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.

Technology is destructive only in the hands of people who do not realize that they are one and the same process as the universe.

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.

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.

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

So vast is art, so narrow human wit.

It’s not easy to define poetry.

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

When I do a picture and it’s 90% black, like ‚Bird,‘ I use 90% black people.

Art is making something out of nothing and selling it.

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

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

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.

To be able to endure odium is the first art to be learned by those who aspire to power.

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.

Masterpieces are not single and solitary births; they are the outcome of many years of thinking in common, of thinking by the body of the people, so that the experience of the mass is behind the single voice.

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.

Music is this divine thing, the closest that we can get to something divine. It’s like this instinct we all own, and some of us have found a way to hear that music and write it down and share it with people.

Like a pianist runs her fingers over the keys, I’ll search my mind for what to say. Now, the poem may want you to write it. And then sometimes you see a situation and think, ‚I’d like to write about that.‘ Those are two different ways of being approached by a poem, or approaching a poem.

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

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

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.

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

Art’s everything we hope life would be, a lot of times.

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.

This world is but a canvas to our imagination.

Homer has taught all other poets the art of telling lies skillfully.

All art is at once surface and symbol. Those who go beneath the surface do so at their peril. Those who read the symbol do so at their peril. It is the spectator, and not life, that art really mirrors. Diversity of opinion about a work of art shows that the work is new, complex and vital.

I’m born with a pencil in my hand. I did lots of sketching.

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

I was always interested in choreography – in making people think and feel something.

I am an anarchist in politics and an impressionist in art as well as a symbolist in literature. Not that I understand what these terms mean, but I take them to be all merely synonyms of pessimist.

Real art is basic emotion. If a scene is handled with simplicity – and I don’t mean simple – it’ll be good, and the public will know it.

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.

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

A masterpiece is something said once and for all, stated, finished, so that it’s there complete in the mind, if only at the back.

Politics is the art of controlling your environment.

The true art of memory is the art of attention.

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

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

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.

Art is going to make a bigger comeback than ever. That’s the upside to things getting challenging.

I had rather see the portrait of a dog that I know, than all the allegorical paintings they can show me in the world.

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

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

I could hardly sit through ‚Frozen.‘ There was an attempt to craft a moral message and to build the story around that, instead of building the story and letting the moral message emerge. It was the subjugation of art to propaganda, in my estimation.

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.‘

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

There is no rule on how to write. Sometimes it comes easily and perfectly; sometimes it’s like drilling rock and then blasting it out with charges.

Every bit of me is devoted to love and art. And I aspire to try to be a teacher to my young fans who feel just like I felt when I was younger. I just felt like a freak. I guess what I’m trying to say is I’m trying to liberate them, I want to free them of their fears and make them feel that they can make their own space in the world.

All nature is but art unknown to thee.

With all due respect, the Mona Lisa is overrated.

Every day we should hear at least one little song, read one good poem, see one exquisite picture, and, if possible, speak a few sensible words.

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.

Music comes to me more readily than words.

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

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.

Art is the proper task of life.

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

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.

The painter who draws merely by practice and by eye, without any reason, is like a mirror which copies every thing placed in front of it without being conscious of their existence.