American Artist Quotes

What is it about our specific belief in God and His wishes that makes us so angry at the specific beliefs of another? What is it about the teachings of our respective deities that makes us more right than the next person? Or more wrong?

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

The time approaches when men must take their choice between quiescent, immobile faith and ever-advancing Science - faith, with its medieval consolations, Science, which is incessantly scattering its material blessings in the pathway of life, elevating the lot of man in this world, and unifying the human race.

John William Draper

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

Cathy Guisewite

Sculpture is for the touch, painting is for the eye. I wanted to make a sculpture for the eye and a painting for the touch.

Richard Artschwager

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

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.

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

Does any sane man imagine that the church could cease to be missionary and remain the church?

The less [government] the better. As far as your personal goals are and what you actually want to do with your life, it should never have to do with the government. You should never depend on the government for your retirement, your financial security, for anything. If you do, you're screwed... That's all the government should be: Army, Air Force, Navy, Marines... I think a lot of people are afraid of freedom. They want their lives to be controlled, to be put into a box... Why should someone put a limit on how much fun I can have, how much I can accomplish?

I wanted to get it all down, maybe out of my system. I wanted to be able to say, Everything's possible-if you believe and can get excited.

If I am interested, amazed, stimulated to work, that is sufficient reason to thank the gods, and go ahead!

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

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.

In rushing so fast as many of us do through the mountains, the mountains do not have time to come to us.

Thomas Starr King

I wish I could have known earlier that you have all the time you'll need right up to the day you die.

William T. Wiley

A lot of good and regular art gets made because of who you talk to. No one is immune to human contact and art is not made in a vacuum.

Labor has been one of the most important aspects of our development.... It isn't grand, but it is important and it is a thing that we should be proud of, because we have that part of our life that has gone into the building of America. Not only of ourselves, but in the building of American life.

Long ago it was said that 'one half of the world does not know how the other half lives.' That was true then. It did not know because it did not care. The half that was on top cared little for the struggles, and less for the fate, of those who were underneath, so long as it was able to hold them there and keep its own seat.

The last mad throb of red just as it turns green; the ultimate shriek of orange calling all the blues of heaven for relief and support... each color almost regains the fun it must have felt within itself on forming the first rainbow.

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

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

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

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)

A professor I had in college used to tell me that if someone won't listen to what you have to say because you're not wearing a tie, then put on a tie, 'cause what you have to say is more important than not wearing a tie. He was right.