146 Inspiring Art Quotes

There's something profoundly magical about art; it transcends boundaries, speaks a universal language, and touches the soul in ways that words alone often cannot. Whether you're an artist seeking a burst of inspiration, a collector appreciating the nuances of creative expressions, or simply someone who finds joy in the beauty of artistic endeavors, there’s always a quote that can resonate deeply with you. In this blog post, we bring you a carefully curated collection of the top 146 inspiring art quotes, each one offering insight, motivation, and a fresh perspective on the transformative power of art.

1. “It is a cruel, ironical art, photography. The dragging of captured moments into the future; moments that should have been allowed to be evaporate into the past; should exist only in memories, glimpsed through the fog of events that came after. Photographs force us to see people before their future weighed them down....” - Kate Morton

2. “A picture is a secret about a secret, the more it tells you the less you know.” - Diane Arbus

3. “When I was a child my mother said to me, 'If you become a soldier, you'll be a general. If you become a monk, you'll be the pope.' Instead I became a painter and wound up as Picasso.” - Pablo Picasso

4. “Imagination is not, as some poets have thought, simply synonymous with good. It may be either good or evil. As long as art remained primarily mimetic, the evil which imagination could do was limited by nature. Again, as long as it was treated as an amusement, the evil which it could do was limited in scope. But in an age when the connection between imagination and figuration is beginning to be dimly realized, when the fact of the directionally creator relation is beginning to break through into consciousness, both the good and the evil latent in the working of imagination begin to appear unlimited. We have seen in the Romantic movement an instance of the way in which the making of images may react upon the collective representations. It is a fairly rudimentary instance, but even so it has already gone beyond the dreams and responses of a leisured few. The economic and social structure of Switzerland is noticeably affected by its tourist industry, and that is due only in part to increased facilities of travel. It is due not less to the condition that (whatever may be said about their ‘particles’) the mountains which twentieth-century man sees are not the mountains which eighteenth-century man saw.It may be objected that this is a very small matter, and that it will be a long time before the imagination of man substantially alters those appearances of nature with which his figuration supplies him. But then I am taking the long view. Even so, we need not be too confident. Even if the pace of change remained the same, one who is really sensitive to (for example) the difference between the medieval collective representations and our own will be aware that, without traveling any greater distance than we have come since the fourteenth century, we could very well move forward into a chaotically empty or fantastically hideous world. But the pace of change has not remained the same. It has accelerated and is accelerating. We should remember this, when appraising the aberrations of the formally representational arts. Of course, in so far as these are due to affectation, they are of no importance. But in so far as they are genuine, they are genuine because the artist has in some way or other experienced the world he represents. And in so far as they are appreciated, they are appreciated by those who are themselves willing to make a move towards seeing the world in that way, and, ultimately therefore, seeing that kind of world. We should remember this, when we see pictures of a dog with six legs emerging from a vegetable marrow or a woman with a motorbicycle substituted for her left breast.” - Owen Barfield

5. “I don't think it was pain that made [Vincent Van Gogh] great - I think his painting brought him whatever happiness he had.” - David Lynch

6. “I really, sincerely believe that one should trust the work, and not the author.” - Peter Greenaway

7. “There is no end. There is no beginning. There is only the infinite passion of life. ” - Fellini

8. “A face that has the marks of having lived intensely, that expresses some phase of life, some dominant quality or intellectual power, constitutes for me an interesting face. For this reason the face of an older person, perhaps not beautiful in the strictest sense, is usually more appealing than the face of a younger person who has scarcely been touched by life.” - Doris Ulmann

9. “There is no art without contemplation.” - Robert Henri

10. “Every morning when I wake up, I experience an exquisite joy —the joy of being Salvador Dalí— and I ask myself in rapture: What wonderful things is this Salvador Dalí going to accomplish today?” - Salvador Dali

11. “Art is what you can get away with.” - Andy Warhol

12. “Old art offers just as good a criticism of new art as new art offers of old.” - Jasper Johns

13. “A storyteller who provided us with such a profusion of details would rapidly grow maddening. Unfortunately, life itself often subscribes to this mode of storytelling, wearing us out with repetition, misleading emphases and inconsequential plot lines. It insists on showing us Bardak Electronics, the saftey handle in the car, a stray dog, a Christmas card and a fly that lands first on the rim and then in the centre of the ashtray.Which explains how the curious phenomenon whereby valuable elements may be easier to experience in art and in anticipation than in reality. The anticipatory and artistic imaginations omit and compress; they cut away the periods of boredom and direct our attention to critical moments, and thus, without either lying or embellishing, they lend to life a vividness and a coherence that it may lack in the distracting wooliness of the present.” - Alain De Botton

14. “Poets are not so scrupulous as you are. They know how useful passion is for publication. Nowadays a broken heart will run to many editions.""I hate them for it," cried Hallward. "An artist should create beautiful things, but should put nothing of his own life into them. We live in an age when men treat art as if it were meant to be a form of autobiography. We have lost the abstract sense of beauty. Some day I will show the world what is it; and for that the world shall never see my portrait of Dorian Gray.” - Oscar Wilde

