"Everything you can imagine is real."
— Pablo Picasso

"Painting is poetry that is seen rather than felt, and poetry is painting that is felt rather than seen."
— Leonardo da Vinci

"Even in literature and art, no man who bothers about originality will ever be original: whereas if you simply try to tell the truth (without caring twopence how often it has been told before) you will, nine times out of ten, become original without ever having noticed it."
— C.S. Lewis (Mere Christianity)

"There are painters who transform the sun to a yellow spot, but there are others who with the help of their art and their intelligence, transform a yellow spot into sun"
— Pablo Picasso

"Creativity takes courage. "
— Henri Matisse

"Art is not what you see, but what you make others see."
— Edgar Degas

"Art is the lie that enables us to realize the truth."
— Pablo Picasso

"There is a vitality, a life force, an energy, a quickening that is translated through you into action, and because there is only one of you in all time, this expression is unique. And if you block it, it will never exist through any other medium and will be lost. "
— Martha Graham

"Our truest response to the irrationality of the world is to paint or sing or write, for only in such response do we find truth."
— Madeleine L'Engle

"Do you not see how necessary a world of pains and troubles is to school an intelligence and make it a soul?"
— John Keats

"The painter has the Universe in his mind and hands."
— Leonardo da Vinci

"Life isn't a support system for art. It's the other way around."
— Stephen King

"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."
— Anaïs Nin

"A man's work is nothing but this slow trek to rediscover, through the detours of art, those two or three great and simple images in whose presence his heart first opened."
— Albert Camus

"Art is the proper task of life. "
— Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

"The chief enemy of creativity is good sense."
— Pablo Picasso

""What do you think an artist is? ...he is a political being, constantly aware of the heart breaking, passionate, or delightful things that happen in the world, shaping himself completely in their image. Painting is not done to decorate apartments. It is an instrument of war.""
— Pablo Picasso

"Science is what we understand well enough to explain to a computer. Art is everything else we do."
— Donald Knuth

"Interpretation is the revenge of the intellectual upon art. "
— Susan Sontag

"If we can't, as artists, improve on real life, we should put down our pencils and go bake bread."
— Barbara Kingsolver

"It is hard work and great art to make life not so serious."
— John Irving (The Hotel New Hampshire)

"The absence of limitations is the enemy of art."
— Orson Welles

"There is a vitality, a life force, an energy, a quickening that is translated through you into action, and because there is only one of you in all of time, this expression is unique. And if you block it, it will never exist through any other medium and it will be lost. The world will not have it. It is not your business to determine how good it is nor how valuable nor how it compares with other expressions. It is your business to keep it yours clearly and directly, to keep the channel open. You do not even have to believe in yourself or your work. You have to keep yourself open and aware to the urges that motivate you. Keep the channel open. ... No artist is pleased. [There is] no satisfaction whatever at any time. There is only a queer divine dissatisfaction, a blessed unrest that keeps us marching and makes us more alive than the others"
— Martha Graham

"Artists who seek perfection in everything are those who cannot attain it in anything.
"
— Eugène Delacroix

"Without magic, there is no art. Without art, there is no idealism. Without idealism, there is no integrity. Without integrity, there is nothing but production. "
— Raymond Chandler

"Works of art, in my opinion, are the only objects in the material universe to possess internal order, and that is why, though I don't believe that only art matters, I do believe in Art for Art's sake."
— E.M. Forster

"One can have no smaller or greater mastery than mastery of oneself. "
— Leonardo da Vinci

"Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once he grows up."
— Pablo Picasso

"Speak against unconscious oppression,
Speak against the tyranny of the unimaginative,
Speak against bonds."
— Ezra Pound

"We work in the dark - we do what we can - we give what we have. Our doubt is our passion, and our passion is our task. The rest is the madness of art."
— Henry James

"Art is, after all, only a trace – like a footprint which shows that one has walked bravely and in great happiness."
— Robert Henri

"Q: Do you feel concerned that after all this work, people won't treat [Starship Titanic] with the gravity of, say, a movie or a book? That they won't treat it as an art form?

