“Art attracts us only by what it reveals of our most secret self.”

“All architecture is great architecture after sunset perhaps architecture is really a nocturnal art, like the art of fireworks.”

“I think that one's art is a growth inside one. I do not think one can explain growth. It is silent and subtle. One does not keep digging up a plant to see how it grows.”

“What I dream of is an art of balance, of purity and serenity devoid of troubling or depressing subject matter - a soothing, calming influence on the mind, rather like a good armchair which provides relaxation from physical fatigue.”

“Smiles come naturally to me, but I started thinking of them as an art form at my command. I studied all the time. I looked at magazines, I'd practice in front of the mirror and I'd ask photographers about the best angles. I can now pull out a smile at will.”

“Art is an invention of aesthetics, which in turn is an invention of philosophers... What we call art is a game.”

“Painting is easy when you don't know how, but very difficult when you do.”

“It is commonly supposed that the art of pleasing is a wonderful aid in the pursuit of fortune but the art of being bored is infinitely more successful.”

“Religion is essentially the art and the theory of the remaking of man. Man is not a finished creation.”

“A frenzied passion for art is a canker that devours everything else.”

“The writer, when he is also an artist, is someone who admits what others don't dare reveal.”

“It has always been difficult for Man to realize that his life is all an art. It has been more difficult to conceive it so than to act it so. For that is always how he has more or less acted it.”

“Early-twentieth-century abstraction is art's version of Einstein's Theory of Relativity. It's the idea that changed everything everywhere: quickly, decisively, for good.”

“It was Public Art, defined as art that is purchased by experts who are not spending their own personal money.”

“It's an honor putting art above politics. Politics can be seductive in terms of things reductive to the soul.”

“It is in this power of saying everything, and yet saying nothing too plainly, that the perfection of art consists.”

“I can't satisfy myself with just trying to tie all of my imagination into music, especially when music is not appreciated as an art form as much as it used to be.”

“To my mind the old masters are not art their value is in their scarcity.”

“To speak of morals in art is to speak of legislature in sex. Art is the sex of the imagination.”

“In art and dream may you proceed with abandon. In life may you proceed with balance and stealth.”

“The beginning of a friendship, the fact that two people out of the thousands around them can meet and connect and become friends, seems like a kind of magic to me. But maintaining a friendship requires work. I don't mean that as a bad thing. Good art requires work as well.”