"The satisfaction of the creative impulse is a basic, biological need, essential to the health of the individual….Art is one of the few important means known to man for the articulation of this impulse."
- Mark Rothko
"It is the artist’s mission to penetrate as far as may be toward that secret ground where primal law feeds growth. […] my hand is entirely the instrument of a more distant sphere. Nor is it my head that functions in my work."
- Paul Klee
"The place I am interested in is where the mind goes when it’s trying to make up for what isn’t there."
- Cecily Brown
"I need to make things. The physical interaction with the medium has a curative effect. I need the physical acting out. I need to have these objects exist in relation to my body."
- Louise Bourgeois
“You cannot deny yourself. You ask, am I painting myself? I’d be a swindler if I did otherwise. I’d be denying my existence as an artist. I’ve also been asked, what do you want to convey? And I say, nothing but my own nature. How can one paint anything else?”
- Hans Hoffmann
"From a very young age I started to sense that an individual has to set an example in society. Your own acts and behaviour tell the world who you are and at the same time what kind of society you think it should be."
- Ai Weiwei
"There are not millions of deaths. It happens millions of times that someone dies."
- Etel Adnan
"I love to work for truth and beauty."
- Matt Mullican
"Art shows us who we are and where we stand. Ultimately all art, no matter how abstract, revolves around and relates to the human figure and human nature."
- Tony Cragg
"Colour has taken possession of me; no longer do I have to chase after it, I know that it has hold of me forever... Colour and I are one. I am a painter."
- Paul Klee
"My language is the visual one, of painting. And with it, I have tried to say, throughout my life, what I thought and felt, what I thought I needed to say."
- Joan Miró
"We must agree that the beauty of a work of art will always remain a mystery [...] we can never be absolutely sure 'how it's made.' We must at all costs preserve this magic..."
- Claude Debussy
"I have made mysterious Nature my religion ... When I gaze at a sunset sky and spend hours contemplating its marvellous ever-changing beauty, an extraordinary emotion overwhelms me. Nature in all its vastness is truthfully reflected in my sincere though feeble soul. Around me are the trees stretching up their branches to the skies, the perfumed flowers gladdening the meadow, the gentle grass-carpeted earth, ... and my hands unconsciously assume an attitude of adoration."
- Claude Debussy
“Life is made of ever so many partings welded together ... Divisions among such must come, and must be met as they come.”
- Charles Dickens
"My favourite word? It's "act"."
- Ai Weiwei
“Form itself, even if completely abstract ... has its own inner sound.”
- Wassily Kandinsky
“Energy and motion made visible – memories arrested in space.”
- Jackson Pollock
"I will always work. I want to carry on working until the end. The only thing in my life that makes me happy is painting and working. If I don't do it, I become ill, I forget who I am, I lose my inner identity. And, as I get older, I get angry with myself for abusing a lot of the time that I had when I was younger and should have been focused and more serious."
- Tracey Emin
“I think every paint is biographical. You can read the artist if you take the trouble to.”
“I insist on letting it go, the way it’s going to go rather than forcing it. [...] I think that’s the essence: don’t tamper with that, don’t will it, don’t force it, let it come through in it’s own terms."
“If anyone cares to understand my life they should look at my work because it’s essentially a diary of what is happening.”
- Lee Krasner
"I can't understand why people are frightened of new ideas. I'm frightened of the old ones."
- John Cage
"Painting is an attempt to come to terms with life. There are as many solutions as there are human beings."
- George Tooker
“Nature does not ask your permission, she has nothing to do with your wishes, and whether you like her laws or dislike them, you are bound to accept her as she is, and consequently all her conclusions.”
- Fyodor Dostoyevsky
"There must be a kind of painting totally free of the dependence on the figure - or object - which, like music, illustrates nothing, tells no story, and launches no myth. Such a painting would simply evoke the incommunicable kingdoms of the spirit, where dream becomes thought, where line becomes existence."
- Michel Seuphor
"Each painting has its own way of evolving. . . . When the painting is finished, the subject reveals itself."
- William Baziotes
"How to reproduce the taste in words? The taste is one and the words are many. As for the music, where does it go? The only concrete thing in music is the instrument. Far beyond thought I have a musical background. But even further beyond there's the beating heart. Therefore, the most profound thought is a beating heart."
- Clarice Lispector
"The force that through the green fuse drives the flower."
- Dylan Thomas