Art Book Quotes

The art of medicine cannot be inherited, nor can it be copied from books ~ Paracelsus

Ring sense is an art, a gift from God that flows out of a fighter like a great painting flows out of an artist, or a great book flows out of an author. ~ Ray Arcel

The first book ever written in an alphabet was the Hebrew Bible or the Old Testament. And the most important passage was the Ten Commandments. The first commandment is the most revolutionary sentence ever written. It states: "I am the Lord thy God there is no other." The second prohibits us from making images. Thus, there is a profound rejection of any goddess influence and a ban of representative art. ~ Leonard Shlain

Whatever poetry that was in me was coming out in the form of constructing art books! ~ Stephen Vincent Benet

One of the best things Henry Miller ever said was that art goes all out. It's all out. It goes full length ... A big book is an all-out book in which you limit your life to things that pertain directly to the book. ~ Nelson Algren

Many, perhaps most, very learned people prefer the company of their books to sitting in a crowd listening to history and art being mangled; furthermore, it is unlikely that the venerable scholars will stand up afterward to declare, "This lecture was a load of crap." The more profound a professor's distaste with the proceedings, the more likely he is to melt away at the end of the talk. ~ Camille Paglia

In Red Flags, Juris Jurjevics has brilliantly accomplished a feat that is becoming a major characteristic of 21st century literature: the seamless combining of a genre form with the deep resonance of literary art. This book is thrilling to read for both its narrative drive and its insight into the human heart. ~ Robert Olen Butler

We are now in want of an art to teach how books are to be read rather than to read them. Such an art is practicable. ~ Benjamin Disraeli

Some people get lots of pleasure; From books or from music or art; But boys seem to think it's fantastic; To just have a really good fart. ~ Giles Andreae

First one gets works of art, then criticism of them, then criticism of the criticism, and, finally, a book on The Literary Situation , a book which tells you all about writers, critics, publishing, paperbacked books, the tendencies of the (literary) time, what sells and how much, what writers wear and drink and want, what their wives wear and drink and want, and so on. ~ Randall Jarrell

What are books but folly, and what is an education but an arrant hypocrisy, and what is art but a curse when they touch not the heart and impel it not to action? ~ Louis Sullivan

Dance is low on the totem pole of the arts, because you're not left with a painting ... a book that will stay there, a score you can read. ~ Jerome Robbins

What's important about the artists we learn about in art history and see in all the art books is that they have somehow pushed the boundaries of what people think art is or should be, and that's how they've made their work relevant. That's what I'm trying to figure out for myself. ~ Kadir Nelson

Since the choice of what we curl up with is often crucial for our solace and sanity, we need to learn how to nurture the talent of selection. Book browsing is a meditative art ... Books are as essential as breathing. ~ Sarah Ban Breathnach

As we breathe and live, have a conversation, and you look in someone's eyes, and you see a sunset or have an argument or read a book or see a painting or whatever you do, it influences you. And as you live your art, it changes and grows just like you and your soul or whatever you want to call it. For me, it's never-ending, I call it "the organizer of chaos." That's what I do with this and I present it in a way that I dream. So basically, I'm just sharing my dreams with all of you. ~ Jared Leto

And no book, and possibly no painting, when it is finished, is ever exactly like the first dream of it. ~ Patricia Highsmith

After all, the world is not a stage-not to me: nor a theatre: nor a show-house of any sort. And art, especially novels, are not little theatres where the reader sits aloft and watches ... and sighs, commiserates, condones and smiles. That's what you want a book to be: because it leaves you so safe and superior, with your two-dollar ticket to the show. And that's what my books are not and never will be ... Whoever reads me will be in the thick of the scrimmage, and if he doesn't like it if he wants a safe seat in the audience-let him read someone else. ~ D.H. Lawrence

