Arts

Above all, artists are men who want to become inhuman.
~ Guillaume Apollinaire (Wilhelm-Apollinaris de Kostrowitzky), Les peintres cubistes (1913).

I think the best pictures are often on the edges of any situation, I don't find photographing the situation nearly as interesting as photographing the edges.
~ William Albert Allard, Photographic Essay (American Photographer Master Series, 1989).

Artists are, above all, men who want to become inhuman.
~ Guillaume Apollinaire (Wilhelm-Apollinaris de Kostrowitzky), The Cubist Painters (1913). On Painting

French painting today is the only school which counts; only it plunders the universe for the logic of the great traditions, only it is full of life.
~ Guillaume Apollinaire (Wilhelm-Apollinaris de Kostrowitzky), The Cubist Painters (1913). On Painting

I hate artists who are not of their time.
~ Guillaume Apollinaire (Wilhelm-Apollinaris de Kostrowitzky)

Without poets, without artists, men would soon weary of nature's monotony. The sublime idea men have of the universe would collapse with dizzying speed. The order which we find in nature, and which is only an effect of art, would at once vanish. Everything would break up in chaos. There would be no seasons, no civilization, no thought, no humanity; even life would give way, and the impotent void would reign everywhere.
~ Guillaume Apollinaire (Wilhelm-Apollinaris de Kostrowitzky), The Cubist Painters (1913). On Painting

Nature has endowed us with a manifold mechanism of mind which enables us to mold and control imagined emotion to artistic ends.
~ William Archer, Masks or Faces?: A Study in the Psychology of Acting (1888).

Modern art touches a sore spot, or several sore spots, in the ordinary citizen of which he is totally unaware. The more irritated he becomes at modern art the more he betrays the fact that he himself, and his civilization, are implicated in what the artist shows him.
~ William E. Barrett, Irrational Man: A Study in Existential Philosophy (1958).

However much we would like advertising to be a science -- because life would be simpler that way -- the fact is that it is not. It is a subtle, ever-changing art, defying formularization, flowering on freshness and withering on imitation; where what was effective one day, for that very reason, will not be effective the next, because it has lost the maximum impact of originality.
~ Bill Bernbach, Bill Bernbach said . . . (1989).

As poetry admits not a letter that is insignificant, so painting admits not a grain of sand, or a blade of grass insignificant -- much less an insignificant blur or mark.
~ William Blake, A Vision of the Last Judgment (c. 1810).

Empire follows art & not vice versa as Englishmen suppose.
~ William Blake, in The Life of William Blake (1863). Notes on Reynolds' Discourses (written c. 1798-1808; aka Annotations to The Works of Sir Joshua Reynolds).

All pictures that's painted with sense and with thought
Are painted by madmen, as sure as a groat;
For the greater the fool is the pencil more blest,
As when they are drunk they always paint best.
~ William Blake, On Art And Artists (1800). To Venetian Artists

The difference between a bad artist and a good one is, that the bad artist seems to copy a great deal, the good one does copy a great deal.
~ William Blake, in The Life of William Blake (1863). Notes on Reynolds' Discourses (written c. 1798-1808; aka Annotations to The Works of Sir Joshua Reynolds).

The man who never in his mind and thought travelled to heaven, is no artist.
~ William Blake, in The Life of William Blake (1863). Notes on Reynolds' Discourses (written c. 1798-1808; aka Annotations to The Works of Sir Joshua Reynolds).

Rembrandt painted about 700 pictures -- of these, 3,000 are in existence.
~ Wilhelm Bode

All styles, all manners of all styles are naively fixed in superb unself-consciousness -- which anyhow is just the unique atmosphere in which all the arts can germinate.
~ William Bolitho, from Camera Obscura (1930).

I accept and respect all schools of painting which have as their basis the sincere study of nature, the search for the true and the beautiful. As for the mystics, the impressionists, the pointillists, etc., I don't see the way they see. That is my only reason for not liking them.
~ William Adolphe Bouguereau

One has to seek Beauty and Truth, Sir! As I always say to my pupils, you have to work to the finish. There's only one kind of painting. It is the painting that presents the eye with perfection, the kind of beautiful and impeccable enamel you find in Veronese and Titian.
~ William Adolphe Bouguereau

All the great craving desires of humanity have been promised and attained through the message of art.
~ William Stanley Braithwaite, The Crisis (August 1915). Democracy and Art

We find that at almost every stage of its development Democracy has been betrayed by one or another of its idealist professors, except one. . . . Art alone has kept her convenant with Democracy.
~ William Stanley Braithwaite, The Crisis (August 1915). Democracy and Art

You cannot paint the "Mona Lisa" by assigning one dab each to a thousand painters.
~ William F. Buckley, Jr.

