My Art Quotes

Certainly, I want to capture the reader's attention from the beginning and hold it until the end: that is half the purpose of my art. The other half must be to tell my story in the most honest way that I can.
- Edward Abbey

I'm not sure that I care for the idea of strangers examining my daily habits and folkways, studying my language, inspecting my costume, questioning me about my religion, classifying my artifacts, investigating my sexual rites and evaluating my chances for cultural survival. So I lived alone.
- Edward Abbey

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.
- John Lennon

This art of acting is a process I love very much. It's an unbelievably fulfilling experience for me and I look forward to building upon my art in the years to come.
- Greg Akcelrod

My art is that of the 35mm kind; my poetry is of the lead and ink kind; my happiness is of the product of both; and my legacy is of the story of my soul, that my life left behind
- Jeremy Aldana

All I owe the world is my art.
- Sherman Alexie

Infatuated, half through conceit, half through love of my art, I achieve the impossible working as no one else ever works.
- Alexandre Dumas

My art springs from my desire to have things in the world which would otherwise never be there.
- Carl Andre

My art will reflect not necessarily conscious politics but the unanalysed politics of my life.
- Carl Andre

I'm free. I just do what I want, say what I want, say how I feel, and I don't try to hurt nobody. I just try to make sure that I don't compromise my art in any kind of way, and I think people respect that.
- Erykah Badu

Your rank and wealth, Harry; my brains, such as they are - my art, whatever it may be worth; Dorian Gray's good looks - we shall all suffer for what the gods have given us, suffer terribly.
- Oscar Wilde

How extraordinary! I thought you would never care for anything but your art."
"He is all my art to me now.
- Oscar Wilde

What are you? What am I? Those are the questions that constantly persecute and torment me and perhaps also play some part in my art.
- Max Beckmann

I've learned that I'm most powerful when I'm doing my art.
- Andre Benjamin

The owner was this very thin woman who looked sort of bitchy, which, think about it, most very thin women do-even when they smile, it's like grimacing. Fat people are often miserable too, but at least they LOOK jolly even though it's really mostly them apologizing, like, "Sorry, sorry, sorry I'm offending your idea of bodily aesthetics," "Sorry I'm clogging my arteries and giving the thumbs-up to diabetes.
- Elizabeth Berg

My parents were very supportive of me and my artistic endeavours. My father and mother came to every school play I ever did.
- Jack Black

This is why my art is about violence. Because I was subjected to so much of it as a kid. After that, and a lot of thinking, I became less violent. I realized that there must be other ways. So, I started to pursue them.
- Jack Bowman

My art and poetry is very political now. Because you've got to find that truth within you and express yourself. Somewhere out there, I know, there will be people who will listen.
- Jack Bowman

One false step, and you'll fall all the way to Tartarusand believe me, unlike the Doors of Death, this would be a one-way trip, a very hard fall! I will not have you dying before you tell me your plan for my artwork.
- Rick Riordan

If I ever loved a man better than I love my art, I should marry him and leave the stage. But I have never met such a man.
- Billie Burke

Yes, thanks to God... my life has a goal, much more important than my artistic activities, that is the struggle against Leukemia.
- Jose Carreras

My shadow in my art is one way I trace who I was and where I have been. My shadow and I have been on a journey for quite a while now!
- Angela Cartwright

I get strength from my art - all the paintings I own are powerful.
- Madonna Ciccone

Thank you for the tragedy. I need it for my art.
- Kurt Cobain

My mother's voice and my father's fists are two bookends of my childhood, and they form the basis of my art.
- Pat Conroy

So I'm in that half-hour business where the most money is, so that eventually I feel like the people that put on the Dupont show, like maybe my artistic effort is going to be a little different.
- Jackie Cooper

I hope to live all my life for my art, without abandoning my principles one iota.
- Gustave Courbet

Everything that is strong in me has gone into my art work.
- Robert Crumb

My art unkind, my energy all gone blind;The limbs uneven, the face shallower,Because those who I see are not seen,Those who see me are rude indeed. So blow, blow dear winter, just blow along me!

