You’ve always lived a life of pretense, not a real life– a simulated existence, not a genuine existence. Everything about you, everything you are, has always been pretense, never genuine, never real. – Thomas Bernhard
Now art should never try to be popular. The public should try to make itself artistic. – Oscar Wilde
Poetry and art and knowledge are sacred and pure. – George Eliot
The great artists of the world are never Puritans, and seldom even ordinarily respectable. – H.L. Mencken
A work of art which did not begin in emotion is not art. – Paul Cézanne
You could say my book is the best book ever (or worst book ever), and it wouldn’t make it any better (or worse) than it is. All art exists outside and beyond criticism. – Jarod Kintz
What I’m trying to describe is that it’s impossible to get out of your skin into somebody else’s…. That somebody else’s tragedy is not the same as your own. – Diane Arbus
If art made you think, then this was Art. Staring at the ball, made of layers and layers of cloth, I wondered about the glass marble at its heart. What if you wanted to reach that marble? Make sure it was still whole?
You’d have to remove the layers. You’d have to risk breaking the ball for a chance at freeing it. Fear, knowledge, certainty – you’d have to be willing to let them all go. – Justina Chen
You don’t make art out of good intentions. – Gustave Flaubert
It’s a good thing you and your pills weren’t around a few hundred years ago or there never would have been a Vermeer or a Caravaggio. You’d have drugged “Girl with a Pearl Earring” and “The Taking of Christ” right the hell out of them. – Jennifer Donnelly
The Artist always has the masters in his eyes. – Ralph Waldo Emerson
Art is anything you can get away with. – Marshall McLuhan
