An artist is someone who produces things that people don’t need to have but that he – for some reason – thinks it would be a good idea to give them. – Andy Warhol
The Christian in the one whose imagination should fly beyond the stars. – Francis August Schaeffer
On my website there’s a quote from the writer Anthony Burgess: “The greatest gift is the passion for reading. It is cheap, it consoles, it distracts, it excites, it gives you knowledge of the world and experience of a wide kind.”
I’ve always found that inspiring because the written word, as an art form, is unlike any other: movies, TV, music, they’re shared experiences, but books aren’t like that. The relationship between a writer and a reader is utterly unique to those two individuals. The world that forms in your head as you read a book will be slightly different to that experienced by every other reader. Anywhere. Ever. Reading is very personal, a communication from one mind to another, something which can’t be exactly copied, or replicated, or directly shared.
If I read the work of, say, one of the great Victorian novelists, it’s like a gift from the past, a momentary connection to another’s thoughts. Their ideas are down on paper, to be picked up by me, over a century later. Writers can speak individually to readers across a year, or ten years, or a thousand.
That’s why I love books. – Simon Cheshire
She was never going to seek gainful employment again, that was for certain. She’d remain outside the public sector. She’d be an anarchist, she’d travel with jaguars. She was going to train herself to be totally irrational. She’d fall in love with a totally inappropriate person. She’d really work on it, but abandon would be involved as well. She’d have different names, a.k.a. Snake, a.k.a. Snow – no that was juvenile. She wanted to be extraordinary, to possess a savage glitter. – Joy Williams
A picture might be worth a thousand words but a good sentence is worth a thousand windows – Mati Klarwein
My experience with life is that it’s very fragmented. In one place certain kinds of thing occur, and in another place a different kind of thing occurs. I would like my work to have some vivid indication of those differences. I guess, in painting, it would amount to different kinds of space being represented in it. – Jasper Johns
Vaguely conscious of that great suspense in which we live, we find our escape from its sterile, annihilating reality in many dreams, in religion, passion, art. – Arthur Symons
Art is essentially the affirmation, the blessing, and the deification of existence. – Friedrich Nietzsche
Your first 10,000 photographs are your worst. – Henri Cartier-Bresson
It is art that makes life, makes interest, makes importance, and I know of no substitute for the force and beauty of it’s process. – Henry James
One thing about great art: it made you love people more, forgive them their petty transgressions. It worked in the way that religion was supposed to, if you thought about it. – Nick Hornby
When there is no freedom, there is no creativity. – Soud Qbeilat
