Art Quotes

“Imagine it's 1981. You're an artist, in love with art, smitten with art history. You're also a woman, with almost no mentors to look to art history just isn't that into you. Any woman approaching art history in the early eighties was attempting to enter an almost foreign country, a restricted and exclusionary domain that spoke a private language.”

-- Jerry Saltz

“A nation devoid of art and artists cannot have a full existence.”

-- Kemal Ataturk

“The counterfeit and counterpart of Nature is reproduced in art.”

-- Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

“The artist is nothing without the gift, but the gift is nothing without work.”

-- Emile Zola

“I think most of the people involved in any art always secretly wonder whether they are really there because they're good or there because they're lucky.”

-- Katharine Hepburn

“I have a small house so I borrow everything except art, that's what I love.”

-- Salma Hayek

“The principle of art is to pause, not bypass.”

-- Jerzy Kosinski

“Don't be an art critic. Paint. There lies salvation.”

-- Paul Cezanne

“When I am finishing a picture, I hold some God-made object up to it - a rock, a flower, the branch of a tree or my hand - as a final test. If the painting stands up beside a thing man cannot make, the painting is authentic. If there's a clash between the two, it's bad art.”

-- Marc Chagall

“Diplomacy is the art of saying 'Nice doggie' until you can find a rock.”

-- Will Rogers