Art at its most significant is a Distant Early Warning System that can always be relied on to tell the old culture what is beginning to happen to it.
It is well with me only when I have a chisel in my hand.
Art is based on order. The world is full of 'sloppy Bohemians' and their work betrays them.
Living is a form of not being sure, not knowing what next or how. The moment you know how, you begin to die a little. The artist never entirely knows. We guess. We may be wrong, but we take leap after leap in the dark.
The artist, like the idiot, or clown, sits on the edge of the world, and a push may send him over it.
Art-speech is the only truth. An artist is usually a damned liar but his art, if it be art, will tell you the truth of his day. And that is all that matters. Away with eternal truth. The truth lives from day to day, and the marvelous Plato of yesterday is chiefly bosh today.
Art isn't something you marry, it's something you rape.
It's not what you see that is art, art is the gap.
I always suspect an artist who is successful before he is dead.
An artist has to take life as he finds it. Life by itself is formless wherever it is. Art must give it form.
Art upsets, science reassures.
An artist has been defined as a neurotic who continually cures himself with his art.
Art is either plagiarism or revolution.
The father of every good work is discontent, and its mother is diligence.
A work should contain its total meaning within itself and should impress it on the spectator before he even knows the subject.
The terror of art lies in the representation of the hidden reality with its shattering effect.
Drawing is speaking to the eye; talking is painting to the ear.
We should comport ourselves with the masterpieces of art as with exalted personages - stand quietly before them and wait till they speak to us.
Be regular and orderly in your life like a bourgeois, so that you may be violent and original in your work.
The painting rises from the brushstrokes as a poem rises from the words. The meaning comes later.