- Santosh Kalwar

I'm using my art to comment on what I see. You don't have to agree with it.
- John Mellencamp

I do not know anything about Art with a capital A. What I do know about is my art. Because it concerns me. I do not speak for others. So I do not speak for things which profess to speak for others. My art, however, speaks for me. It lights my way.
- Mark Z Danielewski

It may be that my most helpful contributions to music aren't my compact discs but my articles about other great singers of the past for American Heritage magazine.
- Susannah Mccorkle

If I claim full justice for my art, it is because it is an impersonal thinga thing beyond myself. Crime is common. Logic is rare. Therefore it is upon the logic rather than upon the crime that you should dwell. You have degraded what should have been a course of lectures into a series of tales.
- Arthur Conan Doyle

I like living, breathing better than working...my art is that of living. Each second, each breath is a work which is inscribed nowhere, which is neither visual nor cerebral, it's a sort of constant euphoria.
- Marcel Duchamp

I realized very soon the danger of repeating indiscriminately (forms of) expression... for the spectator even more than for the artist, art is a habit forming drug and I wanted to protect my (art) against such contamination.
- Marcel Duchamp

You know, in my music career there was a moment where the irony was just so heavy. There were people in my audience that were the reason I developed neuroses. These people that tortured my life were using my art, my poetry, as fuel for them, to torture other people.
- Fred Durst

I made a lot mistakes that I'm grateful for, because I won't make them again and I won't let my artists make them, or I'll tell them, 'Don't do this.' A lot of them still make them anyway, but you can't be told things when you're doing your own thing.
- Fred Durst

I don't know a single collector or museum director who says: 'Oh, he's on a list, so I think I'll buy something of his.' The people who buy my art put a little more thought into it than that.
- Olafur Eliasson

Be orderly and disciplined in daily life, like a good bourgeois, so that I might be wild and violent in my art.
- Gustave Flaubert

Now will I rehearse before you a very ancient Breton Lay. As the tale was told to me, so, in turn, will I tell it over again, to the best of my art and knowledge. Hearken now to my story, its why and its reason.
- Marie De France

I have long been convinced that my artistic ideal stands or falls with Germany. Only the Germany that we love and desire can help us achieve that ideal.
- Richard Wagner

When it came to my art, I went my own way and did not follow the trends.
- Frank Frazetta

I have spent my life paying attention to my art form, developing my art form, worrying about my show and what I'm bringing to people, making sure that I give them a fine trade.
- Gallagher

I want to touch people with my art. I want them to say 'he feels deeply, he feels tenderly'.
- Vincent Van Gogh

My art is an attempt to reach beyond the surface appearance. I want to see growth in wood, time in stone, nature in a city, and I do not mean its parks but a deeper understanding that a city is nature too-the ground upon which it is built, the stone with which it is made.
- Andy Goldsworthy

But the best, in my opinion, was the home life in the little flat--the ardent, voluble chats after the day's study; the cozy dinners and fresh, light breakfasts; the interchange of ambitions--ambitions interwoven each with the other's or else inconsiderable--the mutual help and inspiration; and--overlook my artlessness--stuffed olives and cheese sandwiches at 11 p.m.
- O Henry

I do not have many things that are meaningful to me. Except my doubts and my fears. And my art.
- Chaim Potok

My failure, during the first five or six years of my art training, to get set in the right direction, and the disappointment which it caused me, drove me the more persistently into writing as an alternative.
- Laurence Housman

I have not intended to denigrate or hurt the beliefs of anyone through my art.
- M F Husain

I put my genius into my life, not into my art.
- Christopher Isherwood

Jazz vision for me is seeing my art in musical term. It offers me an visual expressions in an ever-changing musical palette.
- Barbara Januszkiewicz

I want my whole life to be a great work of art, not just my art. And that means paying attention to my entire life and trying to make sure my whole life is balanced.
- Jewel

When I was little, my mom used to subsidize my artistic pursuits. I'd draw something, and if she liked it she'd buy it. At the time I thought she was just being motherly and offering me encouragement and a way for me to earn spending money. Now I see it was all a business decision. If I turn out to be the next Duschamp, she'll be able to sell my pieces for an enormous profit. And if I die broke and anonymous, well, she isn't out that much money.
- Jarod Kintz

The canvas isn't empty. It's full of whatever you imagine it to be full of. My art is so conceptual that not only do I not tell, but I don't even show. All I do is sign the canvas and try to sell it.
- Jarod Kintz

I'll keep you in my heart forever, just so long as you don't clog up my arteries.
- Jarod Kintz

I could never be a chef, because I could 't bare the thought of my art always turning to shit.
- Jarod Kintz

The idea is, if I can't heal from my art, then how can you heal?
- Maynard James Keenan

So therefore I dedicate myself, to my art, my sleep, my dreams, my labors, my suffrances, my loneliness, my unique madness, my endless absorption and hunger because I cannot dedicate myself to any fellow being.
- Jack Kerouac