15. “I believe that if it were left to artists to choose their own labels, most would choose none.” - Ben Shahm

16. “Art is what gets us beyond what is real. It makes reality more real. It also shortens the distance we gotta travel to see how connected we are. ” - Laura Pritchett

17. “That's how it is with art. Mere humans who root through their refrigerators at three o'clock in the morning are incapable of such writing.” - Haruki Murakami

18. “Though a living cannot be made from art, art makes life worth living. It makes starving, living.” - John Sloan

19. “ Men and women who are lonely create. Those who are gregarious rarely do... Any poet would rather bed with a girl than write a poem about her. All art is the result of frustration. Art is energy deflected from its normal course in action.” - Burton Rascoe

20. “New skin, a new land! And a land of liberty, if that is possible! I chose the geology of a land that was new to me, and that was young, virgin, and without drama, that of America. I traveled in America, but instead of romantically and directly rubbing the snakeskin of my body against the asperities of its terrain, I preferred to peel protected within the armor of the gleaming black crustacean of a Cadillac which I gave Gala as a present. Nevertheless all the men who admire and the women who are in love with my old skin will easily be able to find its remnants in shredded pieces of various sizes scattered to the winds along the roads from New York via Pittsburgh to California. I have peeled with every wind; pieces of my skin have remained caught here and there along my way, scattered through that "promised land" which is America; certain pieces of this skin have remained hanging in the spiny vegetation of the Arizona desert, along the trails where I galloped on horseback, where I got rid of all my former Aristotelian "planetary notions." Other pieces of my skin have remained spread out like tablecloths without food on the summits of the rocky masses by which one reaches the Salt Lake, in which the hard passion of the Mormons saluted in me the European phantom of Apollinaire. Still other pieces have remained suspended along the "antediluvian" bridge of San Francisco, where I saw in passing the ten thousand most beautiful virgins in America, completely naked, standing in line on each side of me as I passed, like two rows of organ-pipes of angelic flesh with cowrie-shell sea vulvas.” - Salvador Dali

21. “A poor original is better than a good imitation.” - Ella Wheeler Wilcox

22. “Man, didn't anybody ever tell you that art is propaganda? It doesn't matter whether you think it should be or it shouldn't be, it just is, and motherfucker, like or not, you're sitting on a funky Magna Carta.” - Paul Beatty

23. “The aim of language...is to communicate...to impart to others the results one has obtained...As I talk, I reveal the situation...I reveal it to myself and to others in order to change it.” - Jean-Paul Sartre

24. “It is in books, poems, paintings which often give us the confidence to take seriously feelings in ourselves that we might otherwise never have thought to acknowledge.” - Alain De Botton

25. “Those words . . . national and portrait. They were both to do with identity: the identity of a culture (place, language and history), the identity of an individual human being as an object for mimetic representation.” - A.S. Byatt

26. “A writer - and, I believe, generally all persons - must think that whatever happens to him or her is a resource. All things have been given to us for a purpose, and an artist must feel this more intensely. All that happens to us, including our humiliations, our misfortunes, our embarrassments, all is given to us as raw material, as clay, so that we may shape our art.” - Jorge Luis Borges

27. “The ‘Muse’ is not an artistic mystery, but a mathematical equation. The gift are those ideas you think of as you drift to sleep. The giver is that one you think of when you first awake.” - Roman Payne

28. “Beauty will be convulsive or will not be at all.” - André Breton

29. “You love your work. God help you, you love it! And thats the curse. That's the brand on your forehead for all of them to see. You love it and they know it, and they know they have you. Do you ever look at the people in the street? Aren't you afraid of them? I am. They move past you and they wear hats and they carry bundles. But that's not the substance of them. The substance of them is hatred for any man who loves his work. That's the only kind they fear. I don't know why” - Ayn Rand

30. “The morality of art consists, for everyone, in the side that flatters its own interests. People do not like literature.” - Gustave Flaubert

31. “Much Madness is Divinest Sense, to a Discerning Eye....” - Emily Dickinson

32. “Dalin must have whiffed the anarch in me, a man with no ties to state or society. Still, he was unable to sense an autonomy that puts up with these forces as objective facts but without recognizing them. What he lacked was a grounding in history.Opposition is collaboration; this was something from which Dalin, without realizing it, could not stay free. Basically, he damaged order less than he confirmed it. The emergence of the anarchic nihilist is like a goad that convinces society of its unity.The anarch, in contrast, not only recognizes society a priori as imperfect, he actually acknowledges it with that limitation. He is more or less repulsed by state and society, yet there are times and places in which the invisible harmony shimmers through the visible harmony. This is obviously chiefly in the work of art. In that case, one serves joyfully.But the anarchic nihilist thinks the exact opposite. The Temple of Artemis, to cite an example, would inspire him to commit arson. The anarch, however, would have no qualms about entering the temple in order to meditate and to participate with an offering. This is possible in any temple worthy of the name.” - Ernst Jünger

