"Creation always involves building upon something else. There is no art that doesn't reuse. And there will be less art if every reuse is taxed by the appropriator."

"Art, like dreaming, is something so necessary to internal balance that people deprived of it go a little wacky. Art is the collective dreamplace, the reservoir of our deepest understandings and desires and hopes, as essential as water. In recognition of this fact, the marketplace offers us entertainment, hoping to replace the wild and forested interior of our souls with potted plastic plants. Just as we dream-whether we want to or not, whether we long for or fear our dreaming-people make art and are drawn to art."

"Every vital social movement immediately begins to generate art-songs, poetry, posters, murals, novels-an outpouring of the creativity that people will create from even the smallest crumbs of hope."

"In Science the paramount appeal is to the Intellect — its purpose being instruction; in Art, the paramount appeal is to the Emotions — its purpose being pleasure. A work of Art must of course indirectly appeal to the Intellect, and a work of Science will also indirectly appeal to the Feelings; nevertheless a poem on the stars and a treatise on astronomy have distinct aims and distinct methods. But having recognised the broadly-marked differences, we are called upon to ascertain the underlying resemblances. Logic and Imagination belong equally to both. It is only because men have been attracted by the differences that they have overlooked the not less important affinities."

"Eminem: I tried to show you art, but you just pick it apart."

"All art is solitary and the studio is a torture area."

"Art is long, and time is fleeting."

"Art is Power."

"The counterfeit and counterpart Of Nature reproduced in art."

"Art is the child of Nature; yes, Her darling child in whom we trace The features of the mother's face, Her aspect and her attitude."

"The Art Snob can be recognized in the home by the quick look he gives the pictures on your walls, quick but penetrating, as though he were undressing them. This is followed either by complete and pained silence or a comment such as 'That's really a very pleasant little water color you have there.'"

"The Art Snob will stand back from a picture at some distance, his head cocked slightly to one side. … After a long period of gazing (during which he may occasionally squint his eyes), he will approach to within a few inches of the picture and examine the brushwork; he will then return to his former distant position, give the picture another glance and walk away."

"Gideon: I'm afraid I'm hopeless about novels just now, that's the fact. I'm sick of the form—slices of life served up cold in three hundred pages. Oh, it's very nice; it makes nice reading for people. But what's the use? Except, of course, to kill time for those who prefer it dead. But as things in themselves, as art, they've been ruined by excess. My critical sense is blunted just now. ...I couldn't write one, good or bad, to save my life, I know that. And I've got to the stage when I wish other people wouldn't. I wish everyone would shut up, so that we could hear ourselves think..."

"A genuine work of art must mean many things; the truer its art, the more things it will mean. If my drawing, on the other hand, is so far from being a work of art that it needs THIS IS A HORSE written under it, what can it matter that neither you nor your child should know what it means? It is there not so much to convey a meaning as to wake a meaning. If it do not even wake an interest, throw it aside. A meaning may be there, but it is not for you. If, again, you do not know a horse when you see it, the name written under it will not serve you much."

"The artist is not the transcriber of the world, he is its rival."

"Art ... can speak its own language only as long as the images are alive which refuse and refute the established order."

"Art, in fact, can be nothing but violence, cruelty and injustice."

"Comics they say are not literature--adventure strips lack artistic form, mental substance, and emotional appeal to any but the most moronic of minds. Can it be that 100,000,000 Americans are morons?"

"If you seek just a little truth, as most, you should not ignore abstract forms, the basis from which all short-lived experiences we call reality springs."

"You can think of art as framed deviance."

"Art indeed is long, but life is short."

"Impressionism is the newspaper of the soul."

"Drawing is like making an expressive gesture with the advantage of permanence."

"Art does not imitate, but interpret. It searches out the idea lying dormant in the symbol, in order to present the symbol to men in such form as to enable them to penetrate through it to the idea. Were it otherwise, what would be the use or value of art?"

"Instinct and study; love and hate; Audacity — reverence. These must mate, And fuse with Jacob's mystic heart, To wrestle with the angel — Art."

"For Art is Nature made by Man To Man the interpreter of God."

"My job is to make art expensive."

"I make the whole world answer to my art."

"What do we do when things are hard to describe? We start by sketching out the roughest shapes to serves as scaffolds for the rest; it does not matter very much if some of those forms turn out partially wrong. Next, draw details to give these skeletons more life-like flesh. Last, in the final filling-in, discard whatever first ideas no longer fit. ...Until you've seen some of the rest, you can't make sense of any part."

"If it is a dying craft we can't do anything about it. Civilisation moves on. Where are all the fresco painters now? Where are the landscape artists? What are they doing now? The world is changing. I have been very fortunate to be able to do the same job for 40 years. That's rare in any era."

"Actually I think CGI has the potential to equal or even surpass what the human hand can do."