You see one painting, I see another, the art book puts it at another remove still, the lady buying the greeting card at the museum gift shop sees something else entire, and that's not even to mention the people separated from us by time - four hundred years before us, four hundred years after we're gone - it'll never strike anybody the same way and the great majority of people it'll never strike in any deep way at all but - a really great painting is fluid enough to work its way into the mind and heart through all kinds of different angles, in ways that are unique and very particular. Yours, yours. I was painted for you. ~ Donna Tartt

Even then, retailers learned early that shoppers prefer their shopping suggestions not be too truthful. One of the great unwritten chapters of retail intelligence programming featured a "personal shopper" program that all-too-accurately modeled the shoppers' desires and outputted purchase ideas based on what shoppers really wanted as opposed to what they wanted known that they wanted. This resulted in one overcompensatingly masculine test user receiving suggestions for an anal plug and a tribute art book for classic homoerotic artist Tom of Finland, while a female test user in the throes of a nasty divorce received suggestions for a small handgun, a portable bandsaw, and several gallons of an industrial solvent used to reduce organic matter to an easily drainable slurry. ~ John Scalzi

I've become really aware of all the subtle things you can communicate through the art and how you're presenting a character, particularly someone like Wonder Woman, who means so much to so many people. ~ Cliff Chiang

A piece of art - this goes for a painting or a sculpture or a book or whatever - really shouldn't have to do with the set of expectations that the viewer or the audience or the reader brings to that work. It should just have to do with how they interpret it and whether they like it or not. ~ Max Kellerman

A movie is just like a work of art or a book or a piece of music. The intent of its maker is one thing, but its interpretation by an audience is something else. I don't stop at what the filmmaker wanted to do. ~ Wesley Morris

I would rather have as my patron a host of anonymous citizens digging into their own pockets for the price of a book or a magazine than a small body of enlightened and responsible men administering public funds. I would rather chance my personal vision of truth striking home here and there in the chaos of publication that exists than attempt to filter it through a few sets of official, honorably public-spirited scruples. ~ John Updike

The truth is ... that the great artists of the world are never puritans, and seldom ever ordinarily respectable. No virtuous man - that is, virtuous in the YMCA sense - has ever painted a picture worth looking at, or written a symphony worth hearing, or a book worth reading, and it is highly improbable that the thing has ever been done by a virtuous woman. ~ H.L. Mencken

I have learned that the camera is, as is often said, a powerful weapon. And the wielder of that weapon can be perceived as dominating and threatening, even if that is not his or her intent. ~ Waswo X. Waswo

What I would like to write is a book about nothing, a book without exterior attachments, which would be held together by the innerforce of its style, as the earth without support is held in the air
a book that would have almost no subject or at least in which the subject would be almost invisible. ~ Gustave Flaubert

Appreciation, whether of nature, or books, or art, or men, depends very much on temperament. What is beauty or genius or greatness to one, is far from being so to another. ~ Tryon Edwards

Art shouldn't be locked away in galleries and libraries and books. Art should be for everybody and not just art buffs, historians and so-called experts. ~ Julian Beever

In the New Testament it is taught that willing and voluntary service to others is the highest duty and glory in human life ... The men of talent are constantly forced to serve the rest. They make the discoveries and inventions, order the battles, write the books, and produce the works of art. The benefit and enjoyment go to the whole. There are those who joyfully order their own lives so that they may serve the welfare of mankind. ~ William Graham Sumner

The Layers

I have walked through many lives,
some of them my own,
and I am not who I was,
though some principle of being
abides, from which I struggle
not to stray.
When I look behind,
as I am compelled to look
before I can gather strength
to proceed on my journey,
I see the milestones dwindling
toward the horizon
and the slow fires trailing
from the abandoned camp-sites,
over which scavenger angels
wheel on heavy wings.
Oh, I have made myself a tribe
out of my true affections,
and my tribe is scattered!
How shall the heart be reconciled
to its feast of losses?
In a rising wind
the manic dust of my friends,
those who fell along the way,
bitterly stings my face.
Yet I turn, I turn,
exulting somewhat,
with my will intact to go
wherever I need to go,
and every stone on the road
precious to me.
In my darkest night,
when the moon was covered
and I roamed through wreckage,
a nimbus-clouded voice
directed me:
"Live in the layers,
not on the litter."
Though I lack the art
to decipher it,
no doubt the next chapter
in my book of transformations
is already written.
I am not done with my changes. ~ Stanley Kunitz

