arts

"If my art has nothing to do with people's pain and sorrow, what is 'art' for?"

"The excellency of every art is its intensity, capable of making all disagreeable evaporate."

"A great city, whose image dwells in the memory of man, is the type of some great idea. Rome represents conquest; Faith hovers over the towers of Jerusalem; and Athens embodies the pre-eminent quality of the antique world, Art."

"Art is accusation, expression, passion. Art is a fight to the finish between black charcoal and white paper."

"It's high time for the art world to admit that the avant-garde is dead. It was killed by my hero, Andy Warhol, who incorporated into his art all the gaudy commercial imagery of capitalism (like Campbell's soup cans) that most artists had stubbornly scorned."

"I wonder how many people I've looked at all my life and never seen."

"There hasn't been anything real since grunge. That was the last movement led by music or an art form."

"Contrary to general belief, an artist is never ahead of his time but most people are far behind theirs."

"Art and nature shall always be wrestling until they eventually conquer one another so that the victory is the same stroke and line: that which is conquered, conquers at the same time."

"Motivation is the art of getting people to do what you want them to do because they want to do it."

"A man's work is nothing but this slow trek to rediscover, through the detours of art, those two or three great and simple images in whose presence his heart first opened."

"My eyes were made to erase all that is ugly."

"You can go through life and make new friends every year - every month practically - but there was never any substitute for those friendships of childhood that survive into adult years. Those are the ones in which we are bound to one another with hoops of steel."

"The sculptor produces the beautiful statue by chipping away such parts of the marble block as are not needed - it is a process of elimination."

"The people who make art their business are mostly imposters."

"Art is the unceasing effort to compete with the beauty of flowers - and never succeeding."

"The art of art, the glory of expression and the sunshine of the light of letters, is simplicity."

"It's the job that's never started as takes longest to finish."

"I try to keep a low profile in general. Not with my art, but just as a person."

"Art begins with resistance - at the point where resistance is overcome. No human masterpiece has ever been created without great labor."