Quotes for All
I had thrown my body in for art… I had thrown myself into this game for art. You know, I was not a very good artist. But this was, like, one thing I could do. (On being photographed nude playing chess with Marcel Duchamp at Duchamp’s 1963 retrospective at the Pasadena Museum of Art.) Eve … Read more
It takes a long time to make a painter – even with a good artist’s education – but without one it tries the patience of Job; it is a great thing if one does not go backward. Edward Lear
Only when he no longer knows what he is doing does the painter do good things. Edgar Degas
Great art is always a way of concentrating, reinventing what is called fact, what we know of our existence- a reconcentration… tearing away the veils, the attitudes people acquire of their time and earlier time. Really good artists tear down those veils Francis Bacon
What an artist does, is fail. Any reading of the literature, (I mean the literature of artistic creation), however summary, will persuade you instantly that the paradigmatic artistic experience is that of failure. The actualization fails to meet, equal, the intuition. There is something “out there” which cannot be brought “here”. This is standard. I … Read more
Every good artist I know, I always think works hard, we’re working all the time. David Hockney
Most artists work all the time, they do actually, especially good artists, they work all the time, what else is there to do? I mean you do. David Hockney
Good artists exist in what they make, and consequently are perfectly uninteresting in what they are. Dave Eggers
If you study a great work of art, you’ll probably find the artist was a kind of genius. And geniuses are different to you and me. So let’s have no talk of temperamental, self-absorbed and petulant babies. Being a good artist is the toughest job you could pick, and you have to be a little … Read more
If I stop being on good behaviour for a moment, my dark little secret is that I don’t actually believe many people in the art world have much feeling for art and simply cannot tell a good artist from a weak one, until the artist has enjoyed the validation of others – a received pronunciation. … Read more