So therefore I dedicate myself to myself, to my art, my sleep, my dreams, my labors, my sufferance, my loneliness, my unique madness, my endless absorption and hunger because I cannot dedicate myself to any fellow being.
- Jack Kerouac

When I got saved, God became my art agent.
- Thomas Kincade

Deals are my art form. Other people paint beautifully on canvas or write wonderful poetry. I like making deals, preferably big deals. That's how I get my kicks.
- Edward Koch

I believe that my art gets across the point that I'm in this morality theater trying to help the underdog, and I'm speaking socially here, showing concern and making psychological and philosophical statements for the underdog.
- Jeff Koons

I believe in advertisement and media completely. My art and my personal life are based in it. I think that the art world would probably be a tremendous reservoir for everybody involved in advertising.
- Jeff Koons

Although my art work was heavily informed by my design work on a formal and visual level, as regards meaning and content the two practices parted ways.
- Barbara Kruger

I hope to continue building my acting career and work more on projects that fulfill my artistic thirst.
- Karolina Kurkova

I have been asked to collaborate with fashion houses using my artwork, which I will probably do.
- Helmut Lang

The merging of characteristics between different species creates a very powerful language, one that I love to explore through my art, enabling me to tap into the unconscious.
- Virginia Lee

I am about tribal feminine power. As a leader, I may stumble but my essence lives to the future-- of my people, of my literature, of my art. And when a tribesman turn against its leader, that tribe will become two. It may faulter my course, but it will not stifle my ending. I rule only among my believers.
- Kristie Levangie

I'm not really sure what social message my art carries, if any. And I don't really want it to carry one. I'm not interested in the subject matter to try to teach society anything, or to try to better our world in any way.
- Roy Lichtenstein

I like to pretend that my art has nothing to do with me.
- Roy Lichtenstein

I probably spent the first 20 years of my life wanting to be as American as possible. Through my 20s, and into my 30s, I began to become aware of how so much of my art and architecture has a decidedly Eastern character.
- Maya Lin

Her German language made my arteries harden-
I've no annuity for the play we blew.
I chartered an aluminum canoe,
I had her six times in the English Garden.
- Robert Lowell

When I work, and in my art, I hold hands with God.
- Robert Mapplethorpe

I'm not an exhibitionist. But, honestly, for my art I'll do anything almost. I'll go there.
- Eva Mendes

Preserve my artistic creativity and ennoble my artistic fame.
- Giacomo Meyerbeer

It is my art. I am better at it than I ever was. And I will do it as long as I can. When you reach a certain age you can slough off what is unnecessary and concentrate on what is. And why not?
- Arthur Miller

The French were generous in giving us assistance in corps and army artillery, with its personnel, and we were confident from the start of our superiority over the enemy in guns of all calibers.
- Kelly Miller

Everyone discusses my art and pretends to understand, as if it were necessary to understand, when it is simply necessary to love.
- Claude Monet

People discuss my art and pretend to understand as if it were necessary to understand, when it's simply necessary to love.
- Claude Monet

I try to keep a low profile in general. Not with my art, but just as a person.
- Alanis Morissette

For as long as I can remember I have suffered from a deep feeling of anxiety which I have tried to express in my art.
- Edvard Munch

Well, from an acting point of view, I bear no relation, I don't look like Alfred Kinsey at all, but I thought somewhere in my artist's soul, my actor's soul, I could capture something of the spirit of the man.
- Liam Neeson

But I think Cybil was my biggest fan. She cut out my articles and hung them in her locker and we were always cracking up how if you wrote the simplest, most obvious thing in the world people thought you were a genius.
- Blake Nelson

As Mayor, I will fully support my Arts Commission and its professional selection committees so that they can commission a full range of public art that is daring and, when appropriate, daringly traditional.
- Gavin Newsom

I absolutely refuse the fame part of my business. I refuse even the money side of my business. I try to do as good work as I can do, I try to grow in my art and reach for truth. That's what I want from my art, that's what I aspire to.
- Connie Nielsen

I made a lot of different experiments with tapes at that time, until I finally realized around 1995, that sound is an interesting subject for me. Ever since then sound got more and more integrated into my art works, musically as well as physically.
- Alva Noto

Lord, grant that my work increase knowledge and help other men. Failing that, Lord, grant that it will not lead to man's destruction. Failing that, Lord, grant that my article in Brain be published before the destruction takes place.
- Walker Percy

People always make the mistake of thinking art is created for them. But really, art is a private language for sophisticates to congratulate themselves on their superiority to the rest of the world. As my artist's statement explains, my work is utterly incomprehensible and is therefore full of deep significance.
- Bill Watterson

