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

History has proven that each generation of Howard graduates will forge the way forward for our country and our world.

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.

There is in me an anarchy and frightful disorder. Creating makes me die a thousand deaths, because it means making order, and my entire being rebels against order. But without it I would die, scattered to the winds.

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 mediator of the inexpressible is the work of art.

The art of government is the organisation of idolatry.

Don’t only practice your art, but force your way into its secrets; art deserves that, for it and knowledge can raise man to the Divine.

I must be cruel, only to be kind.

Nothing can come of nothing.

The essence of all beautiful art, all great art, is gratitude.

While we look to the dramatist to give romance to realism, we ask of the actor to give realism to romance.

I have no interest in Shakespeare and all that British nonsense… I just wanted to get famous and all the rest is hogwash.

Yes, there is a terrible moral in ‚Dorian Gray‘ – a moral which the prurient will not be able to find in it, but it will be revealed to all whose minds are healthy. Is this an artistic error? I fear it is. It is the only error in the book.

What I’ve discovered is that in art, as in music, there’s a lot of truth-and then there’s a lie. The artist is essentially creating his work to make this lie a truth, but he slides it in amongst all the others. The tiny little lie is the moment I live for, my moment. It’s the moment that the audience falls in love.

Rhetoric is the art of ruling the minds of men.

I think it is perfectly natural for any artist to admire intensely and love a young man. It is an incident in the life of almost every artist.

Art is the proper task of life.

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

Paintings have a life of their own that derives from the painter’s soul.

My work as an artist is completely separate from my work as a philanthropist.

Every picture has its own demands, and every picture stimulates something within you to tell it a certain way. I don’t know what that is; I don’t think too much about that.

In a budget, how important is art versus music versus athletics versus computer programming? At the end of the day, some of those trade-offs will be made politically.

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

I call architecture frozen music.

I think the idea of art kills creativity.

I’ve just finished my 20th book this past year and I’m working on my 21st book about the Middle East right now that I’ll finish this year. And I get up early in the morning and when I get tired of the computer and tired of doing research, I walk 20 steps out to my woodshop and I either build furniture or paint paintings. I’m an artist too.

We may consider each generation as a distinct nation, with a right, by the will of its majority, to bind themselves, but none to bind the succeeding generation, more than the inhabitants of another country.

For this generation, ours, life is nuclear survival, liberty is human rights, the pursuit of happiness is a planet whose resources are devoted to the physical and spiritual nourishment of its inhabitants.

Religion is essentially the art and the theory of the remaking of man. Man is not a finished creation.

Deliver me from writers who say the way they live doesn’t matter. I’m not sure a bad person can write a good book, If art doesn’t make us better, then what on earth is it for.

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

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

As an artist, as a brand, as a rapper, as a musician, you know you got a window and a lot of people, even an athlete; they don’t have no exit strategy. It’s just living in the false reality that it’s going to be like this forever.

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.

An author ought to write for the youth of his own generation, the critics of the next, and the schoolmaster of ever afterwards.

It is through art, and through art only, that we can realise our perfection.

Guilt is cancer. Guilt will confine you, torture you, destroy you as an artist. It’s a black wall. It’s a thief.

Thirty-three-years-old, still creating art. It’s rage, it’s creativity, it’s pain, it’s hurt, but it’s the opportunity to still have my voice get out there through music.

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.

There’s something about being in front of a live audience that’s fun. It’s a really interesting, very electric, very alive, and intense experience, and you can’t get it anywhere else. And I’ve been doing it since I was 23, so it’s part of my being – it’s part of my fabric as a person.

O, you men who think or say that I am malevolent, stubborn or misanthropic, how greatly do you wrong me. You do not know the secret cause which makes me seem that way to you, and I would have ended my life – it was only my art that held me back. Ah, it seemed impossible to leave the world until I had brought forth all that I felt was within me.

O! Let me not be mad, not mad, sweet heaven; keep me in temper; I would not be mad!

I am an artist, and I have the ability and the free will to choose the way the world will envision me.

I’m the king of the anthems.

This is not writing at all. Indeed, I could say that Shakespeare surpasses literature altogether, if I knew what I meant.

We were the first generation to have to deal with the modern stardom of football. Some handled it better than others.

Every portrait that is painted with feeling is a portrait of the artist, not of the sitter.

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.

All art is but imitation of nature.

Technique is really personality. That is the reason why the artist cannot teach it, why the pupil cannot learn it, and why the aesthetic critic can understand it.

Music was an experience, intimately married to your life. You could pay to hear music, but after you did, it was over, gone – a memory.

Artistic temperament is the disease that afflicts amateurs.

I’m not a very creative person, you know? I’m not really an art person. I’m not a great reader or writer or artist or musician.

Every man, and for stronger reasons, every artist, wants to be recognized. So do I.

If you had a million Shakespeares, could they write like a monkey?

Each morning when I awake, I experience again a supreme pleasure – that of being Salvador Dali.

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.

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

At my advanced age – I’m now an octogenarian – I’m constantly amazed by the number of people who want to take my picture.