20th-century Artist Quotes

By contemplation I swear,
By the beginning of speech,
By the flight of a dove from the mind.
A word is in the cage

When you long with all your heart for someone to love you, a madness grows there that shakes all sense from the trees and the water and the earth. And nothing lives for you, except the long deep bitter want. And this is what everyone feels from birth to death.

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.

Let's look at photographs as food. Does an exhibition leave you hungry or fill you with the visual equivalent of a snack or feast?

A river seems a magic thing. A magic, moving, living part of the very earth itself.

And only the photographer himself knows the effect he wants. He should know by instinct, grounded in experience, what subjects are enhanced by hard or soft, light or dark treatment.

Women are beautiful in the light of the day, but are even more so in the shadows of the night.

Andrzej Majewski

I must admit that I am not a member of the ugly school. I have a great regard for certain notions of beauty even though to some it is an old fashioned idea. Some photographers think that by taking pictures of human misery, they are addressing a serious problem. I do not think that misery is more profound than happiness.

I'm the type of person that likes to dream big, and I've often found that every great journey begins with a dream

I think about photographs as being full, or empty. You picture something in a frame and it's got lots of accounting going on in it-stones and buildings and trees and air - but that's not what fills up a frame. You fill up the frame with feelings, energy, discovery, and risk, and leave room enough for someone else to get in there.

Joel Meyerowitz

You just do what you love, and then a style happens later on.

David LaChapelle

My interest in working sites is linked to an investigation of what is behind the extravagant forms and perfect lines of Hadid's Architecture; it is an interest in the relation between the elegance of her gesture and her radical way of making a building. Something very primordial and out of time is present in those situations. I think of this as a process of forming.

I believe in goodness
Mercy and charity
I believe in a universal spirit
I believe in casting bread
Upon the waters

A gourmet can tell from the flavour whether a woodcock's leg is the one on which the bird is accustomed to roost.

I am an artist who makes walks. A walk defines the form of the land in space and time beyond the scale of sculpture or the fixed image. Some of my walks are formal (straight, circular, rhythmic) almost ritualised. I have climbed around mountains instead of to the top, I have made walks about slowness, walks about stones and water. I have made walks within a place as opposed to a linear journey; walking without travelling.

Why can't a Democrat get fired up about protecting the environment and enacting gun control legislation just as right wing republicans get fired up about making sure that children have access to assault weapons and banning 'The catcher in the rye' and 'Harry Potter'?

The world is full of fictional characters looking for their stories

In Egypt: Under no conditions, under threat of death could anyone kill a cat. People were exceuted for even killing a cat accidentally. And when a cat died, the whole family, and probably their closest friends, went into mourning, the measure of their personal loss signalled by their shaving off their eyebrows.

I was brought in, not in the photographic department at all, I was brought in on a thing called Special Skills. I was to do posters, pamphlets, murals, propaganda in general, you know.

By Interstate 70: a dog skeleton, a vacuum cleaner, TV dinners, a doll, a pie, rolls of carpet.Later, next to the South Platte River: algae, broken concrete, jet contrails, the smell of crude oil. What I hope to document, though not at the expense of surface detail, is the form that underlies this apparent chaos.

Robert Adams (photographer)

Chasing a burning girl down a city street is a lot harder than it sounds. Civilians tend to stop and stare and this turns them into human bowling pins. Slow whiny bowling pins.

From the vast expanses of its surface waters to its beaches and marshes and tidelands and mangrove swamps, from its many thousands of miles of rocky shores to its deepest and darkest abyss, the sea produces life in fantastic abundance.

Jacques-Yves Cousteau

I read the first edition of 'Mein Kampf' when it came out in 1923 and even then I knew Hitler meant what he said. I knew the history of anti-Semitism going back for centuries, and I knew all about pogroms in Russia and Eastern Europe. When I grew up and whent to school in Moscow, I experienced anti-Semitism and the restrictions on where Jews could live and work. Hitler systemized anti-Semitism. Pogroms are my business... Oh yes, I could be a professor of anti-Semitism.

Simplicity: The New Competitive Advantage in a World of More, Better, Faster.

Always recognize the dreamlike qualities of life and reduce attachment and aversion. Practice good-heartedness toward all beings. Be loving and compassionate, no matter what others do to you. What they will do will not matter so much when you see it as a dream. The trick is to have positive intention during the dream. This is the essential point. This is true spirituality.

Chagdud Tulku Rinpoche