“An artist is a creature driven by demons. He doesn't know why they choose him and he's usually too busy to wonder why.”
“I choose a block of marble and chop off whatever I don't need. [when asked how he managed to make his remarkable statues.]”
“The True Artist has the planet for his pedestal; the adventurer, after years of strife, has nothing broader than his shoes.”
“If art is to nourish the roots of our culture, society must set the artist free to follow his vision wherever it takes him.”
“Artists to my mind are the real architects of change, and not the political legislators who implement change after the fact.”
“When I judge art, I take my painting and put it next to a God made object like a tree or flower. If it clashes, it is not art.”
“But the one thing you should. not do is to suppose that when something is wrong with the arts, it is wrong with the arts ONLY.”
“A good traveler has no fixed plans and is not intent upon arriving. A good artist lets his intuition lead him wherever it wants.”
“No art can be noble which is incapable of expressing thought, and no art is capable of expressing thought which does not change.”
“An artist is a man of action, whether he creates a personality, invents an expedient, or finds the issue of a complicated situation.”
“Art is the child of Nature; yes, her darling child, in whom we trace the features of the mother's face, her aspect and her attitude.”
“The more a man cultivates the arts the less he fornicates. A more and more apparent cleavage occurs between the spirit and the brute.”
“Were art to redeem man, it could do so only by saving him from the seriousness of life and restoring him to an unexpected boyishness.”
“It is art that makes life, makes interest, makes importance and I know of no substitute whatever for the force and beauty of its process.”
“Art is permitted to survive only if it renounces the right to be different, and integrates itself into the omnipotent realm of the profane.”
“Art at its most significant is a distant early warning system that can always be relied on to tell the old culture what is beginning to happen.”
“The artist is extremely lucky who is presented with the worst possible ordeal which will not actually kill him. At that point, he's in business.”
“Those who write for lucre or fame are grosser than the cartel robbers, for they steal the genius of the people, which is its will to resist evil.”
“What distinguishes a great artist from a weak one is first their sensibility and tenderness; second, their imagination, and third, their industry.”
“The primary distinction of the artist is that he must actively cultivate that state which most men, necessarily, must avoid: the state of being alone.”
“Pop artists deal with the lowly trivia of possessions and equipment that the present generation is lugging along with it on its safari into the future.”
“Art is an absolute mistress; she will not be coquetted with or slighted; she requires the most entire self-devotion, and she repays with grand triumphs.”
“And the first rude sketch that the world had seen was joy to his mighty heart, till the Devil whispered behind the leaves ''It's pretty, but is it Art?''”
“Art is a jealous mistress; and if a man have a genius for painting, poetry, music, architecture or philosophy, he makes a bad husband and an ill provider.”
“Art is so wonderfully irrational, exuberantly pointless, but necessary all the same. Pointless and yet necessary, that's hard for a puritan to understand.”
“Surely all art is the result of one's having been in danger, of having gone through an experience all the way to the end, where no one can go any further.”
“In order for the artist to have a world to express he must first be situated in this world, oppressed or oppressing, resigned or rebellious, a man among men.”
“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.”
“Each of the arts whose office is to refine, purify, adorn, embellish and grace life is under the patronage of a muse, no god being found worthy to preside over them.”
“Fortunately art is a community effort --a small but select community living in a spiritualized world endeavoring to interpret the wars and the solitudes of the flesh.”