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I have put my talent into writing, my genius I have saved for living.
— OSCAR WILDE
I don't want to achieve immortality through my work. I want to achieve it by not dying.
— WOODY ALLEN
The greatest enemy of art is the absence of Limitation.
— ORSON WELLES
A ballerina's life can be glorious. But it does not get any easier. I don't think anyone must ever think about it getting easier.
— ALICA MARKOVA
I can't teach you to be an artist; all I can do is help you learn to see.
— J. P. LOVELESS
We don't make these pictures to make money. We make money so that we can make more pictures.
— WALT DISNEY
For these few days the hills are bright with cherry blossom. Longer, and we should not prize them so.
— YAMABE NO AKAHITO
How do people get rich? I started out in life asking this question. Whenever I saw a rich person I would ask where their money was from, and invariably, or should I say inevitably, the answer was a natural resource, or else an unnatural resource. Oil would be a common answer, or real estate, or steel--this was before computers. The answer was never the answer you wanted to hear. The answer was never "Poetry--their money's from poetry, Fran." Or "That's one of the great essay fortunes in this country." Or "You know, he's the biggest epigram magnate in Europe." And so I learned that I was not in the moneymaking end of the money-making business."
— FRAN LEBOWITZ on MONEY, from Vanity Fair July 1997.
As for techniques and processes, as seen in the works themselves, neither public nor artists will find anything about them here. Those things are learned in the studio and the public is interested only in the results.
— CHARLES BAUDELAIRE, "The Salon of 1846"
At times inactivity is preferable to mindless functioning.
— JENNY HOLZER
Creativity is a commodity that must be paid for.
— STANLEY MARCUS
An artist cannot speak about his art any more than a plant can discuss horticulture.
— JEAN COCTEAU
An artist is a creature driven by demons. He doesn't know why they chose him and is usually too busy to wonder why.
— WILLIAM FAULKNER
The night of which I speak is not to be confused with the night which Freud invited his patients to enter. Freud was a modest housebreaker: he absconded with a few mediocre pieces of furniture and some erotic photographs. He never consecrated the abnormal as a transcendence; nor did he hail the great disorders. He devised a confessional for bores.
— JEAN COCTEAU
I shall never forget what I saw at the Museum of Modern Art: in a spotless schoolroom, fifty little girls painting away at tables covered with brushes, pots, tubes, bowls, staring into space and sticking out their tongues like the clever animals that ring a bell, tongues lolling and eyes vague. Teachers supervise these young creators of abstract art and slap their wrists if what they paint represents something and dangerously inclines toward realism. The mothers (still at the Picasso stage) are not admitted.
— JEAN COCTEAU (in New York)
It takes a very long time to become young.
— PICASSO
There are poets and grownups.
— JEAN COCTEAU
I want the kind of readers who remain children at any cost. I can tell them at a glance: loyalty to that first enchantment guards better than any cosmetic; than any diet, against the insults of age. But alas for such readers, who would huddle safe and sound in the asylum of their credulous enchantment as if in the womb-our enervating century offends them by its chaos, its fidgets of light and space, the host of its excuses for dividing , for rending oneself from others and from oneself.
— JEAN COCTEAU
At Kobe, the first sight which catches my eye is a little girl playing hopscotch. This five-year old chalks on the sidewalk the perfect circle with which Hokusai signed his letters. Having completed this masterpiece, she hops off, sticking out her tongue. I should like to take away that circle. It yields up, at our first step, the secret of the Nipponese soul. That calm like the solemn silence of the Meiji temple park, that laborious patience, that sureness of eye and hand, that clarity and cleanliness grant us either this miraculous woodwork or all the junk flooding the European market.
— JEAN COCTEAU (on a trip to Japan)
There is a case for saying that the creation of new aesthetic forms has been the most fundamentally productive of all forms of human activity. Whoever creates new artistic conventions has found methods of interchange between people about matters which were incommunicable before. The capacity to do this has been the basis of the whole of human history.
— J. Z. YOUNG (from the book, "Art & Physics" by Leonard Schlain)
The artist is the antenna of the race.