33. “Dive again and again into the river of uncertainty. Create in the dark, only then can you recognize the light.” - Jyrki Vainonen

34. “This is what is known as perspective, and it is a swindle.” - Kurt Schwitters

35. “They knew how to live with nature and get along with nature. They didn't try too hard to be all men and no animal. That's the mistake we made when Darwin showed up. We embraced him and Huxley and Freud, all smiles. And then we discovered that Darwin and our religions didn't mix. Or at least we didn't think they did. We were fools. We tried to budge Darwin and Huxley and Freud. They wouldn't move very well. So, like idiots, we tried knocking down religion. We succeeded pretty well. We lost our faith and went around wondering what life was for. If art was no more than a frustrated outflinging of desire, if religion was no more than self-delusion, what good was life? Faith had always given us answer to all things. But it all went down the drain with Freud and Darwin. We were and still are lost people.” - Ray Bradbury

36. “That's creativity in a nutshell. A messy tug-of-war with imagination to erase that feeling that nothing really matters anyway.” - Zoe Whittall

37. “It took me years to learn to sit at my desk for more than two minutes at a time, to put up with the solitude and the terror of failure, and the godawful silence and the white paper. And now that I can take it . . . now that I can finally do it . . . I'm really raring to go. I was in my study writing. I was learning how to go down into myself and salvage bits and pieces of the past. I was learning how to sneak up on the unconscious and how to catch my seemingly random thoughts and fantasies. By closing me out of his world, Bennett had opened all sorts of worlds inside my own head. Gradually I began to realize that none of the subjects I wrote poems about engaged my deepest feelings, that there was a great chasm between what I cared about and what I wrote about. Why? What was I afraid of? Myself, most of all, it seemed."Freedom is an illusion," Bennett would have said and, in a way, I too would have agreed. Sanity, moderation, hard work, stability . . . I believed in them too. But what was that other voice inside of me which kept urging me on toward zipless fucks, and speeding cars and endless wet kisses and guts full of danger? What was that other voice which kept calling me coward! and egging me on to burn my bridges, to swallow the poison in one gulp instead of drop by drop, to go down into the bottom of my fear and see if I could pull myself up? Was it a voice? Or was it a thump? Something even more primitive than speech. A kind of pounding in my gut which I had nicknamed my "hunger-thump." It was as if my stomach thought of itself as a heart. And no matter how I filled it—with men, with books, with food—it refused to be still. Unfillable—that's what I was. Nymphomania of the brain. Starvation of the heart.” - Erica Jong

38. “Airplane Dream #13' told the story, more or less, of a dream Rosa had had about the end of the world. There were no human beings left but her, and she had found herself flying in a pink seaplane to an island inhabited by sentient lemurs. There seemed to be a lot more to it -- there was a kind of graphic "sound track" constructed around images relating to Peter Tchaikovsky and his works, and of course abundant food imagery -- but this was, as far as Joe could tell, the gist. The story was told entirely through collage, with pictures clipped from magazines and books. There were pictures from anatomy texts, an exploded musculature of the human leg, a pictorial explanation of peristalsis. She had found an old history of India, and many of the lemurs of her dream-apocalypse had the heads and calm, horizontal gazes of Hindu princes and goddesses. A seafood cookbook, rich with color photographs of boiled crustacea and poached whole fish with jellied stares, had been throughly mined. Sometimes she inscribed text across the pictures, none of which made a good deal of sense to him; a few pages consisted almost entirely of her brambly writing, illuminated, as it were, with collage. There were some penciled-in cartoonish marginalia like the creatures found loitering at the edges of pages in medieval books.” - Michael Chabon

39. “Fashion and music are the same, because music express its period too.” - Karl Lagerfeld

40. “This recognition of the truth we get in the artist’s work comes to us as a revelation of new truth. I want to be clear about that. I am not referring to the sort of patronizing recognition we give a writer by nodding our heads and observing, “Yes, yes, very good, very true—that’s just what I’m always saying.” I mean the recognition of a truth that tells us something about ourselves that we had not been always saying, something that puts a new knowledge of ourselves withint our grasp. It is new, startling, and perhaps shattering, and yet it comes to us with a sense of familiarity. We did not know it before, but the moment the poet has shown it to us, we know that, somehow or other, we had always really known it.” - Dorothy L. Sayers

41. “Like punk rock, like Jackson Pollock, like Jack Kerouac, it was truly human, a mix of perfect beauty and cathartic error.” - Yann Martel

42. “Over the years, I have been subjected to many indignities, all for the sake of Art. If I ever catch him, I'm going to kill the guy.” - Bob Hope

43. “The only real influence I've ever had is myself.” - Edward Hopper

44. “I remember growing up, saying you’re an artist it sounds pretentious but now it’s one of the only dignified things that you can call yourself. ” - Marilyn Manson

