To sing a song is like whispering to a child's ear. It is an art heavily relying on improvisation.

I had always planned to make a large painting of the early spring, when the first leaves are at the bottom of the trees, and they seem to float in space in a wonderful way. But the arrival of spring can't be done in one picture.

Art Nouveau got its inspiration from nature. The Bauhaus got its inspiration from engineering.

People ask about art and commercialism. I think that if someone tries to sell their work at a high price, that is the wrong way of doing it.

All good art is an indiscretion.

With an apple I will astonish Paris.

Dance is the most fundamental of all art forms.

The very essence of the creative is its novelty, and hence we have no standard by which to judge it.

The perfection of art is to conceal art.

The beauty of art is that it allows you to slow down, and for a moment, things that once seemed unfamiliar become precious to you.

You begin with the possibilities of the material.

I found that I was just hopeless at school. It was just a total bore. First, I passed in art and English, and then just art. Then I passed out.

Art is like a border of flowers along the course of civilization.

Part of the joy of looking at art is getting in sync in some ways with the decision-making process that the artist used and the record that's embedded in the work.

When I think of art I think of beauty. Beauty is the mystery of life. It is not in the eye it is in the mind. In our minds there is awareness of perfection.

Art for art's sake is a philosophy of the well-fed.

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.

The highs, the lows, the peaks, the valleys, whatever, it's all going to go into the art, whether I'm singing or acting or whatever.

It is not in life, but in art that self-fulfillment is to be found.

I don't have to work on it. I'm naturally a writer. The rapping and writing, they can go hand-in-hand - but rapping is an art that you have to practice and master, so I worked at it for a long time.

Art is magic... But how is it magic? In its metaphysical development? Or does some final transformation culminate in a magic reality? In truth, the latter is impossible without the former. If creation is not magic, the outcome cannot be magic.

The web, then, or the pattern, a web at once sensuous and logical, an elegant and pregnant texture: that is style, that is the foundation of the art of literature.

The arts equally have distinct departments, and unless photography has its own possibilities of expression, separate from those of the other arts, it is merely a process, not an art.

The artist who aims at perfection in everything achieves it in nothing.

The art of pleasing is the art of deception.

I was the least Pop of all the Pop artists.

My idea of art is, you write something that makes people feel so strongly that they get some conviction about who they want to be or what they want to do. It's morally useful not in a political way, but it makes your heart bigger; it's emotionally and spiritually empowering.

You have to have conviction and completely question everything and anything you do. No matter how much you study, no matter how much you know, the side of your brain that has the smarts won't necessarily help you in making art.

It's art that pushes against psychological and social expectations, that tries to transform decay into something generative, that is replicative in a baroque way, that isn't about progress, and wants to - as Walt Whitman put it - 'contain multitudes.'

'Summer of Love: Art of the Psychedelic Era,' the Whitney Museum's 40th-anniversary trip down counterculture memory lane, provides moments of buzzy fun, but it'll leave you only comfortably numb. For starters, it may be the whitest, straightest, most conservative show seen in a New York museum since psychedelia was new.

Both of my folks were into art. My dad was an art collector, my mom had a little kiln in our basement, and we would make pottery. I think from about age five on, they sent me to art classes, and I was a huge colorer.

A room hung with pictures is a room hung with thoughts.

To paint is a possessing rather than a picturing.

Art does not, like science, set forth a permanent order of nature, the enduring skeleton of law. Two factors primarily determine its works: one is the idea in the mind of the artist, the other is his power of expression; and both these factors are extremely variable.

We're all just a bundle of habits shaped by our memories. And to the extent that we control our lives, we do so by gradually altering those habits, which is to say the networks of our memory. No lasting joke, or invention, or insight, or work of art was ever produced by an external memory. Not yet, at least.

An artist is not paid for his labor but for his vision.

Art is difficult. It's not entertainment.

Statesmanship is harder than politics. Politics is the art of getting along with people, whereas statesmanship is the art of getting along with politicians.

At school, I always felt the art room was the place where you could sit and talk. It was a place of solace. I wasn't the best artist at school by a long shot; it was more the understanding and the support that came from that room.

Even though you can't expect to defeat the absurdity of the world, you must make the attempt. That's morality, that's religion, that's art, that's life.

At a certain point, I just put the building and the art impulse together. I decided that building was a legitimate way to make sculpture.

Great art is never produced for its own sake. It is too difficult to be worth the effort.

The rainbow flag is beautiful because it's about love. The Confederate flag is ugly because it's about hate. It's pretty simple from the art level: beautiful versus ugly.

All great art allows us this: a glimpse across the limits of our self.

Painting is the passage from the chaos of the emotions to the order of the possible.

I collect art like other people eat pizza. I can't get enough of it. I need a constant source of inspiration.

Art is an expression of who we are, what we believe, and what we dream about.

I didn't grow up thinking of movies as film, or art, but as movies, something to do on a Saturday afternoon.

In the dining room, next to my collection of colorful papier-mache Mardi Gras float art, hang draperies made of the New Orleans toile fabric that I designed pre-Katrina for Hazelnut.

I take this art very seriously and passionately. I love what I do. You can't help but grow. That's not to say you don't make mistakes or make bad choices, but that's part of the art. Painters paint bad paintings.