“The highest art is always the most religious, and the greatest artist is always a devout person.”
“Classic art was the art of necessity: modern romantic art bears the stamp of caprice and chance.”
“Art is dangerous. It is one of the attractions: when it ceases to be dangerous you don't want it.”
“I'm still an artist. I'm never gonna do a shit movie, because I've got my modeling to support me.”
“Without tradition, art is a flock of sheep without a shepherd. Without innovation, it is a corpse.”
“Art -- the one achievement of Man which has made the long trip up from all fours seem well advised.”
“This is the artist, then, life's hungry man, the glutton of eternity, beauty's miser, glory's slave.”
“The artist is the child of his time; but woe to him if he is also its disciple, or even its favorite.”
“One of the most striking signs of the decay of art is when we see its separate forms jumbled together.”
“The function of art is to make that understood which in the form of argument would be incomprehensible.”
“Contrary to popular belief an artist is never ahead of his time, but most people are far behind theirs.”
“As a general truth, it is safe to say that any picture that produces a moral impression is a bad picture.”
“Art is the imposing of a pattern on experience, and our aesthetic enjoyment is recognition of the pattern.”
“Every great work of art has two faces, one toward its own time and one toward the future, toward eternity.”
“Any work that aspires, however humbly, to the condition of art should carry its justification in every line.”
“The public history of modern art is the story of conventional people not knowing what they are dealing with.”
“An artist must be a reactionary. He has to stand out against the tenor of the age and not go flopping along.”
“Modern art is what happens when painters stop looking at girls and persuade themselves they have a better idea.”
“Art is good when it springs from necessity. This kind of origin is the guarantee of its value; there is no other.”
“Inside you there's an artist you don't know about. He's not interested in how things look different in moonlight.”
“Humanity is the rich effluvium, it is the waste and the manure and the soil, and from it grows the tree of the arts.”
“An artist is a creature driven by demons. He doesn't know why they choose him and he's usually too busy to wonder why.”
“I choose a block of marble and chop off whatever I don't need. [when asked how he managed to make his remarkable statues.]”
“The True Artist has the planet for his pedestal; the adventurer, after years of strife, has nothing broader than his shoes.”
“Artists to my mind are the real architects of change, and not the political legislators who implement change after the fact.”
“When I judge art, I take my painting and put it next to a God made object like a tree or flower. If it clashes, it is not art.”
“No art can be noble which is incapable of expressing thought, and no art is capable of expressing thought which does not change.”
“The more a man cultivates the arts the less he fornicates. A more and more apparent cleavage occurs between the spirit and the brute.”
“It is art that makes life, makes interest, makes importance and I know of no substitute whatever for the force and beauty of its process.”
“Art is permitted to survive only if it renounces the right to be different, and integrates itself into the omnipotent realm of the profane.”