England has the most sordid literary scene I've ever seen. They all meet in the same pub. This guy's writing a foreword for this person. They all have to give radio programs, they have to do all this just in order to scrape by. They're all scratching each other's backs.
~ William S. Burroughs, Taped conversation with Victor Bockrism, New York City (1980). Burroughs in London

It is the function of the artist to evoke the experience of surprised recognition: to show the viewer what he knows but does not know that he knows.
~ William S. Burroughs, first published in Kindskopf (1991). Helnwein's work (essay written in 1990)

Out of the closets and into the museums, libraries, architectural monuments, concert halls, bookstores, recording studios and film studios of the world. Everything belongs to the inspired and dedicated thief. . . . Words, colors, light, sounds, stone, wood, bronze belong to the living artist. They belong to anyone who can use them. Loot the Louvre! A bas l'originalité, the sterile and assertive ego that imprisons us as it creates. Vive le sol -- pure, shameless, total. We are not responsible. Steal anything in sight.
~ William S. Burroughs, The Adding Machine (1985). Les Voleurs

Religion and art spring from the same root and are close kin. Economics and art are strangers.
~ Willa Sibert Cather, from Willa Cather On Writing (1949). Four Letters: Escapism (first published in "Commonweal"; 17 April 1936)

The condition every art requires is, not so much freedom from restriction, as freedom from adulteration and from the intrusion of foreign matter.
~ Willa Sibert Cather

[W]hat was any art but an effort to make a sheath, a mould in which to imprison for a moment the shining elusive element which is life itself -- life hurrying past us and running away, too strong to stop, too sweet to lose.
~ Willa Sibert Cather, The Song of the Lark (1915).

He ne'er will as an artist shine,
Who copies Nature line by line:
Who'er from nature takes a view,
Must copy and improve it too.
~ William Combe, Tour of Dr. Syntax, in Search of the Picturesque (1812).

Blest be the art that can immortalize.
~ William Cowper, On Receipt Of My Mother's Picture (1798).

Made poetry a mere mechanic art
And every warbler has his tune by heart.
~ William Cowper, from Poems by William Cowper of the Inner Temple, Esq. (1782). Table Talk (written in 1781)

Art without science is poverty, but science without art is barbarism.
~ William James "Will" Durant

For even higher than the life of art is the art of life.
~ William James "Will" Durant

It is the artists that create the poetry, the painting, the music, the philosophy and the love; and every lover cherishes them.
~ William James "Will" Durant

The universe of thought is only one of many worlds; each sense has its own; each art has therefore its characteristic medium, which cannot be translated into speech. Even an artist writes about art in vain.
~ William James "Will" Durant

I am afraid that there are more people than I can imagine who can go no further than appreciating a picture that is a rectangle with an object in the middle of it, which they can identify. They don't care what is around the object as long as nothing interferes with the object itself, right in the centre. . . . They want something obvious. I am at war with the obvious.
~ William Eggleston, The Democratic Forest (1989). Afterword

He's almost like a folk poet, but he reaches heights of art because of his simplicity. The simple things, the essences, are the great things, but our way of expressing them can be incredibly complex. It's the same thing with technique in music. You try to express a simple emotion -- love, excitement, sadness -- and often your technique gets in the way . . . The great artist gets right to the heart of the matter. His technique is so natural it's invisible or unhearable.
~ Bill Evans (of William Blake), Down Beat Magazine (1960).

An artist is a creature driven by demons. He doesn't know why they chose him and he's usually too busy to wonder why. He is completely amoral in that he will rob, borrow, beg, or steal from anybody and everybody to get the work done.
~ William Faulkner, in Writers at Work, First Series (Interview; 1958).