— EZRA POUND (from the book, "Art & Physics" by Leonard Schlain)
A new painting is a unique event, a birth, which enriches the universe as it is grasped by the human mind, by bringing a new form into it.
— HENRI MATISSE
All the fun's in how you say a thing.
— ROBERT FROST
The man who has no inner life is a slave to his surroundings.
— HENRI-FREDERIC AMEIL
You have to trust your instincts. There is a moment when an actor has it, and he knows it.
— CLINT EASTWOOD
As soon as there is life, there is danger.
— RALPH WALDO EMERSON
From an interview with Donald Sultan by Julie L. Belcove: "A giant squash?" the painter asks referring to one of the (huge yellow and black) abstract still lifes hanging in his spacious TriBeCa studio. "It's not about being a giant squash. It's about confronting color and material while also confronting the seeming permanence of objects." To those who might say, "I could paint that," Sultan responds, "That's true. I could fix a sink, but I don't." "Art is meant to cause these kinds of dialogs. It's doing its job. A dentist's job is not to cause pain-that's an artist's job.
— DONALD SULTAN
That abominable and sensual act called reading the newspaper, thanks to which all the misfortunes and cataclysms in the universe over the last twenty-four hours, the battles which cost the lives of fifty-thousand men, the murders, the strikes, the bankruptcies, the fires, the poisonings, the suicides, the divorces, the cruel emotions of statesmen and actors, are transformed for us, who don't even care, into a morning treat, blending in wonderfully, in a particularly exciting and tonic way, with the recommended ingestion of a few sips of cafe au lait.
— MARCEL PROUST
My little Renoirs. Matisse describes having seen Renoir make these tiny canvases. When he had finished working, he would use up the color left in his brushes on them. It is true that the tourists collect the earth from his Cagnes garden and that the Americans would pay a lot for his paint rags.
— JEAN COCTEAU from the Cocteau Diaries, Volume One
Continue reading Proust. His magnificent intelligence is particularly fond of describing stupidity. Which is ultimately exhausting.
— JEAN COCTEAU from the Cocteau Diaries, Volume One
Keep braiding one's wavelengths back into oneself. That way they gain all the more external power and surround us with a huge affective and protective zone. Don't talk about this. Never talk about our secret methods. If we talk about them, they stop working.
— JEAN COCTEAU from the Cocteau Diaries, Volume One
Our vanity, our passions, our spirit of imitation, our abstract intelligence, our habits have long been at work, and it is the task of art to undo this work of theirs, making us travel back in the direction from which we have come to the depths where what has really existed lies unknown within us.
— MARCEL PROUST
Friendship is in the end no more than: " . . . a lie which seeks to make us believe that we are not irremediably alone."
— MARCEL PROUST
The artist who gives up an hour of work for an hour of conversation with a friend knows that he is sacrificing a reality for something that does not exist (our friends being friends only in the light of an agreeable folly which travels with us through life and to which we readily accommodate ourselves, but which at the bottom of our hearts we know to be no more reasonable than the delusion of the man who talks to the furniture because he believes that it is alive.).
— MARCEL PROUST
"Conversation, which is friendship's mode of expression, is a superficial digression which gives us nothing worth acquiring. We may talk for a lifetime without doing more than indefinitely repeat the vacuity of a minute."
— MARCEL PROUST
Through the last few decades it [the art object] has been ripped off the wall and twisted through every conceivable permutation, yet back to the wall it insists on going.
— ASHLEY BICKERTON
One reads poetry with one's nerves.
— WALLACE STEVENS
The most astonishing quality of abstract painting is indeed
its capacity to formulate what is still unknown or new--although
everything refers to the canon of forms that exist in the
world. The more beautiful and surprising a painting is, the
more staggering are the associations it sets free. On the
other hand, details from baroque or medieval Persian paintings
can also evoke or be seen as abstraction. I believe in the
richness and beauty of the human intellect and in its ability
to understand the unknown and strange. I accordingly believe
that there are more possibilities than simply plundering the
archives of paintings and combining their elements, piling
them on one another. Beauty through confusion; truth through
collision!
— DANIEL RICHTER, German abstract painter
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