Art is not a study of positive reality, it is the seeking for ideal truth.

‚The Lady’s World‘ should be made the recognized organ for the expression of women’s opinions on all subjects of literature, art and modern life, and yet it should be a magazine that men could read with pleasure.

You use a glass mirror to see your face; you use works of art to see your soul.

Nothing, indeed, is more dangerous to the young artist than any conception of ideal beauty: he is constantly led by it either into weak prettiness or lifeless abstraction: whereas to touch the ideal at all, you must not strip it of vitality.

The artist forges himself to the others, midway between the beauty he cannot do without and the community he cannot tear himself away from. That is why true artists scorn nothing: they are obliged to understand rather than to judge.

The earliest paintings I loved were always the most non-referential paintings you can imagine, by painters such as Mondrian. I was thrilled by them because they didn’t refer to anything else. They stood alone, and they were just charged magic objects that did not get their strength from being connected to anything else.

A work of art is the unique result of a unique temperament.

It is only an auctioneer who can equally and impartially admire all schools of art.

Surrealism had a great effect on me because then I realised that the imagery in my mind wasn’t insanity. Surrealism to me is reality.

Art should never try to be popular. The public should try to make itself artistic.

Art is not a thing; it is a way.

In art, the hand can never execute anything higher than the heart can imagine.

The art which we may call generally art of the wayside, as opposed to that which is the business of men’s lives, is, in the best sense of the word, Grotesque.

At the beginning of the 20th century, the ambition of the great painters was to make paintings that were like music, which was then considered as the noblest art.

Art! Who comprehends her? With whom can one consult concerning this great goddess?

Like music and art, love of nature is a common language that can transcend political or social boundaries.

We write for the same reason that we walk, talk, climb mountains or swim the oceans – because we can. We have some impulse within us that makes us want to explain ourselves to other human beings. That’s why we paint, that’s why we dare to love someone – because we have the impulse to explain who we are.

Friendship is unnecessary, like philosophy, like art… It has no survival value; rather it is one of those things that give value to survival.

True art is characterized by an irresistible urge in the creative artist.

Find a beautiful piece of art. If you fall in love with Van Gogh or Matisse or John Oliver Killens, or if you fall love with the music of Coltrane, the music of Aretha Franklin, or the music of Chopin – find some beautiful art and admire it, and realize that that was created by human beings just like you, no more human, no less.

For art to exist, for any sort of aesthetic activity to exist, a certain physiological precondition is indispensable: intoxication.

It is better to imitate ancient than modern work.

I felt I really wanted to back off from music completely and just work within the visual arts in some way. I started painting quite passionately at that time.

Nothing is capable of being well set to music that is not nonsense.

One of the things you’re doing when you make art, apart from entertaining yourself and other people, is trying to see what ways of working feel good, what feels right.

It seems almost backwards to me that my music seems the more emotional outlet, and the art stuff seems more about ideas.

A work of art that contains theories is like an object on which the price tag has been left.

Art consists of limitation. The most beautiful part of every picture is the frame.

I am Warhol. I am the No. 1 most impactful artist of our generation. I am Shakespeare in the flesh.

The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and science.

Myth and fairy-story must, as all art, reflect and contain in solution elements of moral and religious truth (or error), but not explicit, not in the known form of the primary ‚real‘ world.

I think most of the people involved in any art always secretly wonder whether they are really there because they’re good or there because they’re lucky.

The highest art is always the most religious, and the greatest artist is always a devout person.

Every man lives in two realms: the internal and the external. The internal is that realm of spiritual ends expressed in art, literature, morals, and religion. The external is that complex of devices, techniques, mechanisms, and instrumentalities by means of which we live.

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

A guilty conscience needs to confess. A work of art is a confession.

All good art is an indiscretion.

Art is always and everywhere the secret confession, and at the same time the immortal movement of its time.

I wish I could make music about politics. I feel like it’s such an art and a talent that I admire tremendously, but when I step into the studio, I step out of the real world, and it’s therapeutic.

In the first book of my Discworld series, published more than 26 years ago, I introduced Death as a character; there was nothing particularly new about this – death has featured in art and literature since medieval times, and for centuries we have had a fascination with the Grim Reaper.

In this quest to seek and find God in all things, there is still an area of uncertainty. There must be. If a person says that he met God with total certainty and is not touched by a margin of uncertainty, then this is not good.

The job of art is to chase ugliness away.

All great art is the work of the whole living creature, body and soul, and chiefly of the soul.

Until I began to learn to draw, I was never much interested in looking at art.

One thing I know: the only ones among you who will be really happy are those who will have sought and found how to serve.

Glorious bouquets and storms of applause are the trimmings which every artist naturally enjoys.

I create stars.

With all due respect, the Mona Lisa is overrated.

I believe that economics is based on scarcity of markets. And it’s possible to monetize your art without compromising the integrity of it for commerce.

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.

He who possesses art and science has religion; he who does not possess them, needs religion.

Music helps me tell my story. That’s where I can really be heard. But there’s so much focus on the things that aren’t music.

There’s no art to find the mind’s construction in the face.

It is not sufficient to see and to know the beauty of a work. We must feel and be affected by it.

I wanted very much to learn to draw, for a reason that I kept to myself: I wanted to convey an emotion I have about the beauty of the world.

If art is to nourish the roots of our culture, society must set the artist free to follow his vision wherever it takes him.

Without art, the crudeness of reality would make the world unbearable.

The bad gains respect through imitation, the good loses it especially in art.

Painting, I think it’s like jazz.

Art was, seriously, the only thing I’d ever wanted to own. It has always been for me a stable nourishment. I use it. It can change the way that I feel in the mornings.

I like having my hands in the clay. I like the movie-making process.