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.

Great art is the contempt of a great man for small art.

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.

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!

You have to believe in your process. You have to believe in the things that you are doing to help the team win. I think you have to take the good with the bad.

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

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

I call architecture frozen music.

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.

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.

Acting is just a process of relaxation, actually. Knowing the text so well and trusting that the instinct and the subconscious mind, whatever you want to call it, is going to take over.

Dancing is a perpendicular expression of a horizontal desire.

Without tradition, art is a flock of sheep without a shepherd. Without innovation, it is a corpse.

Any good piece of material like Shakespeare ought to be open to reinterpretation.

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

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.

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

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.

It is extremely difficult to say how long the process actually took to finally achieve my fragrance, Boudoir, because there was a lot of time waiting around for other people.

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

I’m rather kind of old school, thinking that when an artist does his work, it’s no longer his… I just see what people make of it.

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.

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

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.

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.

Sleeping is no mean art: for its sake one must stay awake all day.

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

A critic should be taught to criticise a work of art without making any reference to the personality of the author.

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.

A beautiful body perishes, but a work of art dies not.

There is only one position for an artist anywhere; and that is upright.

Painting, I think it’s like jazz.

I think you get most of the most interesting work done in fields where people don’t think they’re doing art but are merely practicing a craft and working as good craftsmen. Being literate as a writer is good craft, is knowing your job, is knowing how to use your tools properly and not to damage the tools as you use them.

I went into the business for the money, and the art grew out of it. If people are disillusioned by that remark, I can’t help it. It’s the truth.

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

Great nations write their autobiographies in three manuscripts – the book of their deeds, the book of their words and the book of their art.

Well, Art is Art, isn’t it? Still, on the other hand, water is water. And east is east and west is west and if you take cranberries and stew them like applesauce they taste much more like prunes than rhubarb does. Now you tell me what you know.

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

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

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

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

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

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

My focus is my art, and that’s what I love to do. I have to be really passionate in order to do something. I’ve turned down many things that I just didn’t believe in.

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.

I love all of the arts. I love motion pictures. I love stage. I love theater.

I went to the museum where they had all the heads and arms from the statues that are in all the other museums.

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.

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?

Europe is so well gardened that it resembles a work of art, a scientific theory, a neat metaphysical system. Man has re-created Europe in his own image.

The arts have only ever interested a small minority of people, which acted as a kind of nursery to support artists.

Drawing is the honesty of the art. There is no possibility of cheating. It is either good or bad.

To destroy is always the first step in any creation.

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.

We have listened too long to the courtly Muses of Europe.

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.

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

One science only will one genius fit; so vast is art, so narrow human wit.

It is not the language of painters but the language of nature which one should listen to, the feeling for the things themselves, for reality is more important than the feeling for pictures.

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

All nature is but art unknown to thee.