Best Art Quotes

If you're speaking of love, you really must include the element of uncertainty - and perhaps it's best approached as the art of constant maintenance. ~ Twyla Tharp

I'm just following my own art, and I just think that the only thing I can do to be a great artist is do the best job I can in whatever movie I do. ~ Justin Chon

Seventh-Gay Adventists isn't just a helpful movie, important for the way it can help congregations of any denomination deal graciously and truthfully with the issue of homosexuality. It's also a beautifully-filmed and artfully-conceived movie. It does what the best art does - it 'humanizes the other.' You should see it, and when you do, you'll encourage others to see it as well. ~ Brian D. McLaren

The best art on a football field usually happens during kickoff returns. ~ Kevin Sampsell

The consensus seems to be this: we should be deeply Christian artists. But that doesn't mean we should be something called Christian artists or that whatever we produce should be called Christian art. We should simply focus on our craft, on making the best art we can. We should understand that people will and should resonate with our work not because it is Christian but because it is good. Above all, Christians should make good art, true art; art unafraid of exploring mystery, portraying evil, and looking for truth wherever it appears. ~ Brett McCracken

The question is not ... if art is enough to fulfill my life, but if I am true to the path I have set for myself, if I am the best I can be in the things I do. Am I living up to the reasons I became a singer in the first place? ~ Kathleen Battle

I want to listen to Beethoven and Mozart. I want to read the best minds. I want to live with uplifting art. I don't want to live a grubby life. ~ Alexandra Stoddard

As long as art is understood and valued as an "absolute" activity, it will be a separate, elitist one. Elites presuppose masses. So far as the best art defines itself by essentially "priestly" aims, it presupposes and confirms the existence of a relatively passive, never fully initiated, voyeuristic laity which is regularly convoked to watch, listen, read, or hear - and then sent away. ~ Susan Sontag

Religion, art, and science flourish best in a free society. True, freedom does not afford much opportunity for grand gestures. It has little room for martyrs. But life is not supposed to be about dying well. It is about living well. ~ Virginia Postrel

The best teachers, one hopes, don't shout at their students - because they are skilled at wooing as well as demanding the best efforts of others. For the ancient Greeks and Romans, this wooing was a sufficiently fine art in itself to be the central focus of education. ~ Tom Chatfield

Even though I loved to write, I never liked English lit. class very much. I think it ruins books when you dissect them too much. I liked my art classes best. ~ Meg Cabot

High-class kitsch may well be "perfect" in its form and and composition: the academic painters were often masters of their craft. Thus, the accusation that a work of kitsch is based not on lack of for or aesthetic merit but on the presence of a particularly provocative emotional content. (The best art, by contrast, eschews emotional content altogether.) ~ Robert C. Solomon

I think there is a hunger for things that wake you up, something that makes you peel back your eyes, that reminds you that you are alive. Art is at its best when it is in the 'now.' ~ Doug Aitken

In avant garde drama ... primitivism goes hand in hand with aesthetic experimentation designed to advance the technical progress of the art itself by exploring fundamental questions: What is a theatre? What is a play? What is an actor? What is a spectator? What is the relation between them all? What conditions serve this best? ~ C. D. Innes

Artists look at the environment, and the best artists correctly diagnose the problem. I'm not saying artists can't be leaders, but that's not the job of art, to lead. Bob Marley, Nina Simone, Harry Belafonte - there are artists all through history who have become leaders, but that was already in them, nothing to do with their art. ~ Talib Kweli

Let every man practice the art that he knows best. ~ Marcus Tullius Cicero

Nature scarcely ever gives us the very best; for that we must have recourse to art. ~ Baltasar Gracian

Radicals often suspect beauty of corruption. Uptight fuckers though they sometimes are, they're right in one thing: art alone cannot change the world. Pens can't take on swords, let alone Predator drones. But as disappointment and violence spread, the antidote is a generosity that the best art can still inspire.

Art is hope against cynicism, creation against entropy. To make art is an act of both love and defiance. Though I'm a cynic, I believe these things are all we have. ~ Molly Crabapple

The best thing I ever learned from my dad was he knew he wasn't the best of singers, but he always knew he was a great entertainer, and I always thought that was a good concept to bring along, that ultimately acting is an entertainment art and you have to be aware of the fact that you want people to be excited to be watching you. ~ Dean Norris

A nice blend of prediction and surprise seem to be at the heart of the best art. ~ Wendy Carlos

I like playing with that space between laughter and discomfort where your discomfort can also make you laugh, and you're confused about the mixed feelings. That's challenging, and I think that's what makes for some of the best art. ~ Hari Kondabolu