Inspiration comes from everywhere. From life, observing people, etc. From movies and books you love. From research. ~ Holly Black

Book marketing should be a planned process, an art if you will. ~ Heather Hart

I imagine that no art has ever been learned from books. fly-fishing is no exception. ~ G. E. M. Skues

I like people who love books and movies and art and want to talk about it all the time, because that's basically what I want to talk about. Intellectuals that are funny. ~ Greta Gerwig

There is no luck in literary reputation. They who make up the final verdict upon every book are not the partial and noisy readers of the hour when it appears; but a court as of angels, a public not to be bribed, not to be entreated, and not to be overawed, decides upon every man's title to fame. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

The art, the new, the ability to connect the dots and to make an impact - sooner or later, that can only come from one who creates, not from a teacher and not from a book. ~ Seth Godin

The aim of great books is ethical: to teach what it means to be a man. Every major form of literary art has taken for its deeper themes what T.S. Eliot called "the permanent things"-the norms of human action. ~ Russell Kirk

The noise distorts the truth but we can break through, we need to base our foundation upon the Rock. ~ Eric Samuel Timm

I read a book called The Art of Loving. A lot of things seemed clear while I was reading it but afterwards I went back to being more or less the same. ~ Alice Munro

In my home country, there was a little shop with old books, but it was really in the countryside. You couldn't find English books. I found this very avant-garde American art book that had information about Georgia O'Keeffe. I was very much impressed by her. ~ Yayoi Kusama

The art of reading is the art of adopting the pace the author has set. Some books are fast and some are slow, but no book can be understood if it is taken at the wrong speed. ~ Mark Van Doren

I'm always hiding the books in my closet, and my art's always turned upside down in my drawer. ~ Daniel Clowes

Carrie felt this as a personal reproof. She read "Dora Thorne," or had a great deal in the past. It seemed only fair to her, but she supposed that people thought it very fine. Now this clear- eyed, fine-headed youth, who looked something like a student to her, made fun of it. It was poor to him, not worth reading. She looked down, and for the first time felt the pain of not understanding. ~ Theodore Dreiser

As I read you I fell in love with the holes between your words and I loved you most on the days you could not love yourself. ~ Jenim Dibie

In the circle where I was raised, I knew of no one knowledgeable in the visual arts, no one who regularly attended musical performances, and only two adults other than my teachers who spoke without embarrassment of poetry and literature - both of these being women. As far as I can recall, I never heard a man refer to a good or a great book. I knew no one who had mastered, or even studied, another language from choice. And our articulate, conscious life proceeded without acknowledgement of the preceding civilisations which had produced it. ~ Shirley Hazzard

Chapter books are often written in series and kids have come to expect that they'll come out once a year, so publishers want to keep the momentum going. It's the kind of art I love to make, except that the time frame is really nutty. ~ Carson Ellis

Music makes me alive in a way that nothing quite does. Good art, good film, good books, good dance. Exhibitions, history. Nature makes me feel alive. Georgia in the rain - that makes me feel alive. Compassion makes me feel alive. Hard fought victories for social rights. ~ Emily Saliers

I may have been prejudiced against lawyer members of Congress, having run against one or two and having been threatened politically by a few others, and also because my own professional background was academic, principally in the liberal arts. Good lawyers, I asserted in campaigns, can be found in the yellow pages of the telephone books. Good historians, or political and social philosophers, are not so easily found or classified. ~ Eugene McCarthy

Just as art brings you to another place, so does religion - and to ask questions of factuality tends to reduce both. If you say you were inspired by a novel, that implies that your book is a work of fiction. ~ Yann Martel