"This sudden importance of art—an importance discovered by ideological movements, by the State, and by the business world—has made the artist a central figure on the public place. His earlier revolt against society, his marginal role as an entertainer, have of course predestined him to the role of an ally of all progressive movements that promise a universal society, that is, a universal public for his books, poems, paintings and partitions. His shudder before the ugliness of capitalist civilization, his isolation from the masses whose warmth and understanding he genuinely needs, make him an ideal, because uncritical, partner of the progressive ideologues who preach the overthrow of all that he hates."

"We are all heirs to the loveliness of the visible world; but only by process of art can we be inducted into possession of this large estate. Some authentic poet or artist has to intervene and give the property its rights and empower it to attain perfection in our sight."

"The more I look at most of the art movements, it’s all occultism, when you get down to it. The Surrealists were openly talking about being magicians."

"Annie Besant’s book where she put forward the idea that theosophical mystical energies could be portrayed as colours or abstract shapes was practically the invention of abstract art. A lot of artists rushed out and read it and suddenly thought, ‘oh God you could, you could portray love as a colour, or depression as a colour” All of a sudden abstract art happens, a flowering out of occultism."

"I don’t distinguish between magic and art. When I got into magic, I realised I had been doing it all along, ever since I wrote my first pathetic story or poem when I was twelve or whatever. This has all been my magic, my way of dealing with it."

"I saw no reason why you couldn't create a work of pornography that adhered to all the same standards as the best art or literature. The big difference between art and pornography is that art, at its best, makes you feel less alone. You see a painting or read a piece of writing that expresses a thought that you had but didn't express, and you suddenly feel less alone. Pornography, on the other hand, tends to engender feelings of self-disgust, isolation and wretchedness. I wanted to change that."

"Actually, art and magic are pretty much synonymous. I would imagine that this all goes back to the phenomenon of representation, when, in our primordial past, some genius or other actually flirted upon the winning formula of “This means that.” Whether “this” was a voice or “that” was a mark upon a dry wall or “that” was a guttural sound, it was that moment of representation. That actually transformed us from what we were into what we would be. It gave us the possibility, all of a sudden, of language. And when you have language, you can describe pictorially or verbally the strange and mystifying world that you see around you, and it’s probably not long before you also realize that, hey, you can just make stuff up. The central art of enchantment is weaving a web of words around somebody. And we would’ve noticed very early on that the words we are listening to alter our consciousness, and using the way they can transform it, take it to places we’ve never dreamed of, places that don’t exist."

"Magic and art tend to share a lot of the same language. They both talk about evocation, invocation, and conjuring. If you’re trying to conjure a character, then maybe you should treat that with the respect that you would if you were trying to conjure a demon. Because if an image of a god is a god, then in some sense the image of a demon is a demon. I’m thinking of people like Malcolm Lowry, the exquisite author of Under the Volcano. There are kabbalistic demons that are lurking all the way through Under the Volcano, and I assume they were probably similar forces to the ones that eventually overwhelmed Lowry’s life, such as the drinking and the madness. When I hear alcoholics talk about having their demons, I think that they’re probably absolutely literally correct."

"The heart desires, The hand refrains, The Godhead fires, The soul attains."

"For me, Art is the restoration of order. It may discuss all sort of terrible things, but there must be satisfaction at the end. A little bit of hunger, but also satisfaction."

"Most painting in the European tradition was painting the mask. Modern art rejected all that. Our subject matter was the person behind the mask."

"One... characteristic of medieval space must be noted: space and time form two relatively independent systems. First: the medieval artist introduced other times within his own spatial world, as when he projected the events of Christ's life within a contemporary Italian city, without the slightest feeling that the passage of time has made a difference, just as in Chaucer the classical legend of Troilus and Cressida is related as if it were a contemporary story. When a medieval chronicler mentions the King... it is sometimes difficult to find out whether he is talking about Caeser or Alexander the Great or his own monarch: each is equally near to him. ...the word anachronism is meaningless when applied to medieval art... in Botticelli's The Three Miracles of St. Zenobius, three different times are presented upon a single stage."

"Once the major wants of mankind are satisfied by the machine process, our factory system must be on a basis of regular annual replacement instead of progressive expansion—not on a basis of premature replacement through debauched workmanship, adulterated materials, and grossly stimulated caprice. "The case," as Mr. J. A. Hobson again puts it, "is a simple one. A mere increase in the variety of our material consumption relieves the strain imposed upon man by the limits of the material universe, for such a variety enables him to utilize a larger proportion of the aggregate matter. But in proportion as we add to mere variety a higher appreciation of those adaptations of matter which are due to human skill, which we call Art, we pass outside the limit of matter and are no longer slaves of roods and acres and a law of diminishing returns." In other words: a genuine standard, once the vital physical wants are satisfied, tends to change the plane of consumption and therefore to limit, in a considerable degree, the extent of further mechanical enterprise."

"I do not believe in art which is not the compulsive result of humanity's urge to open its heart."

"But fantasy kills imagination, pornography is death to art."

"Many are willing to suffer for their art. Few are willing to learn to draw."

"Art allows you to imbue the truth with a sort of magic, so it can infiltrate the psyches of more people, including those who don't believe the same things as you."