The little may contrast with the great, in painting, but cannot be said to be contrary to it. Oppositions of colors contrast; but there are also colors contrary to each other, that is, which produce an ill effect because they shock the eye when brought very near it.

The aim of art is to represent not the outward appearance of things, but their inward significance.

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.

The whole aspect of cinema and film festivals should be a moment to come together and celebrate art and humanity. It would be a shame if there was such a divide.

No good is ever done to society by the pictorial representation of its diseases.

White… is not a mere absence of colour; it is a shining and affirmative thing, as fierce as red, as definite as black… God paints in many colours; but He never paints so gorgeously, I had almost said so gaudily, as when He paints in white.

Ankles are nearly always neat and good-looking, but knees are nearly always not.

I liked watching Rossi, his style, his colours and everything. He was someone I looked up to and until now he is still my only hero. He is the king of motorbikes and most people like Rossi mainly because he comes across as a pretty fun and good character. He is cool and has a good style and look.

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.

I suppose for me as an artist it wasn’t always just about expressing my work; I really wanted, more than anything else, to contribute in some way to the culture that I was living in. It just seemed like a challenge to move it a little bit towards the way I thought it might be interesting to go.

Genres aren’t closed boxes. Stuff flows back and forth across the borders all the time.

Music belongs to the people. To no one else. To no one else.

No art can be noble which is incapable of expressing thought, and no art is capable of expressing thought which does not change.

Art is the beautiful way of doing things. Science is the effective way of doing things. Business is the economic way of doing things.

I don’t think I’d ever apologise for music I make, no.

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.

Bad people are, from the point of view of art, fascinating studies. They represent colour, variety and strangeness. Good people exasperate one’s reason; bad people stir one’s imagination.

Art is the most intense mode of individualism that the world has known.

To affect the quality of the day, that is the highest of arts.

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

No Government can be long secure without a formidable Opposition.

The beginnings and ends of shadow lie between the light and darkness and may be infinitely diminished and infinitely increased. Shadow is the means by which bodies display their form. The forms of bodies could not be understood in detail but for shadow.

The art is long, life is short.

I draw from the crowd a lot.

It was one of those March days when the sun shines hot and the wind blows cold: when it is summer in the light, and winter in the shade.

There is a thin line that separates laughter and pain, comedy and tragedy, humor and hurt.

Were I called on to define, very briefly, the term Art, I should call it ‚the reproduction of what the Senses perceive in Nature through the veil of the soul.‘ The mere imitation, however accurate, of what is in Nature, entitles no man to the sacred name of ‚Artist.‘

There is only one step from the sublime to the ridiculous.

Music is not math. It’s science. You keep mixing the stuff up until it blows up on you, or it becomes this incredible potion.

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.

Painting is concerned with all the 10 attributes of sight; which are: Darkness, Light, Solidity and Colour, Form and Position, Distance and Propinquity, Motion and Rest.

The very word ‚secrecy‘ is repugnant in a free and open society; and we are as a people inherently and historically opposed to secret societies, to secret oaths, and to secret proceedings.

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

A first-rate soup is more creative than a second-rate painting.

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

There is a rollicking kindness that looks like malice.

All art is quite useless.

A fool’s brain digests philosophy into folly, science into superstition, and art into pedantry. Hence University education.

Music, in performance, is a type of sculpture. The air in the performance is sculpted into something.

Art is man’s expression of his joy in labor.

I believe in sketching because there is something very sensitive in sketching, you know, in sketches that you don’t have out of a computer that looks the same like everybody even if, later on, the dresses are OK, but I like to sketch, and I like to see trails made after my sketches that look the same. It is you know, what I like.

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.

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.

Opposition brings concord. Out of discord comes the fairest harmony.

Art is parasitic on life, just as criticism is parasitic on art.

Obviously, the cinematography of films is art, just as a still shot can be art. If I’m watching a Wes Anderson movie, the colour palettes alone, and the way they’re painted, could be art. With music, you’re a little bit limited, of course, because it’s only audio.

Admiration for a quality or an art can be so strong that it deters us from striving to possess it.

This world is but a canvas to our imagination.

Poetry is the art of substantiating shadows, and of lending existence to nothing.

Art is not merely an imitation of the reality of nature, but in truth a metaphysical supplement to the reality of nature, placed alongside thereof for its conquest.

I’ve always been amazed by Da Vinci, because he worked out science on his own. He would work by drawing things and writing down his ideas. Of course, he designed all sorts of flying machines way before you could actually build something like that.

There are goods so opposed that we cannot seize both, but, by too much prudence, may pass between them at too great a distance to reach either.

When art dresses in worn-out material it is most easily recognized as art.

I call architecture frozen music.

The art of acting consists in keeping people from coughing.

I got a signed document from Bullock’s saying that they had such-and-such drawings on consignment. Of course, nobody bought any of them, but otherwise, I was a big success: I had my drawings on sale at Bullock’s!

To correct a natural indifference I was placed half-way between misery and the sun. Misery kept me from believing that all was well under the sun, and the sun taught me that history wasn’t everything.

The true art of memory is the art of attention.

In the US, there is basically one party – the business party. It has two factions, called Democrats and Republicans, which are somewhat different but carry out variations on the same policies. By and large, I am opposed to those policies. As is most of the population.

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 best part of beauty is that which no picture can express.