The refusal to rest content, the willingness to risk excess on behalf of one's obsessions, is what distinguishes artists from entertainers, and what makes some artists adventurers on behalf of us all. (Quote by - John Updike)

The genuine artist is as much a dissatisfied person as the revolutionary, yet how diametrically opposed are the products each distills from his dissatisfaction. (Quote by - Eric Hoffer)

Rice Krispies happens to be one of my favorite junk foods, just as I regard Michener as superior among junk writers. (Quote by - Christopher Lehmann-haupt)

Giving jazz the Congressional seal of approval is a little like making Huck Finn an honorary Boy Scout. (Quote by - Melvin Maddocks)

Anyone who contributes to the defense fund of pornographers is a mental moonbeam. (Quote by - Mike Royko)

Good artists exist simply in what they make, and consequently are perfectly uninteresting in what they are. (Quote by - Oscar Wilde)

Being born is like being kidnapped. And then sold into slavery. (Quote by - Andy Warhol)

Classic means standard as opposed to Romantic: form before meaning as opposed to meaning before form. It grows from inside out, while Romantic grows from outside in. (Quote by - Ned Rorem)

Without art, the crudeness of reality would make the world unbearable. (Quote by - George Bernard Shaw)

Art is a selective re-creation of reality according to an artist's metaphysical value-judgments. An artist recreates those aspects of reality which represent his fundamental view of man's nature. (Quote by - Marcel Proust)

Interpretation is the revenge of the intellect upon art. (Quote by - Susan Sontag)

One of the most difficult things to do is to paint darkness which nonetheless has light in it. (Quote by - Vincent van Gogh)

Art for art's sake is a philosophy of the well-fed. (Quote by - Frank Lloyd Wright)

If artists and poets are unhappy, it is after all because happiness does not interest them. (Quote by - George Santayana)

I've been 40 years discovering that the Queen of all colours is black. (Quote by - Auguste Renoir)

As a painter I shall never signify anything of importance. I feel it absolutely. (Quote by - Vincent van Gogh)

A great artist is always before his time or behind it. (Quote by - George Moore)

Strip away the phony tinsel of Hollywood and you'll find the real tinsel underneath. (Quote by - Oscar Levant)

Art distills sensation and embodies it with enhanced meaning in memorable form or else it is not art. (Quote by - Jacques Barzun)

Dying is the most embarrassing thing that can ever happen to you, because someone's got to take care of all your details. (Quote by - Andy Warhol)

The fact that writers will go through so much to remain writers says something, perhaps everything. It would be far easier (and nearly always more profitable) to become a real estate agent. (Quote by - Maria Lenhart)

Still, there is a calm, pure harmony, and music inside of me. (Quote by - Vincent van Gogh)

I think there is no work of art which represents the spirit of a nation more surely than "Die Meister Singer" of Richard Wagner. Here is no plaything with local colour, but the raising to its highest power all that is best in the national consciousness of his country. (Quote by - Ralph Vaughan Williams)

An amateur is an artist who supports himself with outside jobs which enable him to paint. A professional is someone whose wife works to enable him to paint. (Quote by - Ben Shahn)

Rembrandt painted about 700 pictures of these, 3,000 are in existence. (Quote by - Wilhelm Bode)