"The era of Conceptual art - which was also the era of the Civil Rights Movement,. Vietnam, the Women's Liberation Movement, and the counter-culture- was a real."

"From now on whatever the hour represented on the canvas, a supreme accord will be wrought amongst all the parts of the subject: the water, the sky, the clouds, the foliage, reunified by the atmosphere, will form a whole of an irreproachable homogeneity, a grandiose and charming image of natural harmony."

"The real us present, and it is transfigured... It is everywhere a reality at once immutable and changing. Matter is present, submitted to a luminous phantasmagoria. What Monet paints is the space that exists between himself and things."

"You can't prove Rembrandt is better than Norman Rockwell - although if you actually do prefer Rockwell, I'd say you were shunning complexity, were secretly conservative, and hadn't really looked at either painter's work. Taste is a blood sport."

"I'm looking for what the artist is trying to say and what he or she is actually saying, what the work reveals about society and the timeless conditions of being alive."

"After 1909, Monet drastically enlarged his brushstrokes, disintegrated his images, and broke through the taming constraints and delicacy of Impressionism for good. Nineteen gnarly paintings, starting in 1909 and carrying through his final seventeen years, finish off the notion that Monet went happily ever after into lily-land."

"Barry supported the lady, whose voice was not powerful enough for the big auditorium. I asked him how she succeeded—I was at another theatre. "Obscene but not heard," he answered."

"Great art is an instant arrested in eternity."

"He dares to be a fool, and that is the first step in the direction of wisdom."

"Tchaikovsky thought of committing suicide for fear of being discovered as a homosexual, but today, if you are a composer and not homosexual, you might as well put a bullet through your head."

"In The Shock of the New Ian Dunlop quotes first-hand accounts of the irresistible laughter provoked by the exhibits. Word would get around that in this or that there was a funny picture, and, as Zola reported in his novel L'CEuvre, "people came stampeding from every other room in the exhibition and gangs of sightseers, afraid of missing something, came pushing their way in, shouting 'Where? — "Over there!" "Oh, I say! Did you ever?""

"The Shock of the New"

"The author of the first Shock of the New is Ian Dunlop, an English writer who was once the art critic for The Evening Standard in London and is now on the staff of Sotheby's, the auction house in New York."

"Man is completely out of phase with nature. Nature is woman. Man is the intruder. The man who re-attunes himself with nature is the man who de-mans himself or eliminates himself as man."

"A small but significant number of angry and historically minded women comprehend the women's revolution in the visionary sense of an end to the catastrophic brotherhood and a return to the former glory and wise equanimity of the matriarchies. We don't know how this will take place exactly, nor the resultant nature of the new social forms, we know that it will take place, and in fact that the process of its development is now irreversibly underway. Of supreme importance in this process is the recovery by modern woman of her mythology as models for theory, consciousness, and action.... The Swiss patrician Jacob Bachofen was one of the first to discover "the female era at the lower seam of history, with its sacerdotal, political, and economic female dominion." …. The fruits of this research were until recently unavailable except to a few initiates and they now form a cornerstone of the second wave in the feminist revolution...."

"I desire you, and all that comes with you. If I could only buy you and enjoy you, without having to go through all the formalities, without having to consider your personality et cetera … There is nothing as boring as human personality."

"There is no "worst" in what is new. Everything that has existed is bad, or else no one would have improved upon it by revolution and change."

"Your hissing and your booing make no impression on me, because from Victor Hugo's "Ernani" to Buñel's "The Age of Gold," Cannes Grand Prize winner, everything I have loved has always been hissed and booed at first. At the premiere of "The Age of Gold" the angry audience broke the theatre seats. What worse can happen to me, and how can that affect me? The seats do not belong to me."

"There are so many films from which one leaves as stupid as one entered. I'd rather give you a migraine than nothing at all … I'd rather ruin your eyes than leave you indifferent."

"In my pictures I would use speech as an extra dimension supplementing the image … Speech would not come off the screen in coincidence with the sequences, but from without, as if it were a surplus unconnected with the organism - a cravat of drivel hung on an ivory tooth."

"Our only means of original manifestation is to vomit these old masterpieces. Masterful spittle is our only opportunity to create within the Cinema our masterpieces. That's what Picasso stands for. He is a creator of deglutition and spittle, of old well-digested canvases."

"From the point of view of photography, I'll smite the picture with sun rays. I'll take old stock shots and scratch them; I'll claw at them so that unknown beauty sees the light of day. I shall sculpt flowers upon the film stock."

"Radio through television becomes a species of Cinema. Why shouldn't Cinema, in turn, become a species of radio?"

"The flourishing of bursts of energy dies beyond us."

"The rigidity of forms impedes their transmission."

"The Cinema is too rich; it is obese."

"The evolution of art has nothing to do with the revolution of society."

"It is said that the public is stupid. That's why those who hold it in contempt never dare to offer it something original."

"It isn't so much the heat... as the humidity. (p. 28)"

"You'll feel differently about these things when you're married. (p. 25)"

"You're a sight for sore eyes. (p. 29)"

"I don't know much about Art, but I know what I like. (p. 24)"

"there are no roads in all Bohemia !"

"She doesn't look a day over fifty. (p. 24)"

"A woman and a mouse, they carry a tale wherever they go."

"To appreciate nonsense requires a serious interest in life."

"I never saw a purple cow, I never hope to see one; But I can tell you, anyhow, I'd rather see than be one!"

"Ah, yes, I wrote the "Purple Cow"— I'm Sorry, now, I wrote it; But I can tell you Anyhow I'll Kill you if you Quote it!"

"Ein schwacher Feind in der Festung ist fürchterlicher als der stärkste von außen."

"Avant-garde art has become habitual, a dead letter with little spiritual consequence, however materially refined."

"L'Anglais, filou comme peuple, est honnête comme individu. Il est le contraire du Français, honnête comme peuple et filou comme individu."

"S'il y a un Dieu, l'athéisme doit lui sembler une moindre injure que la religion."

"Une des joies d'orgueil de l'homme de lettres, — quand cet homme de lettres est un artiste, — c'est de sentir en lui la faculté de pouvoir immortaliser, à son gré, ce qu'il lui plait d'immortaliser. Dans ce peu de chose qu'il est, il a comme la conscience d'une divinité créatrice. Dieu crée des existences; l'homme d'imagination crée des vies fictives, qui laissent dans la mémoire du monde un souvenir plus profond, plus vécu pour ainsi dire."

"Dans la langue de la bourgeoisie, la grandeur des mots est en raison directe de la petitesse des sentiments."

"Ne jamais parler de soi aux autres et leur parler toujours d'eux-mêmes: c'est tout l'art de plaire. Chacun le sait et tout le monde l'oublie."

"Évidemment, les critiques n'ont été créés que le septième jour. S'ils avaient été créés le premier, qu'auraient-ils eu à faire?"

"Un livre n'est jamais un chef-d'œuvre, il le devient. Le génie est le talent d'un homme mort."

"On a souvent essayé de définir le Beau en art. Ce que c'est? Le beau, est ce qui paraît abominable aux yeux sans éducation."

"Il n'y a que deux grands courants dans l'histoire de l'humanité: la bassesse qui fait les conservateurs et l'envie qui fait les révolutionnaires."

"That, by the accident of an illegality in the codicil to his will, it should have been possible for Hugh Lane's pet collection to be snaffled by the British Government, is a fitting conclusion to the shabby story of England's appreciation of French impressionist painting."