Quotes about art

A highbrow is a person who looks at a sausage and thinks of Picasso.

A. P. Herbert

You’re not meant to understand them, they’re bloody works of art.

Sonia Lawson

A modern sculptor is a man who can take a rough block of stone or wood, work on it for months and make it look like a rough block of stone or wood.

Charles Kelly

If old masters had labelled their fruit, one wouldn’t be so likely to mistake pears for turnips.

Mark Twain

Varnishing is the only artistic process with which the Royal
Academicians are thoroughly familiar.

Oscar Wilde

Art is making something out of nothing and selling it.

Frank Zappa

To the accountants, a true work of art is an investment that
hangs on the wall.

Hilary Alexander

There is something wrong with a work of art if it can be understood by a policeman.

Patrick Kavanagh

Theatre is life. Film is art. Television is furniture.

Scott Adams

To the complaint, 'There are no people in these photographs,' I respond, 'There are always two people, the photographer and the viewer.

Ansel Adams

I believe that in the history of art and of thought there has always been at every living moment of culture, a 'will to renewal'.

Eugene Ionesco

To be aristocratic in art one must avoid polite society.

George Moore

There is nothing so terrible as the pursuit of art by those who have no talent.

W. Somerset Maugham

Skill without imagination is craftsmanship and gives us many useful objects such as wickerwork and picnic baskets. Imagination without skill gives us modern art.

Tom Stoppard

For a successful exhibition, you've got to have two out of death, sex and jewels.

Roy Strong

The is Shakespeare Memorial Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon, is a courageous and partly successful attempt to disguise a gasworks as a racquets court.

Peter Fleming

Pictures deface more walls than they decorate.

Frank Lloyd Wright

The one unforgivable sin in art is to muddle Monet and Manet.

Andrew McEvoy

I sculpt by choosing a block of marble and chopping off anything that doesn't look like what I am trying to create.

Auguste Rodin

Very few people go to the doctor when they have a cold. They go to the theatre instead.

Boyd Gatewood

No form of art goes beyond ordinary consciousness as film does, straight to our emotions, deep into the twilight of the soul.

Ingrid Bergman

The opera always loses money. That's as it should be. Opera has no business making money.

Rudolf Bing

What distinguishes modern art from the art of other ages is criticism.

Octavio Paz

I saw the angel in the marble and carved until I set him free.

Michelangelo

I adore art when I am alone with my notes, my heart pounds and the tears stream from my eyes, and my emotion and my joys are too much to bear.

Giuseppe Verdi

Great art presupposes the alert mind of the educated listener.

Arnold Schoenberg

Creation which cannot express itself becomes madness.

Anaïs Nin

All art is quite useless.

Oscar Wilde