I'm not a boy now. I'm a man, I hope. I hope I've had my artistic bar mitzvah somewhere.
- Jeremy Piven

I have had the good fortune to see how my articles have directly benefited some farmers and helped build markets for their products in a way that preserves land from development. That makes me a hopeless optimist.
- Michael Pollan

But I, Caesar, have not sought to amass wealth by the practice of my art, having been rather contented with a small fortune and reputation, than desirous of abundance accompanied by a want of reputation.
- Marcus V Pollio

My parents wanted to light my artistic candle. But over time, the definition of 'the arts' began to stretch. And as I got older, they suddenly realized, Oh, my God, we're the parents of Iggy Pop.
- Iggy Pop

I can concentrate on my art.
- Lou Reed

I choose films for their artistic value. I don't need a mansion or a Jaguar. When I leave this Earth, I won't take any money with me. All I will leave behind will be my art.
- Brad Renfro

I gave my artistic laugh and also threw in some quirky language for good measure. "Lawks-a-mercy, no! I'm going to have a long bath and..."
I looked shyly down. Which is pretty impressive to have done artistic laugh, quirky language and shyness all in the space of ten seconds.
- Louise Rennison

That's it, I think, crumpling the pages into one tiny ball of suck. I'm done banging my head against this stone wall; I don't care if I have to begin my article, "Vlad likes three things: fencing, himself, and killing off his siblings." I don't care if I have to lie and oops report that Vlad likes finger painting with dolphin blood in his spare time. We're now entering full investigative mode.
- A M Robinson

At the end of time I want my art to stand up and my soul to bow down.
- Rob Ryser

I never thought of what I was doing as a way to sell the NFL. I was making movies about a sport that I loved, about players and coaches that I respected. I wanted to convey my love of the game through film. And most artists convey their love through art. And my art and my love was expressed through film.
- Steve Sabol

Food's my only bag. It's my gig, my art, my life. Always has been, always will be. I'm always battling myself the part of me that says I can and the part of me that says I can't. My greatest gift has been that the part of me that says "I can't" is always, always just a little bit louder.
- Marcus Samuelsson

My art teacher in junior high was a very out gay man and a mentor to me. He would tell us about Greenwich Village and show us the 'Village Voice' and describe his life, but it was all sort of subversive and below the radar.
- Gus Van Sant

That for me was the big turning point in my artistic life, when my wife and I had our kids. The world got infused with morality again. Every person in the world should theoretically be loved as much as I love my daughters.
- George Saunders

I wish to lead a life free from care, and I see that I shall be unhappy if I cannot always work at my art.
- Clara Schumann

He: What's the matter with you?
Me: Nothing.
Nothing was slowly clotting my arteries. Nothing slowly numbing my soul. Caught by nothing, saying nothing, nothingness becomes me. When I am nothing they will say surprised in the way that they are forever surprised, but there was nothing the matter with her.
- Jeanette Winterson

I've gone through the village of my songwriting and my artistry, and I've gone through lots of different phases, including one where it has been very quiet and abandoned me for a few years.
- Carly Simon

I'm an artist, and I go in the studio and make my music. And then I'll give it to my dad and he does what he does. And he does, you know, the press, and figuring out shows and whatnot. When it comes to my artistic freedom, he doesn't, like, step on my toes or anything.
- Ashlee Simpson

My art became very public.
- Joey Skaggs

If a woman decides she likes me, it would behoove her to take into consideration that my art has had a strong influence on the type of person I am.
- Wesley Snipes

Well, I'm an artist to the core. And my objective has always been to use my talents and my skills to elevate humanity through my art.
- Wesley Snipes

My personal life and my artistic life do not interfere with each other.
- Stephen Sondheim

But why? Why do you care about our class's history?"
"I just do. Besides, I need something to put on my art-school applications besides 'Locks self in room and draws all day.' Even art schools won't take a psychopath.
- Natalie Standiford

I used to believe my art had to be about the things that brought me joy and gave me hope. But I learned that art can be found in all of life, even in pain. --Valentine, while in Italy (pg 267)
- Adriana Trigiani

I have no illusions about my art. I am what the public made me and, consequently, I am not likely to forget my debt to them.
- Conrad Veidt

none of my art is based on how others think i should have done it.
- Darnell Lamont Walker

One of the most valuable things one of my art teachers said to me was, 'Don't get upset by criticism. Value the fact that at least someone noticed what you did.
- Chris Ware

I was always confident in my art and in myself as an artist.
- Kim Weston