45. “If art made you think, then this was Art. Staring at the ball, made of layers and layers of cloth, I wondered about the glass marble at its heart. What if you wanted to reach that marble? Make sure it was still whole?You'd have to remove the layers. You'd have to risk breaking the ball for a chance at freeing it. Fear, knowledge, certainty - you'd have to be willing to let them all go.” - Justina Chen Headley

46. “An artist is like a woman who can do nothing but love, and who succumbs to every stray male jackass.” - Heinrich Böll

47. “A Christian should use these arts to the glory of God, not just as tracts, mind you, but as things of beauty to the praise of God. An art work can be a doxology in itself.” - Francis Schaeffer

48. “In its confounding of the logic that maintains terms like high and low, or base and sacred as polar opposites, it is this play of the contradictory that allows one to think the truth that Bataille never tired of demonstrating: that violence has historically been lodged at the heart of the sacred; that to be genuine, the very thought of the creative must simultaneously be an experience of death; and that it is impossible for any moment of true intensity to exist apart from a cruelty that is equally extreme.” - Rosalind Krauss

49. “Bring together things that have not yet been brought together and did not seem predisposed to be so.” - Robert Bresson

50. “Everything in creation has its appointed painter or poet and remains in bondage like the princess in the fairy tale 'til its appropriate liberator comes to set it free.” - Ralph Waldo Emerson

51. “Art isn't a product. It's an experience” - Lori Lansens

52. “Identifying Your DreamSome people can easily identify one primary dream. For others, a dream is more elusive. These people often have many dreams at once, or a general idea of a dream that never takes a specific shape.” - Susan Ariel Rainbow Kennedy (SARK)

53. “This imaginary gift is a journey for your imagination.I send you...A luxury train ride. On this train are all the inspiring people you've ever wanted to meet or talk to. You glide from car to car, sitting or lying down on velvet lounge chairs, listening and asking questions. There is also a voluminous library on the train, with every book you've ever wanted to read or look at. Kind people bring you delicious tidbits to eat and nourishing liquids to drink. If you take a nap, time stands still until you return so you never miss anything. You receive a large journal filled with photographs, drawings and descriptions of your journey to take with you when you leave. You realize that you can board this train at any time.” - Susan Ariel Rainbow Kennedy (SARK)

54. “A Gift for YouI send you...A cottage retreat on a hill in Ireland. This cottage is filled with fresh flowers, art supplies, and a double-wide chaise lounge in front of a wood-burning fireplace. There is a cabinet near the front door, where your favorite meals appear, several times a day. Desserts are plentiful and calorie free. The closet is stocked with colorful robes and pajamas, and a painting in the bedroom slides aside to reveal a plasma television screen with every movie you've ever wanted to watch. A wooden mailbox at the end of the lane is filled daily with beguiling invitations to tea parties, horse-and-carriage rides, theatrical performances, and violin concerts. There is no obligation or need to respond. You sleep deeply and peacefully each night, and feel profoundly healthy. This cottage is yours to return to at any time. ” - Susan Ariel Rainbow Kennedy (SARK)

55. “Building your "dream life" is filled with things that can feel like the opposite of a dream:MistakesDelaysStarting overFailureThe building part is actually more of a rebuilding that is a continual process. The building is not linear in nature but far more interesting. You might start a creative dream, take the "next step", and find yourself completely bored, dissatisfied, or just not inspired. ” - Susan Ariel Rainbow Kennedy (SARK)

56. “From now on I hope always to stay alert, to educate myself as best I can. But lacking this, in Future I will relaxedly turn back to my secret mind to see what it has observed when I thought I was sitting this one out. We never sit anything out.We are cups, constantly and quietly being filled. The trick is, knowing how to tip ourselves over and let the beautiful stuff out. ” - Ray Bradbury

57. “The architect had not stopped to bother about columns and porticos, proportions or interiors, or any limitation upon the epic he sought to materialize; he had simply made a servant of Nature - art can go no further.” - Lew Wallace

58. “A deadline is negative inspiration. Still, it's better than no inspiration at all.” - Rita Mae Brown

59. “It is only in his work that an artist can find reality and satisfaction, for the actual world is less intense than the world of his invention and consequently his life, without recourse to violent disorder, does not seem very substantial. The right condition for him is that in which his work in not only convenient but unavoidable.” - Tenessee Williams

60. “You can't help it. An artist's duty, as far as I'm concerned, is to reflect the times.” - Nina Simone

61. “How to Draw a Picture (XII)Know when you're finished, and when you are, put your pencil or your paintbrush down. All the rest is only life.” - Stephen King

62. “The 'Renaissance' West Butchered the Rest.If I had to choose between an erudite Aristotle and an unknown ‘soulless’ black slave I would choose the latter. The ascendancy of the West was on a heap of bodies of slaves and trampled humanity through colonization” - Viktor Vijay Kumar

63. “That's something that tends to happen with new technologies generally: The most interesting applications turn up on a battlefield, or in a gallery.” - William Gibson

