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

For it is mutual trust, even more than mutual interest that holds human associations together. Our friends seldom profit us but they make us feel safe. Marriage is a scheme to accomplish exactly that same end.

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

Deliberate violence is more to be quenched than a fire.

A work of art that contains theories is like an object on which the price tag has been left.

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.

There is no way I would ask others to go on a Virgin Galactic flight if I didn’t feel it was safe enough for myself.

For art to exist, for any sort of aesthetic activity to exist, a certain physiological precondition is indispensable: intoxication.

It is in this power of saying everything, and yet saying nothing too plainly, that the perfection of art consists.

I never look at my watch when I’m sketching!

When you come to see a picture of mine, I want you to know that I’m not going to do anything that will make you uncomfortable. I want you to know that you won’t be disappointed in me.

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

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.

Behold, at this hour our moral history is being preserved for eternity. Processes are at work which will perpetuate our every act and word and thought.

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.

Art is to be free. Design is to fix.

Music is the art of the prophets and the gift of God.

I was very into making the Big Artistic Statement – it had to be innovative; it had to be cutting edge. I was desperately keen on being original.

I’ve always hated the danger part of climbing, and it’s great to come down again because it’s safe.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

In a country with millions of people and cars going everywhere, the enemy is going to get a car bomb out there once in awhile.

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.

I wish I could make music about politics. I feel like it’s such an art and a talent that I admire tremendously, but when I step into the studio, I step out of the real world, and it’s therapeutic.

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 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.

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.

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

What medicines do not heal, the lance will; what the lance does not heal, fire will.

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

The momentous thing in human life is the art of winning the soul to good or evil.

Genius creates, and taste preserves. Taste is the good sense of genius; without taste, genius is only sublime folly.

In its primary aspect, a painting has no more spiritual message than an exquisite fragment of Venetian glass. The channels by which all noble and imaginative work in painting should touch the soul are not those of the truths of lives.

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.

At the beginning of the 20th century, the ambition of the great painters was to make paintings that were like music, which was then considered as the noblest art.

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

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

We sleep safe in our beds because rough men stand ready in the night to visit violence on those who would do us harm.

Basically what I’m trying to tell you is that it’s almost impossible to drive a jet ski at night time unless you’re in a city with lights lit up so you can navigate. Besides being pitch black, that water turn black at night. Listen, I don’t recommend it.

In too much of the West, everyone wants the guarantee of safety, and never having to make any decisions.

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

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

Why not invest in the future of music, instead of building fortresses to preserve its past?

Music comes to me more readily than words.

Life imitates art far more than art imitates Life.

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.

My paintings have gotten to be pretty popular and I’ve taken a little bit more interest in painting the last few years. In fact, my novel that I wrote not too long ago, ‚The Hornet’s Nest,‘ I painted the cover picture for it and I do a good bit of painting now.

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

You don’t have to be a renowned artist like Q-Tip to try your hand at poetry. You don’t need any special equipment – that’s the beauty of it.

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.

All art is but imitation of nature.

The coward only threatens when he is safe.

One of the things you’re doing when you make art, apart from entertaining yourself and other people, is trying to see what ways of working feel good, what feels right.

So comes snow after fire, and even dragons have their ending!

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

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

I never thought much of the courage of a lion tamer. Inside the cage he is at least safe from people.

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?