I would say that music is the easiest means in which to express . . . but since words are my talent, I must try to express clumsily in words what the pure must would have done better.
~ William Faulkner

The aim of every artist is to arrest motion, which is life, by artificial means and hold it fixed so that a hundred years later, when a stranger looks at it, it moves again since it is life. Since man is mortal, the only immortality possible for him is to leave something behind him that is immortal since it will always move.
~ William Faulkner, in Lion in the Garden: Interviews with William Faulkner 1926-1962 (1968).

The artist is still a little like the old court jester. He's supposed to speak his vicious paradoxes with some sense in them, but he isn't part of whatever the fabric is that makes a nation.
~ William Faulkner

I listen to the voices, and when I put down what the voices say, it's right. Sometimes I don't like what they say, but I don't change it.
~ William Faulkner

To me, film right now is dormant. It's a sleeping giant. It's the plaything of corporations. The people who determine what American film is today are no different from high rollers who go to Las Vegas. They just want to take all the money and put it on one big number and roll the dice on that number and if it craps out, next number. Next case.
~ William Friedkin, The Harold Lloyd Master Seminar Series at the American Film Institute (16 March 1994).

What is it they want from the man that they didn't get from the work? What do they expect? What is there left when he's done with his work, what's any artist but the dregs of his work, the human shambles that follows it around?
~ William Gaddis, The Recognitions (1955).

The art of sketching is to the picturesque traveler what the art of writing is to the scholar. Each is equally necessary to fix and communicate its respective ideas.
~ William Gilpin, from Three Essays: On Picturesque Beauty; On Picturesque Travel; and On Sketching Landscape (1794)

All the masterpieces of art contain both light and shadow. A happy life is not one filled with only sunshine, but one which uses both light and shadow to produce beauty.
~ Billy Graham, Day by Day with Billy Graham (1976).

Art is the microscope of the mind, which sharpens the wit as the other does the sight, and converts every object into a little universe in itself.
~ William Hazlitt

Art may be said to draw aside the veil of nature. To those who are perfectly unskilled in the practice, unimbued with the principles of art, most objects present only a confused mass.
~ William Hazlitt

Rules and models destroy genius and art.
~ William Hazlitt, from Sketches and Essays (1839). On Taste

Even the most severe criticism when it fairly hits the mark is apt to be greeted by an internal Ah-hah! if it shows the artist a new and valid path for work.
~ William Ernest (W.E.) Henley

It often takes another artist to see the embryonic work that is trying to sprout.
~ William Ernest (W.E.) Henley

Pointed criticism, if accurate, often gives the artist an inner sense of relief.
~ William Ernest (W.E.) Henley

American popular culture does not embrace this certification of art as work. Indeed the word 'art' is rarely used at all. The preferred signifier is the word 'entertainment', which correctly conveys that the aspirations are generally escapist, nostalgic, or anodyne.
~ William A. Henry III, In Defense of Elitism (1994).

I have generally found that persons who had studied painting least were the best judges of it.
~ William Hogarth

It's impossible to make a picture without values. Values are the basis. If they are not, tell me what is the basis.
~ William Morris (W.M.) Hunt

The mission of art is to represent nature, not to imitate her.
~ William Morris (W.M.) Hunt

Literature flourishes best when it is half a trade and half an art.
~ William Ralph (Dean) Inge, from Outspoken Essays, Second Series (1922). The Victorian Age

Theater is, of course, a reflection of life. Maybe we have to improve life before we can hope to improve theater.
~ William R. Inge

There are certain artists who have taken it upon themselves to save the world, and I find that gets tiresome. I think the artist's first obligation is to the art, not to the issues . . . I think if I have something to say the best way to do that is just to tell a damn good story.
~ Billy Joel, St. Louis Post-Dispatch (19 July 1990). Billy Joel: Went Back to His Roots and Found Water

My aim is to express in a natural way what I feel, what is in me, both rhythmically and spiritually, all that which in time has been saved up in my family of primitiveness and tradition, and which is now concentrated in me.
~ William Henry Johnson, Interview for a Danish Newspaper (1932)

Without (a sense of place) the work is often reduced to a cry of voices in empty rooms, a literature of the self, at its best poetic music; at its worst a thin gruel of the ego.
~ William Kennedy

An artist is forced by others to paint out of his own free will.
~ Willem de Kooning, Lecture at the 'Subjects of the Artist' School, New York (18 February 1949). A Desperate View

I don't paint to live, I live to paint.
~ Willem de Kooning

I make pictures and someone comes in and calls it art.
~ Willem de Kooning

If you pick up some paint with your brush and make somebody's nose with it, this is rather ridiculous when you think of it, theoretically or philosophically. It's really absurd to make an image, like a human image, with paint, today.
~ Willem de Kooning, BBC (Interview; 30 December 1960).