64. “Life itself has lost its plane reality: it is projected, not along the old fixed points, but along the dynamic coordinates of Einstein, of revolution. In this new projection, the best-known formulas and objects become displaced, fantastic, familiar-unfamiliar. This is why it is so logical for literature today to be drawn to the fantastic plot, or to the amalgam of reality and fantasy. ("The New Russian Prose")” - Yevgeny Zamyatin

65. “Painting, it is true, was undergoing a series of -isms reminiscent of the whims of a pregnant woman.” - M.F.K. Fisher

66. “An artist without ideas is a mendicant; barren, he goes begging among the hours.” - Irving Stone

67. “Friendship is an obstetric art; it draws out our richest and deepest resources; it unfolds the wings of our dreams and hidden indeterminate thoughts; it serves as a check on our judgements, tries out our new ideas, keeps up our ardor, and inflames our enthusiasm.” - Antonin Sertillanges

68. “Art is the imposing of a pattern on experience, and our aesthetic enjoyment is recognition of the pattern.” - Alfred North Whitehead

69. “To discover the mode of life or of art whereby my spirit could express itself in unfettered freedom.” - James Joyce

70. “In the future, as in the present, as in the past, black people will build many new worlds.This is true. I will make it so. And you will help me.” - N.K. Jemisin

71. “It's up to the artist to use language that can be understood, not hide it in some private code. Most of these jokers don't even want to use language you and I know or can learn . . . they would rather sneer at us and be smug, because we 'fail' to see what they are driving at. If indeed they are driving at anything--obscurity is usually the refuge of incompetence.” - Robert A. Heinlein

72. “Since art is considered a noble field, art should be used to promote all that is good and noble, and in a noble fashion.” - E.A. Bucchianeri

73. “Photography is like stealing.You rob someone of a moment that exposes something essential about their character,their soul if you like.there are people who are very conscious of that,who find that terrifying.The thought that everyone,friend of foe,can get so close to you,look you straight in the eye and judge you without having any control over it or being able to respond.A part of them has become the property of the photographer.” - Esther Verhoef

74. “If you make art, people will talk about it. Some of the things they say will be nice, some won’t. You’ll already have made that art, and when they’re talking about the last thing you did, you should already be making the next thing.If bad reviews (of whatever kind) upset you, just don’t read them. It’s not like you’ve signed an agreement with the person buying the book to exchange your book for their opinion.Do whatever you have to do to keep making art. I know people who love bad reviews, because it means they’ve made something happen and made people talk; I know people who have never read any of their reviews. It’s their call. You get on with making art.” - Neil Gaiman

75. “The survival of my own ideas may not be as important as a condition I might create for others’ ideas to be realized.” - Mel Chin

76. “They know a million tricks, those novelists. Take Doctor Goebbels; that's how he started out, writing fiction. Appeals to the base lusts that hide in everyone no matter how respectable on the surface. Yes, the novelist knows humanity, how worthless they are, ruled by their testicles, swayed by cowardice, selling out every cause because of their greed - all he's got to do is thump on the drum, and there's his response. And he's laughing, of course, behind his hand at the effect he gets.” - Philip K. Dick

77. “B-but, Mr Jimson, I w-want to be an artist.''Of course you do,' I said, 'everybody does once. But they get over it, thank God, like the measles and the chickenpox. Go home and go to bed and take some hot lemonade and put on three blankets and sweat it out.''But Mr J-Jimson, there must be artists.''Yes, and lunatics and lepers, but why go and live in an asylum before you're sent for? If you find life a bit dull at home,' I said, 'and want to amuse yourself, put a stick of dynamite in the kitchen fire, or shoot a policeman. Volunteer for a test pilot, or dive off Tower Bridge with five bob's worth of roman candles in each pocket. You'd get twice the fun at about one-tenth of the risk.” - Joyce Cary

78. “Nothing is a masterpiece - a real masterpiece - till it's about two hundred years old. A picture is like a tree or a church, you've got to let it grow into a masterpiece. Same with a poem or a new religion. They begin as a lot of funny words. Nobody knows whether they're all nonsense or a gift from heaven. And the only people who think anything of 'em are a lot of cranks or crackpots, or poor devils who don't know enough to know anything. Look at Christianity. Just a lot of floating seeds to start with, all sorts of seeds. It was a long time before one of them grew into a tree big enough to kill the rest and keep the rain off. And it's only when the tree has been cut into planks and built into a house and the house has got pretty old and about fifty generations of ordinary lumpheads who don't know a work of art from a public convenience, have been knocking nails in the kitchen beams to hang hams on, and screwing hooks in the walls for whips and guns and photographs and calendars and measuring the children on the window frames and chopping out a new cupboard under the stairs to keep the cheese and murdering their wives in the back room and burying them under the cellar flags, that it begins even to feel like a religion. And when the whole place is full of dry rot and ghosts and old bones and the shelves are breaking down with old wormy books that no one could read if they tried, and the attic floors are bulging through the servants' ceilings with old trunks and top-boots and gasoliers and dressmaker's dummies and ball frocks and dolls-houses and pony saddles and blunderbusses and parrot cages and uniforms and love letters and jugs without handles and bridal pots decorated with forget-me-nots and a piece out at the bottom, that it grows into a real old faith, a masterpiece which people can really get something out of, each for himself. And then, of course, everybody keeps on saying that it ought to be pulled down at once, because it's an insanitary nuisance.” - Joyce Cary

