Famous Quotes & Sayings

August Wilson

All of art is a search for ways of being, of living life more fully.

August Wilson

I'm a black American playwright. I couldn't be anything else. I make my art out of black American culture; they're all cut out of the same cloth. That's who I am; that's who I write about.

August Wilson

All art is political in the sense that it serves someone's politics.

August Wilson

When I first started writing plays I couldn't write good dialogue because I didn't respect how black people talked. I thought that in order to make art out of their dialogue I had to change it, make it into something different. Once I learned to value and respect my characters, I could really hear them. I let them start talking.

Audrey Hepburn

As much as I loved the art and discipline of the dance, it didn't love me!

Audre Lorde

June Jordan once said something which is just wonderful. I'm paraphrasing her-that her function as a poet was to make revolution irresistible. Well o.k. that is the function of us all, as creative artists, to make the truth, as we see it irresistible.

Audre Lorde

Of all the art forms, poetry is the most economical. It is the one which is the most secret, which requires the least physical labor, the least material, and the one which can be done between shifts, in the hospital pantry, on the subway, and on scraps of surplus paper. ... poetry has been the major voice of poor, working class, and Colored women. A room of one's own may be a necessity for writing prose, but so are reams of paper, a typewriter, and plenty of time.

Audre Lorde

Art is not living. It is a use of living. The artist has the ability to take that living and use it in a certain way, and produce art.

Athol Fugard

My life had been defined by the apartheid years. Now we were going into an era of democracy... and I believed that I didn't really have a function as a useful artist in that anymore.

Athol Fugard

There is a desperate tendency to try to legislate artists, to try to lay down rules for their obligations to society. Just leave artists alone. If you are a true artist, you will have a very finely tuned moral mechanism.

Arthur Phillips

The truth is, anyone who puts so much of herself and her life into art as you do must naturally fear any failure in that art as a potential threat to your life. And so you protect your art more than you protect your health or the common forms of happiness the rest of us have. And you probably have this in common with every artist you admire.

Arthur Rubinstein

Never sound pompous. You always sound noble, noble. Absolute character of music is nobility. Even popular music can be noble, you see. If it's not noble, then it's not very good... Music is an art of emotion, of nobility, of dignity, of greatness, of love, of tenderness. All that must be brought out in music but never a show of pompousness.

Arnold Newman

I didn't set out to do something different so much as do something that interested me. I wasn't trying to be avant-garde - that's being fashionable. You don't set out to revolutionize art, you make statements for yourself.

Arnold Newman

Those who call themselves art photographers are pompous, arrogant egoists.

Arne Glimcher

Historically, art has always had a market. When one medieval fiefdom defeated another they would drag back its jewels, gold, tapestries and art objects as the spoils of war. Art equaled power, riches and culture.

Arne Glimcher

Art is not an investment. Art is something you buy because you are financially solvent enough to give yourself a pleasure of living with great works rather than having to just see them in museums. People who are buying art at the top of the market as an investment are foolish.

Arne Glimcher

I don't believe in selling art by transparencies. Art is a firsthand experience.

Arne Glimcher

Fairs are beneath the dignity of art. To stand there in a booth and hawk your wares - it is just not how you sell art.

Arne Glimcher

Film and art are close together.

Arne Glimcher

Art is a tool by which society extends its perception.

Arne Glimcher

There is more to representing art than selling art. The life of the gallery is dependent on the renewal and refreshment of its artists and dealers. When that stops happening, it's the end.

Arne Glimcher

As a result of World War II, European artists migrated to America, enlarging the scene and diminishing Paris as the center. America was beginning its dominance of the art world with the emergence of the Abstract Expressionists.

Arne Glimcher

The most wonderful time to be in the art world was in the sixties, because it wasn't a business - there was no business of doing art.

Arne Glimcher

I was an actor as a kid in Boston. Then I went to art school with Brice Marden, the Massachusetts College of Art. So the hybrid of being an actor and artist is a director.

Arne Jacobsen

If architecture had nothing to do with art, it would be astonishingly easy to build houses, but the architect's task - his most difficult task - is always that of selecting.

Arne Jacobsen

If a building becomes architecture, then it is art.

Arne Duncan

The arts significantly boost student achievement, reduce discipline problems, and increase the odds students will go on to graduate from college. As First Lady Michelle Obama sums up, both she and the President believe 'strongly that arts education is essential for building innovative thinkers who will be our nation's leaders for tomorrow.'

Arnold Bennett

At moments we are all artists.

Arnold Bennett

Essential characteristic of the really great novelist: a Christ-like, all-embracing compassion.

Elizabeth Barrett Browning

What is art but the life upon the larger scale, the higher. When, graduating up in a spiral line of still expanding and ascending gyres, it pushes toward the intense significance of all things, hungry for the infinite?

Edwin Louis Cole

Reading is an art form, and every man can be an artist.

Edwin Land

Industry is best at the intersection of science and art.

Edwin Land

The process must be concealed from - non-existent for - the photographer, who by definition need think of the art in the taking and not in the making photographs... In short, all that should be necessary to get a good picture is to take a good picture.