If you do not breathe through writing, if you do not cry out in writing, or sing in writing, then don’t write, because our culture has no use for it.
Pictures must not be too picturesque.
Drawing is like making an expressive gesture with the advantage of permanence.
The waking mind is the least serviceable in the arts.
To make pictures big is to make them more powerful.
To say that a work of art is good, but incomprehensible to the majority of men, is the same as saying of some kind of food that it is very good but that most people can’t eat it.
I think you can leave the arts, superior or inferior, to the conscience of mankind.
A work of art has no importance whatever to society. It is only important to the individual.
Every time a student walks past a really urgent, expressive piece of architecture that belongs to his college, it can help reassure him that he does have that mind, does have that soul.
What marks the artist is his power to shape the material of pain we all have.
The worst state of affairs is when science begins to concern itself with art.
When I work, and in my art, I hold hands with God.
I don’t understand it. Jack will spend any amount of money to buy votes but he balks at investing a thousand dollars in a beautiful painting.
It’s clever, but is it Art?
Life is short, the art long.
All good art is an indiscretion.
Art requires philosophy, just as philosophy requires art. Otherwise, what would become of beauty?
Pictures deface walls more often than they decorate them.
If we could but paint with the hand what we see with the eye.
I don’t want life to imitate art. I want life to be art.
Artists themselves are not confined, but their output is.
Art is subject to arbitrary fashion.
Wherever art appears, life disappears.
To me, photography is the simultaneous recognition, in a fraction of a second, of the significance of an event.
When that shutter clicks, anything else that can be done afterward is not worth consideration.