D.A.: I hope that's the case, yes. I get very worried about this idea of art. Having been an English literary graduate, I've been trying to avoid the idea of doing art ever since. I think the idea of art kills creativity. ... [I]f somebody wants to come along and say, "Oh, it's art," that's as may be. I don't really mind that much. But I think that's for other people to decide after the fact. It isn't what you should be aiming to do. There's nothing worse than sitting down to write a novel and saying, "Well, okay, I'm going to do something of high artistic worth." ... I think you get most of the most interesting work done in fields where people don't think they're doing art, but merely practicing a craft, and working as good craftsmen. ... I tend to get very suspicious of anything that thinks it's art while it's being created."
— Douglas Adams

"Love art in yourself, and not yourself in art."
— Constantin Stanislavski (My Life in Art)

"Creativity is an act of defiance."
— Twyla Tharp

"There is no abstract art. You must always start with something. Afterward you can remove all traces of reality.
"
— Pablo Picasso

"I don't mind being burdened with being glamorous and sexual. Beauty and femininity are ageless and can't be contrived, and glamour, although the manufacturers won't like this, cannot be manufactured. Not real glamour; it's based on femininity. We are all born sexual creatures, thank God, but it's a pity so many people despise and crush this natural gift. Art, real art, comes from it, everything."
— Marilyn Monroe

"Every human is an artist. The dream of your life is to make beautiful art."
— Miguel Ruiz (The Four Agreements: A Practical Guide to Personal Freedom, A Toltec Wisdom Book)

"He who works with his hands is a laborer.
He who works with his hands and his head is a craftsman.
He who works with his hands and his head and his heart is an artist."
— Francis Of Assisi

"The greatest artist does not have any concept
Which a single piece of marble does not itself contain
Within its excess, though only
A hand that obeys the intellect can discover it."
— Michelangelo Buonarroti (I Sonetti Di Michelangelo: The 78 Sonnets of Michelangelo with Verse Translation)

"It is through art, and through art only, that we can realise our perfection."
— Oscar Wilde

"When the artist finds himself he is lost. The fact that he has succeeded in never finding himself is regarded by Max Ernst as his only lasting achievement. "
— Max Ernst

"Does something which exists on the edge have no true relevance to the stable center, or does it, by being on the edge, become a part of the edge and thus a part of the boundary, the definition which gives the whole its shape?"
— Lucy Grealy

"Provided we can escape from the museums we carry around inside us, provided we can stop selling ourselves tickets to the galleries in our own skulls, we can begin to contemplate an art which re-creates the goal of the sorcerer: changing the structure of reality by the manipulation of living symbols ... Art tells gorgeous lies that come true."
— Hakim Bey (T.A.Z.: The Temporary Autonomous Zone)

"Do whatever you do intensely."
— Robert Henri

"Comedy aims at representing men as worse, Tragedy as better than in actual life."
— Aristotle (Aristotle's Poetics)

"The aim of art is to represent not the outward appearance of things, but their inward significance."
— Aristotle

"a spider and a fly

i heard a spider
and a fly arguing
wait said the fly
do not eat me
i serve a great purpose
in the world

you will have to
show me said the spider

i scurry around
gutters and sewers
and garbage cans
said the fly and gather
up the germs of
typhoid influenza
and pneumonia on my feet
and wings
then i carry these germs
into households of men
and give them diseases
all the people who
have lived the right
sort of life recover
from the diseases
and the old soaks who
have weakened their systems
with liquor and iniquity
succumb it is my mission
to help rid the world
of these wicked persons
i am a vessel of righteousness
scattering seeds of justice
and serving the noblest uses

it is true said the spider
that you are more
useful in a plodding
material sort of way
than i am but i do not
serve the utilitarian deities
i serve the gods of beauty
look at the gossamer webs
i weave they float in the sun
like filaments of song
if you get what i mean
i do not work at anything
i play all the time
i am busy with the stuff
of enchantment and the materials
of fairyland my works
transcend utility
i am the artist
a creator and demi god
it is ridiculous to suppose
that i should be denied
the food i need in order
to continue to create
beauty i tell you
plainly mister fly it is all
damned nonsense for that food
to rear up on its hind legs
and say it should not be eaten

you have convinced me
said the fly say no more
and shutting all his eyes
he prepared himself for dinner
and yet he said i could
have made out a case
for myself too if i had
had a better line of talk

of course you could said the spider
clutching a sirloin from him
but the end would have been
just the same if neither of
us had spoken at all

boss i am afraid that what
the spider said is true
and it gives me to think
furiously upon the futility
of literature

archy"
— Don Marquis (archy and mehitabel)

"“Only the very greatest art invigorates without consoling.” "
— Iris Murdoch

"Writing fiction is the act of weaving a series of lies to arrive at a greater truth."
— Khalid Hosseini

"I am interested in art as a means of living a life; not as a means of making a living."
— Robert Henri