The Winnipeg Art Gallery has a good collection of Inuit art, and most of what I've seen I've seen there or in the few books I have. I should spend more time researching. ~ Neil Farber

I think jazz and comic books are probably the two uniquely American art forms. ~ Len Wein

What someone calls my books is irrelevant to me. I consider them works of art and rules and categories and labels mean nothing. ~ James Frey

What I am trying to say is that it is not without any value. The value of copies is that they can direct us towards the original. I was recently at the Louvre Museum and I was filming people who were viewing the Mona Lisa. I noticed the number of ordinary people, astonished, mouths agape, standing still for long stretches looking at the work, and I wondered, "Where does this come from? Are these people all art connoisseurs?" They are like me; through the years, we've seen this work in our schoolbooks or art history books, but when we stand before the original, we hold our breath. ~ Abbas Kiarostami

When I first learned about Abrams and saw the types of books they were making, I knew I wanted my books to be published by them. Abrams books are special-when you hold one in your hands, you have the feeling that this book needed to be made. I once heard an artist say that books are fetish objects-I think Abrams gets that, because their books demand to be treasured. So who better to give comics art its proper due? I feel privileged to have found a home with Abrams. ~ Jeff Kinney

You can't enjoy art or books in a hurry. ~ E.A. Bucchianeri

Now, to describe the process of the Wrapped Reichstag, which went from 1971 to '95, there is an entire book about that, because each one of our projects has its own book. The book is not an art book, meaning it's not written by an art historian. ~ Christo

I feel like what's most important for painting - which has been hierarchically on the top for a really long time in terms of what is considered fine art, by comparison with something like a comic book or what's considered low art - is that painting should open up laterally to include other cultures and things that don't immediately resonate as a painting but are obviously of equal contribution to the genre. ~ Laura Owens

Time and reflection ... modify, little by little, our vision, and at last comprehension comes to us. ~ Paul Cezanne

We sell books, other people sell shoes. What's the difference? Publishing isn't the highest art. ~ Michael Korda

This helpful book on the role of the arts fills a significant gap in the growing literature on holistic faith-based programs. ~ Ronald J. Sider

The shaping of taste is essentially the science of merchandising, whether of detergents or cars or books or objects of fine and decorative art. ~ Russell Lynes

I think it's very, very, very hard to get a book published. I never want to be one of those teachers that say, 'don't do this, ' because how sad would the world be if people didn't create art and write? But, it's not an easy journey being a writer. ~ Alyson Richman

Read books that expand you, that are bright. See films, plays, art forms that elevate your consciousness, that bring you into a sense of how beautiful this world is, how beautiful other worlds are, how beautiful nirvana, the transcendental is. ~ Frederick Lenz

Someday it will dawn on man that woman does not read the wonderful books with which he has filled his libraries, and though she may well admire his marvelous works of art in museums she herself will rarely create, only copy. ~ Esther Vilar

My grandfather was a most gifted person, and amongst his many qualities, one of them had always particularly impressed me. While the past was a book he had read and re-read may times, the future was just one more literary work of art into which he used to pour himself with deep thought and concentration. Innumerable people since his death have told me how he used to read in the future, and this certainly was one of his very great strengths. ~ Aga Khan IV

The iPod is clearly a tipping point (and I'm not quite sure it is a wholly positive development), because it is a revolution in the way that we consume creative property, which I would call art. It has radically changed the relationship between the artist and the audience, how money changes hands, and how much money changes hands. Music was the first, and books are coming next. The Kindle or some form of electronic book is clearly inevitable, and it will massively reshape how books are sold, who pays for them, and how they're consumed. It is going to be really fascinating. ~ Malcolm Gladwell

If a book comes from the heart, it will contrive to reach other hearts; all art and author-craft are of small amount to that. ~ Thomas Carlyle

