Everything you can imagine is real.
Eleanor was right. She never looked nice. She looked like art, and art wasn't supposed to look nice; it was supposed to make you feel something.
A life spent making mistakes is not only more honorable, but more useful than a life spent doing nothing.
Painting is poetry that is seen rather than felt, and poetry is painting that is felt rather than seen.
Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once he grows up.
You must have chaos within you to give birth to a dancing star.
It is good to love many things, for therein lies the true strength, and whosoever loves much performs much, and can accomplish much, and what is done in love is well done.
Art is the lie that enables us to realize the truth.
A painter should begin every canvas with a wash of black, because all things in nature are dark except where exposed by the light.
The most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion that stands at the cradle of true art and true science.
An intellectual says a simple thing in a hard way. An artist says a hard thing in a simple way.
I dream my painting and I paint my dream.
Any fool can be happy. It takes a man with real heart to make beauty out of the stuff that makes us weep.
If you want to really hurt you parents, and you don't have the nerve to be gay, the least you can do is go into the arts. I'm not kidding. The arts are not a way to make a living. They are a very human way of making life more bearable. Practicing an art, no matter how well or badly, is a way to make your soul grow, for heaven's sake. Sing in the shower. Dance to the radio. Tell stories. Write a poem to a friend, even a lousy poem. Do it as well as you possible can. You will get an enormous reward. You will have created something.
I am an excitable person who only understands life lyrically, musically, in whom feelings are much stronger as reason. I am so thirsty for the marvelous that only the marvelous has power over me. Anything I can not transform into something marvelous, I let go. Reality doesn't impress me. I only believe in intoxication, in ecstasy, and when ordinary life shackles me, I escape, one way or another. No more walls.
One ought, every day at least, to hear a little song, read a good poem, see a fine picture, and, if it were possible, to speak a few reasonable words.
If you ask me what I came to do in this world, I, an artist, will answer you: I am here to live out loud.
Art and love are the same thing: It’s the process of seeing yourself in things that are not you.
Art enables us to find ourselves and lose ourselves at the same time.
Art washes away from the soul the dust of everyday life.