79. “...I thought, with a certain amount of sorrow, how much enormous talent there must be in the world for nature simply to toss it away so arbitrarily! But nature could not care less what we think about it, and as far as talent is concerned, there is such an excess that our artists will soon become their own audiences, and audiences made up of ordinary people will no longer exist.” - Hermann Hesse

80. “Art was the very antithesis of crass moralism.” - Alain De Botton

81. “Inspiration comes unawares, from unaccountable sources that have nothing to do with planning or intelligence. Let it cool ever so slightly, and you are left, pen or brush in hand, with no inspiration at all. Gifted people need not, therefore, make a song and dance about being or supposing themselves superior. They simply happened to be born with that fortunate, subconscious equipment of theirs, and the mystery exists independently of intelligence or ambition.” - Maurice Chevalier

82. “Parameters are the things you bounce off to create art.” - Neil Gaiman

83. “All worthy work is open to interpretations the author did not intend. Art isn't your pet -- it's your kid. It grows up and talks back to you.” - Joss Whedon

84. “Fantasy, abandoned by reason, produces impossible monsters; united with it, she is the mother of the arts and the origin of marvels.” - Francisco de Goya

85. “On the opposite wall was a Damien Hirst spot painting, bought by Arabella after a decent bonus season. Roger's considered view of the painting, looking at it from aesthetic, art-historical, interior-design, and psychological points of view, was that it had cost forty-seven thousand pounds, plus VAT.” - John Lanchester

86. “In art one idea is as good as another.” - Willem De Kooning

87. “I tell you, you will not see the new beauty and the truth, until you make up your minds to spit.” - Kazimir Severinovich Malevich

88. “Snow floated down every once in a while, but it was frail snow, like a memory fading into the distance.” - Haruki Murakami

89. “I haven't the slightest idea what art is, but to be a painter is something of which you have to prove.” - Wayne Thiebaud

90. “God is love, I said, but art's the possibility of forms, and shadows are the source of identity.” - Ralph Ellison

91. “There has to be a cut-off somewhere between the freedom of expression and a graphically explicit free-for-all.” - E.A. Bucchianeri

92. “Don't be cool. Like everything.” - Shaky Kane

93. “Mastering the art of seduction gives one a great power, and like any power, it's to be wielded with responsibility; a man who wields the art of seduction without a sense of responsibility and restraint is a walking proximity bomb of viral epidemics, needless procreation, heartbroken families, and shattered dreams.” - Mike Norton

94. “Storytelling--that's not the future. The future, I'm afraid, is flashes and impulses. It's mode up of moments and fragments, and stories won't survive.” - Dexter Palmer

95. “In the medieval tradition, Beksinski seems to believe art to be a forewarning about the fragility of the flesh– whatever pleasures we know are doomed to perish– thus, his paintings manage to evoke at once the process of decay and the ongoing struggle for life. They hold within them a secret poetry, stained with blood and rust.” - Guillermo Del Toro

96. “While art thrives on the blazing colours of scandal, literature blossoms on the dark soil of tragedy.” - E.A. Bucchianeri

97. “This is the theory… that anything that is art… is presumably about some certain thing, but is really always about something else, and it’s no good having one without the other, because if you just have the something it is boring and if you just have the something else it’s irritating.” - Edward Gorey

98. “WE ARE the PULSE of the TIMES!” - Carrie White

99. “A life without books is a thirsty life, and one without poetry is...like a life without pictures.” - Stephen King

100. “Just because I'm into this Does that mean I should live like it?And really do I dare?” - Tanya Davis

101. “Quien quiera hacer de Rembrandt un pensador, un rebelde enfrentado a su época, al encontrarse ante estas obras maestras deberá admitir que la verdad más convincente para definirlo es la furia creadora, una necesidad constante e irreprimible de representar con toda libertad y de consumir la vida en esta obsesión liberadora.” - Isabel Belmonte

102. “I am the eye that beholds... And I am the dreamer that paints the stars in the night sky... For I am the one they call artist, and you call Love.” - Solange nicole

103. “Restoration is a skilled profession. You might even call it an art in its own right, except that it is frowned on to be original. First rule of restoration: follow the intention of the artist. Never try to improve on him.” - J.M. Coetzee

104. “Do you know why teachers use me? Because I speak in tongues. I write metaphors. Every one of my stories is a metaphor you can remember. The great religions are all metaphor. We appreciate things like Daniel and the lion’s den, and the Tower of Babel. People remember these metaphors because they are so vivid you can’t get free of them and that’s what kids like in school. They read about rocket ships and encounters in space, tales of dinosaurs. All my life I’ve been running through the fields and picking up bright objects. I turn one over and say, Yeah, there’s a story. And that’s what kids like. Today, my stories are in a thousand anthologies. And I’m in good company. The other writers are quite often dead people who wrote in metaphors: Edgar Allan Poe, Herman Melville, Washington Irving, Nathaniel Hawthorne. All these people wrote for children. They may have pretended not to, but they did.” - Ray Bradbury

