Artists

All my work is about waking the dead.
—Ken Burns SOURCE

Self-plagiarism is style.
--Alfred Hitchcock

Everybody is original. Everybody can design—if not supremely, at least beautifully.
—Henry Wilson 2

An uninformed public in a democracy is a sure-fire way to end up with little or no democracy at all.
—Michael Moore 1

Good swiping is an art in itself.
—Jules Feiffer

It's one of the tragic ironies of the theatre that only one man in it can count on steady work--the night watchman.
—Tallulah Bankhead

Vegetables are more serious than men and more sensitive to frost.
—Francis Picabia

In a painting I want to say something comforting.
—Vincent van Gogh

I think the universe has a finely tuned sense of humor.
—Ginny Ruffner

Art is the lie that makes us realize the truth.
—Pablo Picasso

Life is what you make it. Always was. Always will be.
—Grandma Moses

Thank God I'm an atheist.
—Luis Buñuel SOURCE

The defining function of the artist is to cherish consciousness.
—Max Eastman

Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.
—Pablo Picasso

Iron rusts from disuse, stagnant water loses its purity and in cold weather becomes frozen; even so does inaction sap the vigors of the mind.
—Leonardo Da Vinci

There is only one difference between a madman and me. I am not mad.
—Salvador Dali

Fortunately, somewhere between chance and mystery lies imagination, the only thing that protects our freedom, despite the fact that people keep trying to reduce it or kill it off altogether.
—Luis Buñuel SOURCE

They always say that time changes things, but you actually have to change them yourself.
—Andy Warhol

The length of a film should be directly related to the endurance of the human bladder.
—Alfred Hitchcock

To finish a work? To finish a picture? What nonsense! To finish it means to be through with it, to kill it, to rid it of its soul, to give it its final blow. . . the coup de grâce for the painter as well as for the picture.
—Pablo Picasso 3

It's one of those wonderful contradictions--if you can think, "I'm not having any abstract thoughts," then you're having one.
—Ginny Ruffner

The human race built most nobly when the limitations were greatest; therefore when most is required of imagination to build it all.
—Frank Lloyd Wright

If my husband would ever meet a woman on the street who looked like the women in his paintings, he would fall over in a dead faint.
—Mrs. Pablo Picasso

Genius is infinite painstaking.
—Michelangelo

The best way to know God is to love many things.
—Vincent van Gogh

If someone were to prove to me right this minute that God, in all his luminousness, exists, it wouldn't change a single aspect of my behaviour.
—Luis Buñuel SOURCE

Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist after he grows up.
—Pablo Picasso

I am still learning.
—Michelangelo

I do not seek. I find.
—Pablo Picasso

A painting is never finished. It simply stops in interesting places.
—Paul Gardner

Men of lofty genius when they are doing the least work are most active.
—Leonardo Da Vinci

We have very few inferior people in the world. We have lots of inferior environments. Try to enrich your environment.
—Frank Lloyd Wright

I admire those painters who make the mistake of imitating the famous masterpieces of nature. Isn't it this perpetual mania of imitation that prevents man from being a god?
—Man Ray

What we need are strong, straightforward, precise works which will be forever misunderstood.
—Dada Manifesto 1918

Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.
—Leonardo Da Vinci

Color weakens!
—Picasso

Conversation in real life is full of half-finished sentences and overlapping talk. Why shouldn't painting be too?
—Edgar Degas

Creation is a drug I can't do without.
—Cecil B. DeMille

If we could only find the courage to leave our destiny to chance, to accept the fundamental mystery of our lives, then we might be closer to the sort of happiness that comes with innocence.
—Luis Buñuel SOURCE

It's hard to have a brain in your head, keep your eyes open to the culture, and not be cynical.
—Alan Ball

Give me two hours a day of activity, and I'll take the other twenty-two in dreams.
—Luis Buñuel SOURCE

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

A hunch is creativity trying to tell you something.
—Frank Capra

The people who make art their business are mostly imposters.
—Pablo Picasso

There is no solution because there is no problem. 
—Marcel Duchamp

You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.
—Buckminster Fuller

A genius is only that one who discerns the pattern amidst the confusion of details just a little bit sooner than the average man.
—Ben Shahn

A child's attitude toward everything is an artist's attitude.
—Willa Cather

That painter who has no doubts will achieve nothing.
—Leonardo da Vinci

Every act of creation is first of all an act of destruction.
—Pablo Picasso

I am always at work, but not in order to arrive at that finish which arouses the admiration of idiots--
—Paul Cézanne Letter to his mother, 1874.

In Italy, for thirty years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder, bloodshed--they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love, five hundred years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce ...? The cuckoo clock.
—Orson Welles

The true work of art is but a shadow of the divine perfection.
—Michelangelo

The talent that can be learnt turns the poet into an ironmonger.
—Dada: Unpretentious Proclamation

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