Top 1200 Quotes & Sayings by Famous Artists - Page 17

There's really no differentiation between the work I make and the world I live in.

I stand for mandatory toothbrushing laws.

You've got to let it go and say it was the best I could do at that time and place in my life. You hope that the thing you're doing next is a little bit better.

When I see a white piece of paper, I feel I've got to draw. And drawing, for me, is the beginning of everything.

Many of my old friends are gone now. I have a hard time dealing with the fact that they're just not there to talk to. I can't call them up for a rabbit-skin glue recipe anymore.

Being a dandy is a condition rather than a profession. It is a defense against suffering and a celebration of life.

At the end of the day, I'm an artist. I may make work and decide to do something political, but it will come out of an artist's position. It won't come out of society telling me I have to. If I do, it's because I choose, as an artist, to do it.

We want to take our time with 'Descender' and let the story unfold at its own pace. But we have carefully planned each world and worked to give each its own look and feel. And each of the 9 core worlds will play a role in the series.

Seeing is no longer believing. The very notion of truth has been put into crisis. In a world bloated with images, we are finally learning that photographs do indeed lie.

Are you really sure that a floor can't also be a ceiling?

3. When he smiles at you, sometimes you feel like crying.

In order to build a career and to be successful, one has to be determined. One has to be ambitious. I much prefer to drink coffee, listen to music, and to paint when I feel like it.

Usually when someone says a thing is too simple, they're saying that certain familiar things aren't there, and they're seeing a couple maybe that are left, which they count as a couple, that's all.

A tree growing out of the ground is as wonderful today as it ever was. It does not need to adopt new and startling methods.

When Princess Diana died, I couldn't understand why people were mourning her death in such an enormous, hysterical way when they didn't actually know her for real.

There are ways to speak that can transform things, which has less to do with authority but is more about resourcefulness and ingenuity.

I like observing intelligent people who have expertise in areas I'm mostly ignorant about.

I try to make images that have the immediate presence we take for granted in objects - a chair, a shoe, a book, a Judd - and compose them like sentences.

I have forced myself to contradict myself in order to avoid conforming to my own taste.

It is all very well to copy what one sees, but it is far better to draw what one now only sees in one's memory. That is a transformation in which imagination collaborates with memory.

Color is the keyboard, the eyes are the harmonies, the soul is the piano with many strings. The artist is the hand that plays, touching one key or another, to cause vibrations in the soul.

I think we're much smarter than we were. Everybody knows that abstract art can be art, and most people know that they may not like it, even if they understand there's another purpose to it.

I have always just made things. I don't see what I make as being defined by a medium or aesthetic. It probably comes more from a fundamental restlessness, an attempt to create tools for questioning or understanding, and I have always been interested in using a wide spectrum of mediums to do this.

The founding fathers of the U.S. were right when they erected that wall between church and state.

Vision connects you. But it also separates you. In my work, and my life, I feel a desire to merge. Not in terms of losing my own identity... but there's a feeling that life is interconnected, that there's life in stones and rocks and trees and dirt, like there is in us.

Distinction is the consequence, never the object of a great mind.

There are going to be times when you learn more about the world you’re entering and feel defeated when you see the gap between the ideal and the reality… But that’s something we’ll all face. The people that face those obstacles and overcome them are people whose dreams come true.

Cynicism is tough. A cynic's point of view is really pitiful. I derive pleasure out of a lot of things in life. As long as I'm fairly healthy, it's hard to stay dismal for very long.

It was never my goal to capitalize on punk. I could never make it as a commercial artist. I didn't back then and I still don't have the temperament and don't care for drawing or painting or making art for any other purposes other my own.

The human brain is probably one of the most complex single objects on the face of the earth; I think it is, quite honestly.

Follow your heart, and your pleasure in art. Don’t do what you think is going to be making you money, or what you’re parents want you to do, or what that beautiful girl or guy thinks you should be doing. Do what you love. It’s going to lead to where you want to go. Go out there and make the world more beautiful. I know you can.

I fell through a crack for years. Historically, I am a nothing because I fit in no category. I can only be me.

Professionals don't get writer's block. I can always come up with the punch line.

Do studies, not pictures. Know when you are licked - start another. Be alive, stop when your interest is lost.

A work of art when placed in a gallery loses its charge, and becomes a portable object or surface disengaged from the outside world.

The trouble with being poor is that it takes up all your time.

I don't think of myself as an illustrator. I think of myself as a cartoonist. I write the story with pictures - I don't illustrate the story with the pictures.

I paint as if I were Rothschild.

My art originates from hallucinations only I can see. I translate the hallucinations and obsessional images that plague me into sculptures and paintings.

He who wonders discovers that this in itself is wonder.

I felt very strongly the whole social impact of that depression, you know, and I felt very strongly about the efforts that this Resettlement Administration was trying to accomplish; resettling people, helping them, and so on.

Art should be an oasis: a place or refuge from the hardness of life.

Sickness, insanity and death were the angels that surrounded my cradle and they have followed me throughout my life.

I feel the need of attaining the maximum of intensity with the minimum of means. It is this which has led me to give my painting a character of even greater bareness.

If commercialization is putting my art on a shirt so that a kid who can't afford a $30,000 painting can buy one, then I'm all for it.

With humour, there is life.

I love making books for children. Big kids, little kids, old kids and new.

Out of all the ridiculous religion stories - which are greatly, wonderfully ridiculous - the silliest one I've ever heard is, 'Yeah, there's this big, giant universe, and it's expanding, and it's all going to collapse on itself, and we're all just here, just 'cuz. Just 'cuz.' That to me, is the most ridiculous explanation ever.

Artists are the only people in the world who really live. The others have to hope for heaven.

It's a great excuse and luxury, having a job and blaming it for your inability to do your own art. When you don't have to work, you are left with the horror of facing your own lack of imagination and your own emptiness. A devastating possibility when finally time is your own.

A woman is supposed to have curves like an old Bentley, not like some old bike.

In school in Lebanon, we were not allowed to speak Arabic during breaks - it had to be French or English.

Photography is about finding things. And painting is different - it's about making something.

What populates a comic-book convention? Well there's actors, and there's dealers, and there's comic-book artists and writers, and there's cosplay people, toy sales people, people who are selling trading cards, and people selling swords. It's not a flea market.

Provocations are like a Molotov cocktail. They only work one time out of ten, but when it works, it can also be dangerous for the arm that is throwing it. It's the price that has to be paid.

In the Marvel universe, vibranium has always been this material that absorbs kinetic energy. And any tiny bit of physics knowledge will tell you that that's really non-Newtonian. You can't just absorb energy, you've gotta change it into something else.

I don't like things that can be reproduced. Wood isn't important in itself but rather in the fact that objects made in it are unique, simple, unpretentious.

I think when somebody's painting they don't necessarily... I'm not illustrating what I know. I'm mapping out, like topographically, some terrain I am satisfied with, how awkward that mark is.

I became interested in making books, starting about 1965, when I did the Serial Project #1, deciding that I needed a small book to show how the work could be understood and how the system worked.

I really like the language of painting.