An album is a whole universe, and the recording studio is a three-dimensional kind of art space that I can fill with sound. Just as the album art and videos are ways of adding more dimensions to the words and music. I like to be involved in all of it because it's all of a piece.

I have to say that I reject somewhat the distinction between something called art and something called public art. I think all art demands and desires to be seen.

In an oppressive society the truth-telling nature of literature is of a different order, and sometimes valued more highly than other elements in a work of art.

My sister is an artist and an interior designer. She went to high school for art. I went to high school for music.

I had always said to myself that forty was the cut off point of my apprenticeship which may for some people sound like a very long one, but the novel as art is a middle-aged art.

A strong work of art really leaves people speechless. They feel a little angry because they don't understand it.

I decided on the spot that I would be an artist, and I assure you, it was no ordinary artist I had in mind.

Being an actor all of my life is kind of a collaborative, social form of interpretive art. Sitting down with a blank page every day by yourself is a different feeling.

In a decaying society, art, if it is truthful, must also reflect decay. And unless it wants to break faith with its social function, art must show the world as changeable. And help to change it.

If people think of public art as something the public decides, it's impossible to make anything of substance.

Surely all art is the result of one's having been in danger, of having gone through an experience all the way to the end, where no one can go any further.

My trade and art is to live.

Art is the final cunning of the human soul which would rather do anything than face the gods.

Time extracts various values from a painter's work. When these values are exhausted the pictures are forgotten, and the more a picture has to give, the greater it is.

I think that is what film and art and music do; they can work as a map of sorts for your feelings.

Art requires neither complaisance nor politeness; nothing but faith, faith and freedom.

The task of art today is to bring chaos into order.

The idea is, if I can't heal from my art, then how can you heal?

Art: If the object of poetry is, to make men, then poetry is the heir of prophecy.

Some songs you get. Some songs you may not. And I think that's the beauty of art: to question and to ask, to understand the deeper meaning after two or three or four listenings.

I was going to go to a four-year college and be an anthropologist or to an art school and be an illustrator when a friend convinced me to learn photography at the University of Southern California. Little did I know it was a school that taught you how to make movies! It had never occurred to me that I'd ever have any interest in filmmaking.

Modernity is the transient, the fleeting, the contingent; it is one half of art, the other being the eternal and the immovable.

The art of publicity is a black art; but it has come to stay, and every year adds to its potency.

What I didn't know was I was deeply attracted to the big space.

What art offers is space - a certain breathing room for the spirit.

Nothing has been left undone by the enemies of freedom. Every art and artifice, every cruelty and outrage has been practiced and perpetrated to destroy the rights of man. In this great struggle, every crime has been rewarded and every virtue has been punished.

People say conversation is a lost art; how often I have wished it were.

A work of art has no importance whatever to society. It is only important to the individual.

The claims I'm making for art are simply the claims that we naturally make around music or around poetry. We're much more relaxed around those art forms. We're willing to ask, 'How could this find a place in my heart?'

Very few people possess true artistic ability. It is therefore both unseemly and unproductive to irritate the situation by making an effort. If you have a burning, restless urge to write or paint, simply eat something sweet and the feeling will pass.

In the West, we look at art through life. Well, that's one way of living. In the Orient they look at life through art. They even drink their tea without sugar, for the same reason that they don't like a lot of frilly decorations on a painting. I can't stand butter on my bread for the same reason. I'm allergic to goo and rococo.

Art is a collaboration between God and the artist, and the less the artist does the better.

That's the motivation of an artist - to seek attention of some kind.

It'll be the Internet and piracy that will kill film. There's a philosophy that the Internet should be free, but the reality is that piracy will destroy the film industry and film as an art form because it's expensive to make a movie. Maybe you'll have funky little independent movies, and it'll go back and then start up again some other way.

I don't want to be interesting. I want to be good.

An empty canvas is full.

When one loves one's Art no service seems too hard.

As a species, we are most animated when our days and nights on Earth are touched by the natural world. We can find immeasurable joy in the birth of a child, a great work of art, or falling in love.

My kids are my greatest piece of art.

My reputation for writing quickly and effortlessly notwithstanding, I am strongly in favor of intelligent, even fastidious revision, which is, or certainly should be, an art in itself.

Be careful that you do not write or paint anything that is not your own, that you don't know in your own soul.

Great artists suffer for the people.

Art is a revolt against fate. All art is a revolt against man's fate.

Through a painting we can see the whole world.

In a way I spend my entire life stealing from everything - from the past, from cities I love, from where I grew up - grabbing things, taking not only from architecture but from Italy, art, writing, poetry, music.

In my opinion, he only may be truly said to live and enjoy his being who is engaged in some laudable pursuit, and acquires a name by some illustrious action, or useful art.

They certainly aren't connected with the old geometric art. My work isn't geometric in that sense.

An artist is forced by others to paint out of his own free will.

There's a snobbery at work in architecture. The subject is too often treated as a fine art, delicately wrapped in mumbo-jumbo. In reality, it's an all-embracing discipline taking in science, art, maths, engineering, climate, nature, politics, economics.

I think of my peace paintings as one long poem, with each painting being a single stanza.