"The negative is the equivalent of the composer's score,
and the print the performance."
Ansel Adams

"The essence of a sculpture must enter on tip-toe,
as light as animal footprints on snow."
Hans Arp

"Art is a fruit that grows in man, like a fruit on a plant,
or a child in its mother's womb."
Jean Arp

"Art is our chief means of breaking bread with the dead."
W. H. Auden

"All art is a kind of confession, more or less oblique.
All artists, if they are to survive,
are forced at last to tell the whole story, to vomit the anguish up."
James Baldwin

"What is art? Nature concentrated."
Honoré de Balzac

"The creative process is a cocktail
of instinct, skill, culture, and a highly creative feverishness.
It is not like a drug;
it is a particular state when everything happens very quickly,
a mixture of consciousness and unconsciousness, of fear and pleasure;
it's a little like making love, the physical act of love."
Francis Bacon

"Do not imagine that Art is something
which is designed to give gentle uplift and self-confidence.
Art is not a brassiere. At least not in the English sense.
But do not forget that brassiere is the French word for life-jacket."
Julian Barnes

"The study of the beautiful is a duel in which
the artist cries out with terror before he is vanquished."
Charles Baudelaire

"A work of art should be like a well-planned crime."
Constantin Brancusi

Edgar Degas is credited with a similar observation: "A painter paints a picture with the same feeling as that with which a criminal commits a crime." And Twyla Tharp extended the metaphor to a whole new arena: "Dancing is like bank robbery. It takes split second timing."

"Art is not a mirror to reflect reality,
but a hammer with which to shape it."
Bertolt Brecht

"Art is a partnership not only between those who are living
but between those who are dead and those who are yet to be born."
Edmund Burke

"Music is a means of rapid transportation."
John Cage

"If I were called on to define briefly the word 'art,'
I should call it the reproduction of what the senses perceive in nature,
seen through the veil of the soul."
Paul Cézanne

"One must always be careful
not to let one's work be covered with moss."
Marc Chagall

"Art is Nature speeded up and God slowed down."
Malcolm de Chazal

"Art is to beauty what honor is to honesty."
Winston Churchill

"Without tradition, art is a flock of sheep without a shepherd.
Without innovation, it is a corpse."
Winston Churchill

"Art is a marriage of the conscious and the unconscious."
Jean Cocteau

"Art is not a pastime, but a priesthood."
Jean Cocteau

"Painting is the intermediate something
between a thought and a thing."
Samuel Taylor Coleridge

"The reward of art is not fame or success but intoxication:
that is why so many bad artists are unable to give it up."
Cyril Connolly

"Art is wine and experience is the brandy we distill from it."
Robertson Davies

"Art is the accomplice of love.
Take love away and there is no longer art."
Remy de Gourmont

"Painting is only a bridge
linking the painter's mind with that of the viewer."
Eugène Delacroix

"Painting is the trade that takes the longest to learn
and is the most difficult.
It demands erudition like that of the composer,
but it also demands execution like that of the violinist."
Eugène Delacroix

"As long as art is the beauty parlor of civilization,
neither art nor civilization is secure."
John Dewey

"Art is the stored honey of the human soul,
gathered on wings of misery and travail."
Theodore Dreiser

"The life of an artist is like the life of a monk,
a lewd monk if you like, very Rabelaisian."
Marcel Duchamp

"I've decided that art is a habit-forming drug.
That's all it is, for the artist,
for the collector, for anybody connected with it."
Marcel Duchamp

"There is no way to success in art but to take off your coat,
grind paint, and work like a digger on the railroad, all day and everyday."
Ralph Waldo Emerson

"Art is the path of the creator to his work."
Ralph Waldo Emerson

"Art is a jealous mistress, and, if a man
have a genius for painting, poetry, music, architecture, or philosophy,
he makes a bad husband and an ill provider."
Ralph Waldo Emerson

A jealous mistress, of course, wants her lover all to herself—completely and totally. George Bernard Shaw echoed the sentiment in Man and Superman: "The true artist will let his wife starve, his children go barefoot, his mother drudge for his living at seventy, sooner than work at anything but his art." And William Faulkner similarly observed: "The artist's only responsibility is to his art. He will be completely ruthless if he is a good one. If a writer has to rob his mother, he will not hesitate; the Ode to a Grecian Urn is worth any number of old ladies."

"The artists must be sacrificed to their art.
Like the bees,
they must put their lives into the sting they give."
Ralph Waldo Emerson

"I succeeded in simply attending at the birth of all my works."
Max Ernst

"All art is autobiographical;
the pearl is the oyster's autobiography."
Federico Fellini

"The artist ought no more to appear in his work than God in nature."
Gustave Flaubert

"I see the way of the artist as a kind of pilgrimage.
When you go on a pilgrimage, you set out from where you happen to be
and start walking toward a place of great sanctity
in hope of returning from it renewed, enriched, and sanctified.
However far you may walk, every pilgrimage
is a safari into your own dark interior, an inner journey.
For pilgrimages belong to the inner world,
to that realm called 'the religious.'"
Frederick Franck, in Art as a Way (1981)