105. “This is a familiar syndrome. There is a stage with every drawing or painting when it looks banal and clumsy. It's worth pushing through that, working through the cliché to find out what made it a cliché in the first place.” - Antony Sher

106. “Art, especially the stage, is an area where it is impossible to walk without stumbling. There are in store for you many unsuccessful days and whole unsuccessful seasons: there will be great misunderstandings and deep disappointments… you must be prepared for all this, expect it and nevertheless, stubbornly, fanatically follow your own way.” - Anton Chekhov

107. “Great art is difficult," Caleb said. After a few moments, he said, "But I don't understand why it has to be so difficult sometimes.” - Kevin Wilson

108. “Because his [Damien Hirst] art is idea art - art drawn on the back of cigarette packets and beer mats, roughed out in airport departure lounges and the back of the taxis, usually delegated to and carried by others - this leaves Damien a lot of time for what might loosely be called socializing. Hanging around.” - Gordon Burn

109. “I'm an eye. A mechanical eye. I, the machine, show you a world the way only I can see it. I free myself for today and forever from human immobility. I'm in constant movement. I approach and pull away from objects. I creep under them. I move alongside a running horse's mouth. I fall and rise with the falling and rising bodies. This is I, the machine, manoeuvring in the chaotic movements, recording one movement after another in the most complex combinations.Freed from the boundaries of time and space, I co-ordinate any and all points of the universe, wherever I want them to be. My way leads towards the creation of a fresh perception of the world. Thus I explain in a new way the world unknown to you.” - Dziga Vertov

110. “All aesthetic judgment is really cultural evaluation.” - Susan Sontag

111. “We''re all misfits here,” he says, almost proudly. “That's why I started this squat, after all.  For people like us, who don't fit in anywhere else.  Halfies and homos and hopeless romantics, the outcast and outrageous and terminally weird.  That's where art comes from, Jimmy, my friend.  From our weirdnesses and our differences, from our manic fixations, our obsessions, our passions.  From all those wild and wacky things that make each of us unique.” - Terri Windling

112. “Whereas life separates meaning from emotion, art unites them. Story is an instrument by which you create such epiphanies at will, the phenomenon known as aesthetic emotion...Life on its own, without art to shape it, leaves you in confusion and chaos, but aesthetic emotion harmonizes what you know with what you feel to give you a heightened awareness and a sureness of your place in reality.” - Robert McKee

113. “I want to make a difference, I want to make a change, inspire a revolution, to create, reinvent, and rearrange.” - Meagan Earls

114. “Yet entertainment--as I define it, pleasure and all--remains the only sure means we have of bridging, or at least of feeling as if we have bridged, the gulf of consciousness that separates each of us from everybody else. The best response to those who would cheapen and exploit it is not to disparage or repudiate but to reclaim entertainment as a job fit for artists and for audiences, a two-way exchange of attention, experience, and the universal hunger for connection.” - Michael Chabon

115. “If you can sustain your interest in what you’re doing, you’re an extremely fortunate person. What you see very frequently in people’s professional lives, and perhaps in their emotional life as well, is that they lose interest in the third act. You sort of get tired, and indifferent, and, sometimes, defensive. And you kind of lose your capacity for astonishment — and that’s a great loss, because the world is a very astonishing place. What I feel fortunate about is that I’m still astonished, that things still amaze me. And I think that that’s the great benefit of being in the arts, where the possibility for learning never disappears, where you basically have to admit you never learn it.” - Milton Glaser

116. “The value of a work of art cannot ultimately turn on the more or less of its subservience to ideology; for painting can be grandly subservient to the half-truths of the moment, doggedly servile, and yet be no less intense.” - T.J. Clark

117. “If you were to go, and hopefully someday you will, you would see a lot of paintings of dead people. You'd see Jesus on the cross, and you'd see a dude getting stabbed in the neck, and you'd see people dying at sea and in battle and a parade of martyrs. But Not. One. Single. Cancer. Kid. Nobody biting it from the plague or smallpox or yellow fever or whatever, because there is no glory in illness. There is no meaning to it. There is no honor in dying of.” - John Green

118. “If the photographer isn't going to pay attention to the picture he is making, that if he thinks the camera is just a machine and not an avenue of expression, then he has no business asking anyone for anything, let alone their time and interest. Don't show the world, he said, invent the world.” - Whitney Otto

119. “Sound unbound by nature becomes bounded by art.” - Dejan Stojanovic

120. “Art actually happens somewhere in the space between clarity and ambiguity, concept and intuition, thought and feeling.” - Bert Dodson

121. “Sometimes there is a microcosm and a macrocosm, and if you're dyslexic like me you can't tell the difference.” - Bruce Bickford

