American Artist Quotes

Andy Warhol

Man Ray

Kanye West

Georgia O'Keeffe

James McNeill Whistler

Leonard Nimoy

Mark Rothko

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

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

I don't believe in making pencil sketches and then painting landscape in your studio. You must be right under the sky.

William Merritt Chase

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

Painting directly from nature is difficult as things do not remain the same; the camera helps to retain the picture in your mind.

Theodore Robinson

Photography records the gamut of feelings written on the human face, the beauty of the earth and skies that man has inherited, and the wealth and confusion man has created. [It is] a major force in explaining man to man.

Edward Steichen

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.

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

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.

Impressionism was the name given to a certain form of observation when Monet, not content with using his eyes to see what things were or what they looked like as everybody had done before him, turned his attention to noting what took place on his own retina (as an oculist would test his own vision).

John Singer Sargent

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

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

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

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 pictures I contemplate painting would constitute a halfway state and attempt to point out the direction of the future - without arriving there completely

Jackson Pollock

People don't want to feel stuck, they want to be able to change.

Happiness is a sort of perfume. You can't pour it on somebody else without getting a few drops on yourself.

James Van Der Zee

I feel that talent means little unless coupled with an insatiable desire to give an excellent personal demonstration of ability...talent must be in company with a capacity for unlimited effort which provides the power that eventually hurdles the difficulties that would frustrate lukewarm enthusiasm.

People like me, who care about printing, constitute the tiniest lunatic fringe in the nation.

It was clear, I was not Manet's type. Picasso—who had a way with women—only used me & Duchamp never even considered me.

Carrie Mae Weems

The essence of Gumby is that he makes children feel safe. He's their greatest pal.

You must live fully in the now to make your dreams come true.

Florence Scovel Shinn

If you're never scared or embarrassed or hurt, it means you never take any chances.

Rosalyn Drexler

The older I get, the one thing I can trust in myself more than anything else is the way I feel about something. When I photograph I try to be as aware of my feelings as I can be to somehow try and get them out of me and onto the film in terms of the way I am responding or seeing the world.

I sometimes think that there is nothing but time, that what you see and what you feel is what time looks like at that moment.