20th-century Artist Quotes

Salvador Dali

Andy Warhol

Frida Kahlo

Joan Miró

Günter Grass

Henry Moore

Max Ernst

I like church. It's empty when I go. I walk around. There are so many beautiful Catholic churches in New York.

To be a surrealist... means barring from your mind all remembrance of what you have seen, and being always on the lookout for what has never been.

A portrait is not a likeness. The moment an emotion or fact is transformed into a photograph, it is an opinion. There is no such thing as inaccuracy in a photograph. All photographs are accurate. None of them is the truth.

On his 1985 book, In The American West

Photography deals exquisitely with appearances, but nothing is what it appears to be.

New skin, a new land! And a land of liberty, if that is possible! I chose the geology of a land that was new to me.

Love must be learned, and learned again and again; there is no end to it. Hate needs no instruction, but waits only to be provoked.

Katherine Porter

There are hurts so deep that one cannot reach them or heal them with words.

A hundredth of a second here, a hundredth of a second there – even if you put them end to end, they still only add up to one, two, perhaps three seconds, snatched from eternity.

Robert Doisneau

I'm hoping to make a new thing for the world that remains in the mind like a new species of living thing.

It is what it is, and it ain't nothin' else... Everything is clearly, openly, plainly delivered.

When I say I want to photograph someone, what it really means is that I'd like to know them. Anyone I know I photograph.

Annie Leibovitz

The painting develops before my eyes, unfolding its surprises as it progresses. It is this which gives me the sense of complete liberty, and for this reason I am incapable of forming a plan or making a sketch beforehand.

Photography, as we all know, is not real at all. It is an illusion of reality with which we create our own private world.

The figure is still the only thing I have faith in in terms of how much emotion it's charged with and how much subject matter is there.

Become one with eternity.
Become part of your environment.
Take off your clothes.
Forget yourself. Make love.
Self-destruction is the only
way to peace.

One of the ongoing themes in my work, I hope, and one of the things I believe in, is a sense of human nature, a sense of shared humanity above the cultural layers we place on ourselves [which don't] mean that much compared to the human experience.

I strive to express the spiritual nature of the Universe. Painting for me is a dynamic balance and wholeness of life; it is mysterious and transcending, yet solid and real.

Richard Pousette-Dart

The photographer is the contemporary being par excellence; through his eyes the now becomes the past.

Berenice Abbott

I know that I am one with beauty and that my comrades are one. Let our souls be mountains, Let our spirits be stars, Let our hearts be worlds.

Good ideas have no value because the world already has too many of them. The market rewards execution, not ideas.

If I had a hammer, I'd build a city on stilts so my feet would stay dry when God's wine glass tilts. If I had a shovel, I'd dig a hole in the dirt and I'll be hiding when his drunken stupor lands upon earth

The death of our close friends and relatives proves that how close the death is to us!

In 1968 Ian Wilson made his final sculpture. Since then, he has explored the idea of oral communication as an art form... Wilson's work is very hard to track down, even in terms of documentation. He has been compared to the Socratic philosophers but if there is a similarity between his practice and theirs, it probably lies mainly in the fact that everything we have from that period of philosophy takes the form of secondary fragments embedded in other texts. Wilson's work functions almost like archaeological or geological evidence: it consists of objects that we examine in order to deduce, from scanty clues, what must have happened.

Edward Allington

My conscious tradition is through Constantin Brâncuși, and Brâncuși just strikes me as an infinitely wiser and infinitely more talented, an infinitely stronger figure than Marcel Duchamp. I think I could have done my work if Duchamp had not lived. I could not have done my work if Brâncuși had not lived.

If all creation rests upon a passion, it is for me also an act of love and an attempt to discover in myself an inner world.

Constantine Andreou