Artist Quotes

As long as I live I will have control over my being.

My illustrious lordship, I'll show you what a woman can do.

Stressing output is the key to improving productivity, while looking to increase activity can result in just the opposite.

Many excellent cooks are spoilt by going into the arts.

Life is hardly more than a fraction of a second. Such a little time to prepare oneself for eternity!

In art, all who have done something other than their predecessors have merited the epithet of revolutionary; and it is they alone who are masters.

The history of modern art is also the history of the progressive loss of art's audience. Art has increasingly become the concern of the artist and the bafflement of the public.

Concentrate your strengths against your competitor's relative weaknesses.

Art requires philosophy, just as philosophy requires art. Otherwise, what would become of beauty?

Life has no meaning unless one lives it with a will, at least to the limit of one's will. Virtue, good, evil are nothing but words, unless one takes them apart in order to build something with them; they do not win their true meaning until one knows how to apply them.

Civilization is what makes you sick.

We never really know what stupidity is until we have experimented on ourselves.

There is always a heavy demand for fresh mediocrity. In every generation the least cultivated taste has the largest appetite.

Life being what it is, one dreams of revenge.

It is the eye of ignorance that assigns a fixed and unchangeable color to every object; beware of this stumbling block.

I shut my eyes in order to see.

Art is either plagiarism or revolution.

We are all going to Heaven, and Vandyke is of the company.

When somebody says that all statements are false, the obvious problem is that as an assertion it's self-defeating.

When I came to New York, I began to meet the people who became the most famous artists of our time. I was insecure about my own level of ability, I didn't know whether I could compete with these people and, at the same time. I was wondering what is this anyway?

When I began competing with the other artists in New York, I discovered classical North Indian music.

The whole drive of western culture, the part of it which is serious, is towards an extreme objectification. It's carried to the point where the human subject is treated almost as if it's dirt in the works of a watch.

Rock became an incredible commercial success, people just became bored with serious music, and it was forgotten.

In classical oil painting, there seemed to be a radical turn to seeing things as the camera sees them, with that technological modification. I began to have a tremendous problem with all of this.

I'm trying to assemble materials for a different mode of life.

I'm actually a great fan of lucidity.

I was a student at Harvard, and that's where I learned about so-called avant-garde music. Jackson Pollock, abstract expressionism and painting were well known at this time.

I have a picture of an ideal consciousness.

I began demonstrating against serious culture. In hindsight, the actual course of events has been very humiliating for me, because no one picked up on the intellectual critique I made.

I began composing works which were imitative of the music I was being told about. I was also very interested in translating the music into visual terms.