Florence is perhaps best known for being the seat of Renaissance art, and rightly so: A greatest-hits collection of artists passed through its streets - Michelangelo, Leonardo, Botticelli, and Brunelleschi among them. ~ Hanya Yanagihara

Some of the best art in the world is collaborative, a mix of voices that are stronger together than separate. Take the Beatles, for example. Or every great movie ever made. We like to say they're the director's vision, but really, they're huge collaborations between directors, writers, actors, even producers. ~ Ted Naifeh

The very best way I can make any reader believe in the nuts and bolts of an art form ... is to know the mechanics, to make the characters grounded in convincing detail. ~ Guy Gavriel Kay

I'm either offered window-dressing parts in large movies or little art films no one ever sees. People think the movies I end up doing are my real choices. I do the best things I'm offered. ~ Jacqueline Bisset

Making children happy is the best art. ~ Marty Rubin

Evergreen had opened up a whole new world to me. There I met many internationally celebrated people: there I was surrounded by the best art and music, as well as conversation. I knew I could never return to the life I had led before. ~ Billy Baldwin

Black people's music is in a class by itself and always has been. There's nothing like it. The reason for that is because it was not tampered with by white people. It was not on the media. It was not anywhere except where black people were. And it is one of the art forms in which black people decided what is good in it. Nobody told them. What surfaced and what floated to the top, were the giants and the best. ~ Toni Morrison

We are not creators; only combiners of the created. Invention isn't about new ingredients, but new recipes. And innovations taste the best. ~ Ryan Lilly

I'd much rather be worrying about playing that note in tune, and picking out the best way to arrange the song, rather than thinking about pricing for the download. It's not art. ~ Trent Reznor

The arts have long been an integral and vibrant part of our nation's cultural heritage. In its many forms, art enables us to gain a deeper understanding of ourselves and of our society. Providing us with a unique way to learn about people of other cultures, it allows us to discover all that we have in common. At its best, art can beautify our cities, encourage economic development and social change, and profoundly affect the ways we live our lives. ~ William J. Clinton

If I'm doing my job correctly, I'm presenting a scenario for you as the reader to engage with on your own. I mean that's what the best art is supposed to do. ~ T.C. Boyle

Craft' gets a bad rap. Mediocre art is not caused by craft; it is caused by artists. Good art employs whatever craft works best. ~ Walter Darby Bannard

At its best, cinema does retain a remarkable ability to speak to people of every age, from every background, and in ways that almost any other art form in popular culture struggles to compete with. ~ David Puttnam

The job at Brooklyn is interesting because Brooklyn reflects what happened to university art departments everywhere. It might be the worst department now, and yet at one point it was the best in the country. ~ Ad Reinhardt

I have made an art form of the interview. The French are the best interviewers, despite their addiction to the triad, like all Cartesians. ~ Orson Welles

Those who try to combat the production of shoddy pictures are enemies of the best art today ... It always feels tragic to see people labouring to saw off the branch they are sitting on. ~ Asger Jorn

If art is singular expression, then by nature, the best art is controversial. But when art stirs debate for reasons besides its artistic integrity, that's when things get bent. ~ John Ridley

Our best teachers do more than impart facts and figures - they inspire and encourage students and instill a true desire to learn. That's a fine art in itself. ~ Sonny Perdue

If you look at the requirements for just one piece, like art, from one generation of games to the next, it will change radically. You need people who are adaptable because the thing that makes you the best in the world in one generation of games is going to be totally useless in the next. ~ Gabe Newell

Jeffrey Deitch is the Jeff Koons of art dealers. Not because he's the biggest, best, or the richest of his kind. But because in some ways he's the weirdest (which is saying a lot when you're talking about the wonderful, wicked, lovable, and annoying creatures known as art dealers). ~ Jerry Saltz

My friend Josh Glenn compiles terrific lists of genre novels from the mid-20th century. His latest is a list of the ten best adventure novels of 1966. Josh also includes the cover art of early editions of the books, which are always much better than the art on newer editions. I want to read every book in this list! ~ Mark Frauenfelder

Art is good but it isn't the best. ~ Jose Bergamin

Film is probably the medium best suited to reach the most people - the visual, the aural, the limbic, the intellectual: it captures all these parts of our mind and soul. No other art form comes close. ~ Peter Landesman

Trying to express yourself is more powerful than trying to be the best. ~ Steeven Shaw

You have the power to think whatever you choose to allow into your head. If something just "pops" into your head, you have the power to make it go away. You have the power to decide that a particular emotion is a "choice" rather than a condition of life. And you have the power, similarly, to choose beliefs that empower you, that bring out your best. ~ Art E. Berg