An art book is a museum without walls. ~ Andre Malraux

THE NAME OF THE WIND has everything fantasy readers like, magic and mysteries and ancient evil, but it's also humorous and terrifying and completely believable. As with all the very best books in our field, it's not the fantasy trappings (wonderful as they are) that make this novel so good, but what the author has to say about true, common things, about ambition and failure, art, love, and loss. ~ Tad Williams

There's been million-seller books and million-seller CDs. But there hasn't been, until now, million-seller art. ~ Thomas Kinkade

I spent a long time in art school so I can really draw. I'll doodle and suddenly I'll find the beginning of the movie in one picture. Usually, I start my stuff on the telephone. Right by the telephone I've got a book of doodles. When I'm on the phone, I'll be doing a drawing eventually. ~ Leonardo DiCaprio

I once wrote a book on women in science. I realized when I was interviewing them that they were the equivalent of writers, or anyone else who tries to make art out of life. Through science they had reached the expressive. ~ Vivian Gornick

For me, I was in school and I pushed myself to be a good student, just because that's the type of person I was, but I never had a connection to any of it. I don't think my brain functioned in a way that was at its height, when I was in school. I needed something like art to really value the way my mind works. I wasn't reaching my full potential by sitting in a classroom and reading from a book. My mind didn't work that way. ~ Misty Copeland

Sometimes listening to music can motivate you. It can. But if you're a musician, that isn't always the way to get new ideas because you don't want to take somebody else's ideas. You need to find your own. So if you go to different artistic mediums, whether it's dance or it's visual arts or films or books, stories, sometimes it gets you hearing things, hearing progressions that you wouldn't come up with if you were just listening to other music because you don't want to copy progressions you've just heard. ~ Tori Amos

Prize not thyself by what thou hast, but by what thou art; he that values a jewel by her golden frame, or a book by her silver clasps, or a man by his vast estate, errs; if thou art not worth more than the world can make thee, thy Redeemer had a bad pennyworth, or thou an uncurious Redeemer. ~ Francis Quarles

Keep at it! The one talent that's indispensable to a writer is persistence. You must write the book, else there is no book. It will not finish itself. Do not try to commit art. Just tell the damned story. ~ Tom Clancy

A work that intends to be art must first be entertaining. ~ Katherine Paterson

I've just finished reading Reality Hunger and I'm lit up by it-astonished, intoxicated, ecstatic, overwhelmed ... It really is an urgent book: a piece of art-making itself, a sublime, exciting, outrageous, visionary volume. ~ Jonathan Lethem

I think the biggest thing - and this I think is true of songs but also of movies and books and art in general - is when you have this moment where you hear a song or whatever and you say, "Hey, I've felt that exact way as a human being," and there's no easy way to describe it. ~ Craig Finn

I like to be aware of a book as a piece of writing, and aware of its structure as a product of mind, and yet I want to be able to see the represented world through it. I admire artists who succeed in dividing my attention more or less evenly between the world of their books and the art of their books ... so that a reader may study the work with pleasure as well as the world that it describes. ~ Annie Dillard

Readers have a loyalty that cannot be matched anywhere else in the creative arts, which explains why so many writers who have run out of gas can keep coasting anyway, propelled on to the bestseller lists by the magic words AUTHOR OF on the covers of their books. ~ Stephen King

Arthur Hughes is one of the pioneers of modern database marketing. His new book, Strategic Database Marketing, Third Edition, contains the wisdom of twenty years of database marketing experience from scores of companies throughout the US. I can heartily endorse Arthur's book for anyone who wants to know the state of the art in database marketing today. ~ Lester Wunderman

For his major contributions to the analysis of algorithms and the design of programming languages, and in particular for his contributions to the "art of computer programming" through his well-known books in a continuous series by this title. ~ Donald Knuth

The people of the world, all of them, whether it is the different race or the different language or the different lifestyle, tend to only think about what we cannot share. But our brains are all the same. We are the same people. With everyone's strength, we can all share the same feelings. That much is obvious. But it won't come easily. ~ Naoko Takeuchi