122. “It's Okay, I'm with me.” - William Visher

123. “It is impossible to be truly artistic without the risk of offending someone somewhere.” - Wayne Gerard Trotman

124. “They all want to leave the Gray Space, Liv, she’d tell me. They don’t realise they’re dead until they remember what it sounds like to be alive.” - Kate Ellison

125. “If it’s a pure expression of yourself no matter what it is or what medium, it’s going to shine. It’s going to resonate. You could look inside of yourself and you could have a canvas and you could paint a dot in it, but if that is where your creative purpose is taking you then it needs to be that dot.” - Rainn Wilson

126. “Brothers in Art: a friendship so complete” - Alfred Tennyson

127. “Why, if you are interested in the country only for the sake of painting it, you'll never learn to see the country.” - C.S. Lewis

128. “Art is ment to travel from your heart to your head and out through your fingers...” - Kelly Bingham

129. “There is no line between fine art and illustration; there is no high or low art; there is only art, and it comes in many forms.” (p. 12)” - James Gurney

130. “Poverty and loneliness could be seen as a liberation from strivings to become rich and popular.” - Donald Richie

131. “He realised, more vividly than ever before, that art had two constant, two unending preoccupations: it is always meditating upon death and it is always thereby creating life.” - Boris Pasternak

132. “Draw the art you want to see, start the business you want to run, play the music you want to hear, write the books you want to read, build the products you want to use – do the work you want to see done.” - Austin Kleon

133. “The creative impulse can be killed, but it cannot be taught...What a teacher can do...in working with children, is to give the flame enough oxygen so that it can burn. As far as I'm concerned, this providing of oxygen is one of the noblest of all vocations.” - Madeleine L'Engle

134. “Be aware of wonder. Live a balanced life - learn some and think some and draw and paint and sing and dance and play and work every day some.” - Robert Fulghum

135. “Sometimes life is hard. Things go wrong—in life and in love and in business and in friendship and in health and in all the other ways that life can go wrong. And when things get tough, this is what you should do: make good art. . . . Someone on the internet thinks what you’re doing is stupid or evil or it’s all been done before: make good art. Probably things will work out somehow, eventually time will take the sting away, and it doesn’t even matter. Do what only you can do best: make good art.” - Neil Gaiman

136. “...A painting was a translation of the language of my heart.” - Amy Tan

137. “In such a person, sadness breeds purpose; finding inspiration in the darkness and often times, I believe, they will impress a hell onto their own lives in order to re-create it, that others might suffer the experience from the comfort of their armchairs. - Quote from Her Past's Present.” - Michael Poeltl

138. “I believe art prefers rules. For some artists, the worst thing you can do is say 'Do whatever you want.' Such permission can be terrifying. I know it is for me. Often it's better if you impose rules or restrictions on a project. Requirements can force you to be creative in unusual ways.” - Mangum Lisa

139. “Good art is not universal. Bruce Willis is universal.” - Sherman Alexie

140. “Fears arise when you look back, and they arise when you look ahead. If you're prone to disaster fantasies, you may even find yourself caught in the middle, staring at your half-finished canvas and fearing both that you lack the ability to finish it, and that no one will understand it if you do.Fears arise when you look back, and they arise when you look ahead. If you're prone to disaster fantasies, you may even find yourself caught in the middle, staring at your half-finished canvas and fearing both that you lack the ability to finish it, and that no one will understand it if you do.To which the Master replied, 'What makes you think that ever changes?'That's why they're called Masters. When he raised David's discovery from an expression of self-doubt to a simple observation of reality, uncertainty became an asset. Lesson for the day: vision is always ahead of execution -- and it should be. Vision, Uncertainty, and Knowledge of Materials are inevitabilities that all artists must acknowledge and learn from: vision is always ahead of execution, knowledge of materials is your contact with reality, and uncertainty is a virtue.” - David Bayles

141. “When you come right down to it all you have is yourself. The sun is a thousand rays in your belly. All the rest is nothing.” - Pablo Picasso

142. “Fine art refers to an accomplished or advanced skill being used to testify and reveal the knowledge, ability, and wisdom of the creator. There is no art more exquisite than the work of the Master Artist Himself. Even those who choose to deny Him credit for His own creation are often engaged as an admirer of His work. Refusing to acknowledge the Source will never minimize His glory or extinguish the truth.With God’s loving guidance our life can be a great masterpiece filled with beauty, adventure, hope and purpose.” - Traci Lea LaRussa

143. “The problem with this poem, from your perspective, must be its lack of financial value. I guess my problem with you, from my perspective, is how you insist on putting a financial value on everything.” - Peter Davis

144. “Art is so often better at theology than theology is.” - Christian Wiman

145. “...she (the artist, the writer) doesn't wait for inspiration, she acts in the anticipation of its apparition.” - Steven Pressfield

146. “In many ways, religion comes from the same place in us that art comes from. The language of the human heart if poetry” - Krista Tippett