Literature flourishes best when it is half a trade and half an art. ~ William Ralph Inge

Best fight ever in a movie: 'They Live.' I want to do a martial arts version of that, where you think it's ended, and it just keeps on going. I love that fight. It was funny as well. Unexpected. ~ Scott Adkins

This much we know: Journalism is not a precise science. It's, on its best day, is a crude art. We make mistakes; I make mistakes. With more than 50 years as a journalist, I have at least had the opportunity to blow more stories, make more mistakes than maybe anybody in television. ~ Dan Rather

There's a unique bond of trust between readers and authors that I don't believe exists in any other art form; as a reader, I trust a novelist to give me his or her best effort, however flawed. ~ Dan Simmons

The best thing about art is that it is the one luxury in life that can be enjoyed by everyone. And it lasts forever. ~ Lynda Resnick

I have just gained a deeper and deeper respect for acting and the whole art of it because you're really trying to live a life and to do the best justification for it. ~ Billy Magnussen

Thank God we don't know a lot about Shakespeare or Moses or Homer or Lautreamont. These are the best guys we got, and their art is powerful because they're mysterious. ~ Cass McCombs

Sometimes words are not needed, and the simplicity of expressing yourself through an art form is one of the best ways of communication. ~ Emmanuel Jal

The art of coalition command - whether it is here in Afghanistan, whether it was in Iraq or in Bosnia or in Haiti - is to take the resources you are provided with, understand what the strengths and weaknesses are and to employ them to the best overall effect. ~ David Petraeus

The way I look at it is that once you create a piece of art, and it's out in the world, there's nothing you can do about it. People can use it the way they want to. There's nothing you can do about it. All you can hope for is that people that are using it are using it with the best intent. ~ David Lloyd

The child will leave the nest. The best paint job will crack. The best play will become boring. The best work will grow tedious. The best art will lose meaning. The greatest creation will decay. Behind all this, lies my true self. ~ Vironika Tugaleva

Some people have been kind enough to call me a fine artist. I've always called myself an illustrator. I'm not sure what the difference is. All I know is that whatever type of work I do, I try to give it my very best. Art has been my life. ~ Norman Rockwell

I was being singled out as the best in the class at this, that and the other, nearly always to do with art. And then I was a very good swimmer from a very early age, and once again the best in the class, and when I was about five or six, I was the best in the school. ~ Rolf Harris

My mother was an artist, and I was fairly good at art as a child. I was always the best drawer in class, except in second grade when an artistic genius passed through our school! ~ Natalie Babbitt

I'm a sworn enemy of convention. I despite the conventional in anything, even the arts. I paint canvasses on the floor and drove one art teacher out of his mind. But that's just the way I paint best. ~ Hedy Lamarr

Now will I rehearse before you a very ancient Breton Lay. As the tale was told to me, so, in turn, will I tell it over again, to the best of my art and knowledge. Hearken now to my story, its why and its reason. ~ Marie De France

I could say diamonds are a girl's best friend, and that never changes. But the taste for art did change. ~ Susan Vreeland

A true artist takes no notice whatever of the public. The public are to him non-existent ~ Oscar Wilde

If we learn the art of yielding what must be yielded to the changing present, we can save the best of the past. ~ Dean Acheson

Like most people, I've always felt using words like 'best' when applied to art is a fun way for critics to stay busy at the end of the year, and I guess a good way to help get ratings for awards shows, which is fine. ~ Steven Van Zandt

Some of the best art occurs when people are oppressed. That's just what we do as a species when something shakes us up. ~ Pharrell Williams

What art and books do at their best is investigate why we are the way we are. ~ Philipp Meyer

It's not communism, it's shouldn't be that everybody gets a try no matter how good or bad they are. It's our profession and our art, so we should eventually strive to be working with the best people. ~ Amy Poehler

When you build a product, you make a lot of assumptions about the state of the art of technology, the best business practices, and potential customer usage/behavior. ~ Steven Sinofsky

Making money is art. And working is art. And good business is the best art. ~ Andy Warhol

If an imaginative boy has a sufficiently rich mother who has intelligence, personal grace, dignity of character without harshness, and a cultivated sense of the best art of her time to enable her to make her house beautiful, she sets a standard for him against which very few women can struggle, besides effecting for him a disengagement of his affections, his sense of beauty, and his idealism from his specifically sexual impulses. ~ George Bernard Shaw

Making art in America is sort of a political statement in and of itself. It's not the best environment for that sometimes. ~ Steve Earle

Making music and art is about expressing something that's universally human, maybe even beyond human, at best. ~ Cass McCombs