In art, one idea is as good as another. If one takes the idea of trembling, for instance, all of a sudden most art starts to tremble. Michelangelo starts to tremble. El Greco starts to tremble. All the Impressionists start to tremble.
~ Willem de Kooning, Lecture at the 'Subjects of the Artist' School, New York (18 February 1949). A Desperate View

God help the Minister that meddles with art!
~ William Lamb (2nd Viscount, Lord Melbourne), Quoted in Lord M (1954).

Art is not a special sauce applied to ordinary cooking; it is the cooking itself if it is good.
~ William Richard (W.R.) Lethaby, in The Imprint (January 1913). Art and Workmanship

The cheap, no matter how charming, how immediate, does not wear so well. It has a way of telling its whole story the first time through.
~ William Littler

Art for art's sake makes no more sense than gin for gin's sake.
~ W. Somerset Maugham

Art, if it is to be reckoned as one of the great values of life, must teach man humility, tolerance, wisdom and magnanimity. The value of art is not beauty, but right action.
~ W. Somerset Maugham

Beauty is something wonderful and strange that the artist fashions out of the chaos of the world in the torment of his soul.
~ W. Somerset Maugham

Every production of an artist should be the expression of an adventure of his soul.
~ W. Somerset Maugham

For the mystic what is how. For the craftsman how is what. For the artist what and how are one.
~ William McElcheran

Art is the only thing that man does which does not involve an adversary relationship. When you do an art, you don't lose something. That's not true of business or sports. Art is done for its own sake; it's a creative partnership.
~ William Ormond (W.O.) Mitchell

A drama critic is a person who surprises the playwright by informing him what he meant.
~ Wilson Mizner

Art is man's expression of his joy in labor.
~ William Morris

If you cannot learn to love real art; at least learn to hate sham art and reject it . . . because these are but the outward symbols of the poison that lies within them.
~ William Morris (lecture delivered at the London Institution, 10 March 1880), Hopes and Fears for Art (1882). The Prospects of Architecture in Civilisation

What business have we with art at all, unless all can share it?
~ William Morris

Paint pictures that will take with the public. In other words, never paint for the few, but for the many. Some artists remain in the corner by not observing the above.
~ William Sidney Mount

Photography has become an outstanding and indispensable means of propaganda in the revolutionary stuggle.
~ Willi Muenzenberg, Arbeiter-Fotograf (1931).

An artist chooses his subjects: that is the way he praises.
~ Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, The Gay Science (1882). Book III

Art is the highest task and proper metaphysical activity of this life.
~ Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

Art is the proper task of life.
~ Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

The artist chooses his subject; that is his mode of praising.
~ Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

We artists! We moon-struck and God-struck ones! We death-silent, untiring wanderers on heights which we do not see as heights, but as our plains, as our places of safety!
~ Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

We have art that we do not die of the truth.
~ Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

There is no more difficult art to acquire than the art of observation, and for some men it is quite as difficult to record an observation in brief and plain language.
~ William Osler

Don't buy a work of art unless you can't live without it.
~ William Samuel Paley

Patriotism is the last refuge of the sculptor.
~ William Charles Franklyn Plomer

Half of art is knowing when to stop.
~ Arthur William Radford

Art without control is like a living man without a head -- it walks but it doesn't talk.
~ William Joseph "Bill" Russo, Jazz Composition and Orchestration (1968).

He paints for the blind, and we are the blind, and he lets us see for sure what we saw long ago but weren't sure we saw. He paints for the dead, to remind us that -- great good God, think of it -- we're alive. . . .
~ William Saroyan, I Used to Believe I Had Forever, Now I'm Not So Sure (1968).

San Francisco itself is art, above all literary art.
Every block is a short story, every hill a novel.
Every home a poem, every dweller within immortal.
That is the whole truth.
~ William Saroyan

The role of art is to make a world which can be inhabited.
~ William Saroyan, in The New York Times (31 October 1983).