I would rather instill in my amateur students love, than knowledge, of music. Left with only knowledge, they will at the end close their books and consign the course to forgetfulness. But if they have learned to love but the smallest part of the art, they are likely to pursue some phase of it the rest of their lives. ~ Ernst Bacon

I went into Hollywood and met Mike Aarons and went to Grantray-Lawrence Animation to work on the, by today's standards, extremely cheap and crude Marvel superheroes cartoons which basically consisted of taking stacks of the comic book art, taking parts of the art, pasting it down, extending it down into drawings and occasionally a new piece of art to bridge the comic book panels and limited animation and lip movement. ~ Mike Royer

I collect art books. I have hundreds and hundreds of them and they get me to start hearing things. Sometimes people look at them, but I find that visual art gets me listening, gets me hearing things. ~ Tori Amos

Literature is a toil and a snare, a curse that bites deep. ~ D.H. Lawrence

Works of art are not so much finished as abandoned. Perhaps poems can be perfect. A short-short story might even be perfectible, as effective and enjoyable for one reader as the next. But novels and other book-length narratives are great rambling things that always contain some flaws. For works of any length, there comes a point when your continued tinkering won't improve the whole, but will just trade one set of problems for another. ~ Bruce Holland Rogers

Grigsby's marvelous exploration-a deep, wide, and beautiful inquiry into Sojourner Truth's use of technology-features more of her photographs than have ever been collected before. Among its many insights, I especially relished the analysis of Truth's illiteracy. Enduring Truths is art history with a wide-ranging concept of history left in. A terrific book, and one we've needed for a long time. ~ Nell Irvin Painter

I am a deeply uncertain individual. I often find myself acting like a fool to make the people around me laugh. When they're laughing, they're not watching me quite as closely. I smile to put people at ease. But what if I opened my mouth one day, spoke my actual thoughts, and the people glared at my opinions? What if they thought me disgusting or frightening or ugly because of my words? Would you keep your lips shut for the rest of your life to not face that judgment? Just for the sake of someone else's comfort? For these strangers, who I will never know? If I can't speak then I'll write. These strangers, whose opinions crush me, will be forced to listen. Because when they read my words those words will make a home within their heads. They may even end up using my own opinions against me. But at least I'll be hidden behind the pages of a book. ~ F.K. Preston

As I take up my pen I feel myself so full, so equal to my subject, and see my book so clearly before me in embryo, I would almost like to try to say it all in a single word. ~ Georg C. Lichtenberg

I owe it all to art books, chocolate and young men. ~ Beatrice Wood

One of the things about the arts that is so important is that in the arts you discover the only way to learn how to do it is by doing it. You can't write by reading a book about it. The only way to learn how to write a book is to sit down and try to write a book ~ David McCullough

I enjoy the art, and I enjoy drawing. I think my printing to this day looks like the printing right out of a comic book. ~ Nathan Fillion

Bring thyself to account each day ere thou art summoned to a reckoning; for death, unheralded, shall come upon thee and thou shalt be called to give account for thy deeds. ~ Bahaullah

I can tell that I shaped the book very deliberately, after a great deal of thought, and that I insisted this piece function as a prologue, but I find the word "intention," confusing ("trust the art," as D.H. Lawrence said, "not the artist"). These speculations are perhaps better responded to by text and reader, rather than author. ~ Laura Mullen

I would prefer to have one comfortable room well stocked with books to all you could give me in the way of decoration which the highest art could supply. ~ John Bright

Most people don't realize the many steps that a pop-up goes through. There are a variety of "Dummies" (the sketch phase of the book). Then finally the pencil "dummy", then the finished art which is like painting pieces of a jig saw puzzle. ~ Tomie DePaola

Books are delightful when prosperity happily smiles; when adversity threatens, they are inseparable comforters. They give strength to human compacts, nor are grave opinions brought forward without books. Arts and sciences, the benefits of which no mind can calculate. depend upon books. ~ Bill Vaughan