All the best art comes from the broken places, ~ Megan Hart

My child has to be an artist,
because conceiving her will be the best art
my body has ever accommodated. ~ Nomthandazo Tsembeni

The best part of the art of living is to know how to grow old gracefully. ~ Eric Hoffer

Artists who have won fame are often embarrassed by it; thus their first works are often their best. ~ Ludwig Van Beethoven

Music is, by far, the best art. Nothing even comes close. It's so immediate and emotional. In writing, maybe ninety percent of it is the unconscious and ten percent is control. In music, I think it's probably more like ninety-nine percent the unconscious. It's just a beautiful thing happening through you. And so, too, is writing a great story. ~ T.C. Boyle

Drawing is the honesty of the art. ~ Salvador Dali

I definitely believe that art is the best way to produce social change. ~ Pedro Reyes

God's careful instructions for building the tabernacle in Exodus 31 remind us that his perfection sets the standard for whatever we create in his name. Whatever we happen to make-not only in the visual arts, but in all the arts-we should make it as well as we can, offering God our very best. ~ Philip Graham Ryken

My theory is that nine times out of ten, if there's a depression, more a social depression than anything, it brings out the best art in black people. The best example is, Reagan and Bush gave us the best years of hiphop. ~ Questlove

I strongly believe that the art of the novel works best when the writer identifies with whoever he or she is writing about. Novels in the end are based on the human capacity, compassion, and I can show more compassion to my characters if I write in a first person singular. ~ Orhan Pamuk

There is a discrepancy of somebody going to an art dealer and promising what they'll make for the next three years. And I'm old fashioned that way; I think that every exhibition you make is supposed to put you in the world, that the next exhibition is spinning off of that. It's almost like a riff. And if you know what you're going to do for the next three years, why don't just do it the final point? You would think, in a progressive situation, that the final would be the best. ~ Lawrence Weiner

The best art looks and sounds prophetic; a genius borrows from tomorrow what he uses today. ~ Matshona Dhliwayo

I think I love jokes! The best jokes are equal to the best art, in my mind, and as rare. ~ Travis Nichols

Books have been vastly important in my life - as both a reader and a writer. I've learned that the great gift of literature is that someone else's tale becomes a chapter of your story. And I still feel books are the best art form for making contact with another consciousness, which is why reading a good book by yourself never feels lonely. ~ Bob Smith

Politics is the art of the next best. ~ Otto Von Bismarck

At its best, no art form is more thrilling than grand opera, yet none is at greater risk of following the dinosaurs down the cold road to extinction. ~ Terry Teachout

I like real art. It's difficult to define 'real' but it is the best word for describing what I like to get out of art and what the best art has. It has the ability to convince you that it's present - that it's there. You could say it's authentic ... but real is actually a better word, broad as it may be. ~ Frank Stella

Good manners is the art of making those people easy with whom we converse. Whoever makes the fewest people uneasy is the best bred in the room. ~ Jonathan Swift

It may well be, of course, that America's pop culture is on balance better than our high art. I don't think so, but you can certainly make a case that the best of it aspires to a degree of aesthetic and emotional seriousness that is directly comparable to all but the very greatest works of high art. ~ Terry Teachout

No art is any good unless you can feel how it's put together. By and large it's the eye, the hand and if it's any good, you feel the body. Most of the best stuff seems to be a complete gesture, the totality of the artist's body; you can really lean on it. ~ Frank Stella

Less disappointing than life, great works of art do not begin by giving us all their best. ~ Marcel Proust

We do have Museums of African American Art in the United States, and there is a National Museum of Women's Art. However, I believe Latinos are best served by displaying their art next to the art of other groups, particularly North American, European, and even Asian artists. ~ Mari Carmen Ramirez

In an art school it's very hard to tell who is the best. ~ Daniel Clowes

There are still some people out there who believe comic books are nothing more than, well, comic books. But the true cognoscenti know graphic novels are - at their best - an amazing blend of art literature and the theater of the mind. ~ John Ridley

And human love needs human meriting:
How has thou merited-
Of all man's clotted clay the dingiest clot?
Alack, thou knowest not
How little worthy of any love thou art!
Whom wilt thou find to love ignoble thee
Save Me, save only Me? ~ Francis G. Thompson

You should go to picture-galleries and museums of sculpture to be acted upon, and not to express or try to form your own perfectlyfutile opinion. It makes no difference to you or the world what you may think of any work of art. That is not the question; the point is how it affects you. The picture is the judge of your capacity, not you of its excellence; the world has long ago passed its judgment upon it, and now it is for the work to estimate you. ~ Anna Brackett