Art Quotes

In our time rhythm is more and more accentuated, not only in art, but in mechanized reality and in the whole of life.

To me, photography is an art of observation. It's about finding something interesting in an ordinary place... I've found it has little to do with the things you see and everything to do with the way you see them.

Nothing is original. Steal from anywhere that resonates with inspiration or fuels your imagination. Devour old films, new films, music, books, paintings, photographs, poems, dreams, random conversations, architecture, bridges, street signs, trees, clouds, bodies of water, light and shadows. Select only things to steal from that speak directly to your soul. If you do this, your work (and theft) will be authentic. Authenticity is invaluable; originality is non-existent.

Living has yet to be generally recognized as one of the arts.

"Whoever neglects the arts when he is young has lost the past and is dead to the future."

"Sometimes life is hard...And when things get tough, this is what you should do: Make good art. I’m serious. Husband runs off with a politician? Make good art. Leg crushed and then eaten by a mutated boa constrictor? Make good art. IRS on your trail? Make good art. Cat exploded? 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."

"Sometimes life is hard...And when things get tough, this is what you should do: Make good art. I’m serious. Husband runs off with a politician? Make good art. Leg crushed and then eaten by a mutated boa constrictor? Make good art. IRS on your trail? Make good art. Cat exploded? 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."

You’re never going to learn something as profoundly as when it’s purely out of curiosity.

Joy in looking and comprehending is nature's most beautiful gift.

Art washes from the soul the dust of every day life.

Those who live in the next century will see better.

There's a great temptation to make things obvious.

"If you do not wish to reach up and smear it with your finger, than it is not art"

Success in art is not just making a living, or being famous and acclaimed. Those are consequences. Success is moving and being moved. It is opening vistas. Unsettling the status quo. Peeking beneath the veil of convention.

I made you take time to look at what I saw and when you took time to really notice my flower, you hung all your associations with flowers on my flower and you write about my flower as if I think and see what you think and see—and I don’t.

The photograph is literally an emanation of the referent. From a real body, which was there, proceed radiations which ultimately touch me, who am here; the duration of the transmission is insignificant; the photograph of the missing being, as Sontag says, will touch me like the delayed rays of a star.

In art intentions are not sufficient and, as we say in Spanish: love must be proved by facts and not by reasons. What one does is what counts, and not what one has the intention of doing.

I can live without many things. But, deprived of a medium with which to create, I would fall apart. If you understand that, you will understand me.

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.

I never read, I just look at pictures.