American Artist Quotes

Andy Warhol

Man Ray

Kanye West

Georgia O'Keeffe

James McNeill Whistler

Leonard Nimoy

Mark Rothko

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

Most of us are animal lovers. We insist that we love all animals equally - the hamster, the weasel, and the zebra - but if pressed, we will admit to being either a cat person or a dog person.

Nicole Hollander

Everything that I have told you is, of course, a fairy tale. Life is magical, after all. Nothing is safe and everything changes.

Trina Schart Hyman

His mother saw that he was not lonesome, and because she was an understanding mother, even though she was a cow, she let him just sit there and be happy.

Beautiful view. Is there one for the enlisted men?

We have this history of impossible solutions to insoluble problems.

I could lose myself forever in that dark hair and those sweet love handles.

Didn't it make sense that after something horrible happens, something better should follow?

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.

She's my friend, the boy said simply. That's who she is and that's enough for me. As Minli looked at the buffalo boy, aglow with happiness against his poor surroundings, she saw it was enough for him. More than enough, as the smile that kept curling up on his face told her.

I've found it's better to talk to the machine and hang up if I get the person.

Cathy Guisewite

It was great fun, to learn anew. You think you know enough, but you don't. You must open up; let it in. be receptive, admit what you don't know, which few are willing to do. Start from square one. Again!