Some say my pictures are stiff. I reply, but my mind is flexible. I prefer that to the other way around.
- Bob Kessel

When life gives you lemons, make lemon still-lifes.
- Bob Kessel

Vous êtes né, Vous êtes devenu célèbre, Et vous êtes mort comme un chien dans un restaurant chinois.
-Bob Kessel

Most art critics are failed artists, but so are most artists.
- Bob Kessel

“There is no comment on pictures but pictures,
on music but music, on poems but poetry.
If you do, you do. If you don’t, you don’t.
And that’s all there is to that.”
- William Carlos Williams

To me there is no past or future in art. The art of the great painters who lived in other times is not an art of the past; perhaps it is more alive today than it ever was.
- Pablo Picasso

Art is like turning corners, one never knows what is around the corner until one has made the turn.
- Milton Avery

Painting is like golf; the fewer strokes I take, the better the picture.
- John Marin

To abstract is to draw out the essence of a matter. To abstract in art is to separate certain fundamentals from irrelevant material which surrounds them.
- Ben Shahn

Objective painting is not good painting unless it is good in the abstract sense. A hill or tree cannot make a good painting just because it is a hill or tree. It is lines and colors put together so that they may say something.
- Georgia O’Keeffe

It’s really absurd to make… a human image, with paint, today, when you think about it… But then all of a sudden, it was even more absurd not to do it.
- Willem de Kooning

Elegance is reduction, simplification, condensation. It is spare, stark, sleek. Elegance is cultivated abstraction.
- Camille Paglia

Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not one bit simpler.
- Albert Einstein

The only difference between me and a madman is that I’m not mad.
- Salvador Dali

It’s easy to have talent at 20 but what is difficult is to have talent at 50.
- Edgar Degas

I take a cliche and try to organize its forms to make it monumental. The difference is often not great, but it is crucial.
- Roy Lichtenstein

Writing is not describing, painting is not depicting.
Verisimilitude is merely an illusion.
- Georges Braque

Nature, my dear sir, is only a hypothesis.
- Raoul Dufy

Beware of artists- They mix with all classes of society and are therfore most dangerous.
- Queen Victoria

In art it’s not the thinking that does the job, but making.
- Goethe

If one criticizes painting by it’s verisimilitude, one’s understanding is similar to that of a child.
- Su Tung P’o

A painter who has the feel of breasts and buttocks is saved.
- Auguste Renoir

Sir, when the backsides look good enough to slap, there’s nothing more to do.
- Peter Paul Rubens

Everyone wants to understand painting. Why don’t they try to understand the singing of birds? People love the night, a flower, everything that surrounds them without trying to understand them. But painting- that they MUST understand.
- Pablo Picasso

Every time I paint a portrait I lose a friend.
- John Singer Sargent

The most useful thing about art is it’s uselessness.
- Tom Robbins

Frivolity is a stern taskmaster.
- Zippy the Pinhead

The intellect has little to do on the road to discovery. ther comes a leap in consciousness, call it intuition if you will, and the solution comes to you and you don’t know how or why.
- Albert Einstein

Those trying to explain pictures are as a rule are completely mistaken.
- Pablo Picasso

If you could say it in words there’d be no reason to paint.
- Edward Hopper

I passionately hate the idea of being “with it”. I think an artist is always out of step with his time. he has to be.
- Orson Welles

I have walked the earth for 30 years, and, out of gratitude, want to leave some souvenir.
- Vincent Van Gogh

The artist must say it without saying it.
- Duke Ellington

A man paints with his brains and not with his hands.
- Michelangelo

I paint in order not to cry.
- Paul Klee

Colour is my day-long obsession, joy and torment.
- Claude Monet

As a well spent day brings happy sleep, so a life well spent brings happy death.
- Leonardo da Vinci

In an artist’s life, death is perhaps not the most difficult thing.
- Vincent Van Gogh

Those who do not want to imitate anything, produce nothing.
- Salvador Dali

Never put more than two waves in a picture; it’s fussy.
- Winslow Homer

If people knew how hard I worked to get my mastery, it wouldn’t seem so wonderful at all.
- Michelangelo

Art evokes the mystery without which the world would not exist.
- Rene Magritte

I hate flowers- I paint them because they are cheaper than models and they don’t move.
- Georgia O’Keeffe

Everything that you paint may be used as evidence against you.
- Pierre Alechinsky

Painters must speak through paint, not through words.
- Hans Hofmann

I don’t have big anxieties. I wish I did. I’d be much more interesting.
- Roy Lichtenstein

I begin with an idea and then it becomes something else.
- Pablo Picasso

The artist is nothing without the gift, but the gift is nothing without work.
- Emile Zola