And art made tongue-tied by authority.
~ William Shakespeare, Sonnet 66

I want that glib and oily art
To speak and purpose not.
~ William Shakespeare, King Lear

In scorn of nature, art gave lifeless life.
~ William Shakespeare, The Rape of Lucrece

More matter with less art.
~ William Shakespeare, Hamlet

Most dear actors, eat no onions nor garlic, for we are to utter sweet breath.
~ William Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night's Dream

O! she's warm.
If this be magic, let it be an art
Lawful as eating.
~ William Shakespeare, The Winter's Tale

Every good poet includes a critic, but the reverse will not hold.
~ William Shenstone

It is local, sectional -- and to be national in literature, one must needs be sectional. No one mind can fully or fairly illustrate the characteristics of any great country; and he who shall depict one section faithfully, has made his proper and sufficient contribution to the great work of national illustration.
~ William Gilmore Simms, The Wigwam and the Cabin (1856 edition). Dedication

An artist must be ruthlessly selfish.
~ William (W.) Eugene Smith, in Let Truth Be the Prejudice: W. Eugene Smith His Life and Photographs (1985).

The purpose of all art is to cause a deep and emotion, also one that is entertaining or pleasing. Out of the depth and entertainment comes value.
~ William (W.) Eugene Smith, in Myth and Vision. On the Walk to Paradise Garden and the Photography of W. Eugene Smith (1987).

Not a few, but everyone, makes art.
~ William Stafford, from Writing the Australian Crawl (1978). Writing: The Discovery of Daily Experience

A picture is not wrought
By hands alone, good Padre, but by thought.
In the interior life it first must start,
And grow to form and colour in the soul;
There once conceived and rounded to a whole,
The rest is but the handicraft of art.
~ William Wetmore Story, Padre Bandelli Proses

All Arts are one, howe'er distributed they stand;
Verse, tone, shape, color, form, are fingers on one hand.
~ William Wetmore Story, Couplet. V

What is left undone is as necessary to a true work of art as what is done.
~ William Wetmore Story

An artist needn't be a clergyman or a churchwarden, but he certainly must have a warm heart for his fellow men.
~ Vincent Willem van Gogh, in The Complete Letters of Vincent Van Gogh, vol. 1 (1958). Letter of 1 November 1882, to his brother Theo

If a farmer fills his barn with grain, he gets mice. If he leaves it empty, he gets actors.
~ William E. "Bill" Vaughan

If cartoonists would look at this more as an art than as a part time job or a get-rich-quick scheme, I think comics overall would be better. I think there's a tremendous potential to be tapped.
~ Bill Watterson, Honk Magazine (Interview; 1986).

True, comics are a popular art, and yes, I believe their primary obligation is to entertain, but comics can go beyond that, and when they do, they move from silliness to significance.
~ Bill Watterson, Speech at the Festival of Cartoon Art, Ohio State University (27 October 1989). The Cheapening of Comics

An actor entering through the door, you've got nothing. But if he enters through the window, you've got a situation.
~ Billy Wilder

It used to be that we in films were the lowest form of art. Now we have something to look down on.
~ Billy Wilder (of television), in Billy Wilder (1968).

Every art requires practice, even if you are a natural.
~ Angel Kyodo Williams, Being Black: Zen and the Art of Living With Fearlessness and Grace (2000).

All good art is an indiscretion.
~ Thomas Lanier ("Tennessee") Williams

In all human experience, there are parallels which permit common understanding in the telling and hearing, and it is the frightening responsibility of an artist to make what is directly or allusively close to his own being communicable and understandable, however disturbingly, to the hearts and minds of all whom he addresses.
~ Thomas Lanier ("Tennessee") Williams, Too Personal (1972 essay).

But all art is sensual and poetry particularly so. It doesn't declaim or explain, it presents.
~ William Carlos Williams

In a purely technical sense, each species of higher organism is richer in information than a Caravaggio painting, Bach fugue, or any other great work of art.
~ Edward Osborne (E.O.) Wilson

Works of art are all that survive of incredibly gifted people.
~ Peter C. Wilson

You can't automate in the arts. Since the sixteenth century there has been no change in the number of people necessary to produce Hamlet.
~ William T. Wylie

Art bids us touch and taste and hear and see the world, and shrinks from what Blake calls mathematic form, from every abstract form, from all that is of the brain only.
~ William Butler Yeats, The Cutting of an Agate (1912).

I think you can leave the arts, superior or inferior, to the conscience of mankind.
~ William Butler Yeats