him. At that point, he's in business: Beethoven's deafness, Goya's deafness, Milton's blindness, that kind of thing.

Without enthusiasm nothing great can be effected in art.

Better farPursue a frivolous trade by serious means,Than a sublime art frivolously.

Don't patronize the chain bookstores. Every time I see some author scheduled to read and sign his books at a chain bookstore, I feel like telling him he's stabbing the independent bookstores in the back.

Why do you reduce art to an autobiography? Once a piece of art is concluded and ejected into the world it changes with every single pair of eyes and becomes an endless object of transformation. The spectator makes it his or her own. Don't decontextualize it and call it truth, call it your perspective.

Art isn't a product. It's an experience