Give me a museum and I’ll fill it.
- Pablo Picasso

You got to be careful if you don’t know where you’re going, because you might not get there.
- Yogi Berra

If a man ain’t nothin’ else, then he’s an artist. It’s the only thing he can claim to be that nobody can prove he ain’t.
- Will Rogers

The ability to simplify means to eliminate the unnecessary so that the necessary may speak.
- Hans Hofmann

Art is foremost a state of mind, and only secondarily a problem of form.
- Marc Chagall

Creativity takes courage.
- Henri Matisse

Art is not a thing; it is a way.
- Elbert Hubbard

Inspiration does exist, but it must find you working.
- Pablo Picasso

There is only one success – to be able to spend your life in your own way.
- Christopher Morley

True happiness comes from the joy of deeds well done, the zest of creating things new.
- Antoine de Saint-Exupery

The critic has to educate the public; the artist has to educate the critic.
- Oscar Wilde

Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.
- Leonardo da Vinci

I don’t do drugs: I am drugs.
- Salvador Dali

The work of art is a scream of freedom.
- Christopher Lasch

I must create a system, or be enslaved by another man’s.
- William Blake

I am interested in art as a means of living a life; not as a means of making a living.
- Robert Henri

An intellectual says a simple thing in a hard way. An artist says a hard thing in a simple way.
- Charles Bukowski

Art is not what you see, but what you make others see.
- Edgar Degas

There’s no retirement for an artist, it’s your way of living so there’s no end to it.
- Henry Moore

Whatever an artist’s personal feelings are, as soon as an artist fills a certain area on the canvas or circumscribes it, he becomes historical. He acts from or upon other artists.
-Willem de Kooning

An artist is not paid for his labor but for his vision.
- James Whistler

Art produces ugly things which frequently become more beautiful with time. Fashion, on the other hand, produces beautiful things which always become ugly with time.
- Jean Cocteau

Inspiration is for amateurs. professionals work everyday. Personally the best inspiration is a deadline.
- Chuck Close

A painting in a museum hears more ridiculous opinions than anything else in the world.
- Edmond de Goncourt

With the most primitive means the artist creates something which the most ingenious and efficient technology will never be able to create.
- Kasimir Malevich

When I work, I work very fast, but preparing to work can take any length of time.
- Cy Twombly

A painter paints the appearance of things, not their objective correctness, in fact he creates new appearances of things.
- Ernst Ludwig Kirchner

All true artists, whether they know it or not, create from a place of no-mind, from inner stillness.
- Eckhart Tolle

I’ve never believed in God, but I believe in Picasso.
- Diego Rivera

At moments of great enthusiasm it seems to me that no one in the world has ever made something this beautiful and important.
- M.C. Escher

I am essentially a painter of the kind of still life composition that communicates a sense of tranquillity and privacy, moods which I have always valued above all else.
- Giorgio Morandi

A sincere artist is not one who makes a faithful attempt to put on to canvas what is in front of him, but one who tries to create something which is, in itself, a living thing.
- William Dobell

Making the simple complicated is commonplace; making the complicated simple, awesomely simple, that’s creativity.
- Charles Mingus

It is only by drawing often, drawing everything, drawing incessantly, that one fine day you discover to your surprise that you have rendered something in its true character.
- Camille Pissarro

Man needs colour to live; it’s just as necessary an element as fire and water.
- Fernand Leger

Art is never finished, only abandoned.
- Leonardo da Vinci

Draw your pleasure, paint your pleasure, and express your pleasure strongly.
- Pierre Bonnard

I hope to live all my life for my art, without abandoning my principles one iota.
- Gustave Courbet

If a man devotes himself to art, much evil is avoided that happens otherwise if one is idle.
- Albrecht Durer

An artist chooses his subjects.. that is the way he praises.
- Friedrich Nietzsche

Art should be something that liberates your soul, provokes the imagination and encourages people to go further.
- Keith Haring

The act of painting is not a duplication of experience but the extension of experience on the plane of formal invention.
- Stuart Davis

Do all the work you can; that is the whole philosophy of the good way of life.
- Eugène Delacroix

The only real influence I’ve ever had was myself.
- Edward Hopper

The position of the artist if humble. He is essentially a channel.
- Piet Mondrian

I prefer to leave the paintings to speak for themselves.
- Barnett Newman

I don’t like to say I have given my life to art. I prefer to say art has given me my life.
- Frank Stella

The artist is an educator of artists of the future who are able to understand and in the process of understanding perform unexpected – the best – evolutions.
- Saul Steinberg

Art is not a pastime but a priesthood.
- Jean Cocteau

I prefer to see with my eyes closed.
- Josef Albers