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

I have Dalinian thought: the one thing the world will never have enough of is the outrageous.

The true art of memory is the art of attention.

Diplomacy is the art of saying ‚Nice doggie‘ until you can find a rock.

Beautiful music is the art of the prophets that can calm the agitations of the soul; it is one of the most magnificent and delightful presents God has given us.

The art of living is more like wrestling than dancing.

If you do things, whether it’s acting or music or painting, do it without fear – that’s my philosophy. Because nobody can arrest you and put you in jail if you paint badly, so there’s nothing to lose.

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

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

Whatever must happen ultimately should happen immediately.

Beauty is also submitted to the taste of time, so a beautiful woman from the Belle Epoch is not exactly the perfect beauty of today, so beauty is something that changes with time.

Dancing is a perpendicular expression of a horizontal desire.

Human self-understanding changes with time, and so also human consciousness deepens.

I don’t have stylistic loyalty. That’s why people perceive me changing all the time. But there is a real continuity in my subject matter. As an artist of artifice, I do believe I have more integrity than any one of my contemporaries.

With all due respect, the Mona Lisa is overrated.

Art, like morality, consists in drawing the line somewhere.

The true artist is not proud: he unfortunately sees that art has no limits; he feels darkly how far he is from the goal, and though he may be admired by others, he is sad not to have reached that point to which his better genius only appears as a distant, guiding sun.

Love of beauty is taste. The creation of beauty is art.

Which painting in the National Gallery would I save if there was a fire? The one nearest the door of course.

There is never time in the future in which we will work out our salvation. The challenge is in the moment; the time is always now.

Death is a commingling of eternity with time; in the death of a good man, eternity is seen looking through time.

I think there’s a lot of similarity between what people try to do with religion with what they want from art. In fact, I very specifically think that they are same thing. Not that religion and art are the same, but that they both tap into the same need we have for surrender.

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.

I left the woods for as good a reason as I went there. Perhaps it seemed to me that I had several more lives to live and could not spare any more time for that one.

I do some kind of work, whether writing or painting or recording, on a daily basis. And it’s so essential that when I’m involved in the actual process, my so-called ‚real life‘ becomes almost incidental, which becomes worrying.

Forever is composed of nows.

I have been very interested and intrigued and congratulatory toward President Bush and his paintings.

It seemed like a very small possibility for me to become an artist. I didn’t have the need to be on the stage; I didn’t feel the need to be heard. I just needed to write.

I have come to believe that a great teacher is a great artist and that there are as few as there are any other great artists. Teaching might even be the greatest of the arts since the medium is the human mind and spirit.

Next to the Word of God, the noble art of music is the greatest treasure in the world.

Any artist, the work you do, if it’s a painting or if it’s a performance, you hope it translates to a common denominator with the people that they see something in their own life in there. Or they see something in somebody else’s life. That’s what’s fun about sharing art.

Yesterday’s weirdness is tomorrow’s reason why.

Frank Lloyd Wright… his things were beautiful but not very functional.

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.

It is not your paintings I like, it is your painting.

No person who is not a great sculptor or painter can be an architect. If he is not a sculptor or painter, he can only be a builder.

Perhaps it’s good for one to suffer. Can an artist do anything if he’s happy? Would he ever want to do anything? What is art, after all, but a protest against the horrible inclemency of life?

If I shall exist eternally, how shall I exist tomorrow?

Art is not a treasure in the past or an importation from another land, but part of the present life of all living and creating peoples.

We are at the very beginning of time for the human race. It is not unreasonable that we grapple with problems. But there are tens of thousands of years in the future. Our responsibility is to do what we can, learn what we can, improve the solutions, and pass them on.

Rhetoric may be defined as the faculty of observing in any given case the available means of persuasion. This is not a function of any other art.

We have art in order not to die of the truth.

It is better to imitate ancient than modern work.

I learned about serif and san serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great. It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can’t capture, and I found it fascinating.

I think a poet is anybody who wouldn’t call himself a poet.

I don’t know how much longer I’ll be around. I’ll probably be writing when the Lord says, ‚Maya, Maya Angelou, it’s time.‘

If being an egomaniac means I believe in what I do and in my art or music, then in that respect you can call me that… I believe in what I do, and I’ll say it.

Long before history began we men have got together apart from the women and done things. We had time.

People look to time in expectation that it will eventually make them happy, but you cannot find true happiness by looking toward the future.

Glance into the world just as though time were gone: and everything crooked will become straight to you.

The critic has to educate the public; the artist has to educate the critic.

Music is like film to me.

Without freedom, no art; art lives only on the restraints it imposes on itself, and dies of all others.

Wherever the art of medicine is loved, there is also a love of humanity.

Bullfighting is the only art in which the artist is in danger of death and in which the degree of brilliance in the performance is left to the fighter’s honor.

Politics is the art of controlling your environment.

Before 1915, space and time were thought of as a fixed arena in which events took place, but which was not affected by what happened in it. Space and time are now dynamic quantities… space and time not only affect but are also affected by everything that happens in the universe.

I am not ashamed to confess that I am ignorant of what I do not know.

Life is short, the art long.

All nature is but art unknown to thee.

Some of the stories I admire seem to zero in on one particular time and place. There isn’t a rule about this. But there’s a tidy sense about many stories I read. In my own work, I tend to cover a lot of time and to jump back and forward in time, and sometimes the way I do this is not very straightforward.