American Artist Quotes

Forgive me not! Hate me and I shall know Some of love's fire still burns in your breast! Forgiveness finds its home in hearts at rest, On dead volcanoes only lies the snow.

Lilla Cabot Perry

Attempt what is not certain. Certainty may or may not come later. It may then be a valuable delusion.

Richard Diebenkorn

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

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.

Clio may be the most austere and chaste of the Muses, but she has been known to come down informally from Mount Helicon in a mood so raffish that there are those who claim to have seen her with her slip showing.

Thornton Willis

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.

Methods of locomotion have improved greatly in recent years, but places to go remain about the same.

I wanted to change history and preserve humanity. But in the process I changed myself and preserved my own.

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 blackbirds are in this book, they're both pro the kids and against the kids. Just like fate. Sometimes it goes your way. Sometimes... and also a blackbird is from my passion for Schubert songs and his blackbirds and his birds of doom or birds of good. … some people were baffled that in the last big picture of that book, there's a crucifix on the wall of the children's house. Everybody assumes the hero and heroine are Jewish and the mother is Jewish. They're not. They're not. — That was my point. Those kids were in the wrong place at the wrong time. And all children were in the Holocaust. Everybody was in the Holocaust. So, I made sure my hero and heroine were not Jewish children. That was too easy. That was too easy.

Unfortunately, the only recognized relics of yesterday's farmers are obsolete curiosities when the greatest relic, their philosophy of living, is seldom considered.

Somehow it doesn't seem long since I trudged in a picket-line; in the street here, and in the rain. A fairly muted demonstration against the Museum, which wasn't always in a mood for showing abstract paintings by Americans. It was fun I suppose-needless to say, the picketing produced no results. Yet a majority of the picketers are visible through their works at the moment, upstairs on the third floor, where it's warm and out of the rain. However, this is no time to celebrate in fact it's better if artists never celebrate. New abstract picket-lines are doubtless assembling, to protest the former picketers.

George L.K. Morris

You can write a letter with a typewriter, a pencil, or a crayon. What you have to say is the important thing.

Life is not simple, and therefore history, which is past life, is not simple.

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

Cathy Guisewite

The reason for the survival of the award system is purely commercial.

The worship leader God is after is the one whose heart is captured by Him.

Calendar Reform is the final act of history, and the first step toward Earth Regeneration in the cradle of galactic culture.

José Argüelles

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

The business of the state trying to legislate modesty is relatively both an infantile and ridiculous procedure. Of course, it is true that the more things are secreted the more intriguing they become, because it is always the forbidden that has the strongest appeal. Nudity is a state of fact - lewdity a state of mind.

Paul Outerbridge

We are Afropolitans: not citizens, but Africans of the world.

I didn't want to make 'high' art, I had no interest in using paint, I wanted to find something that anyone could relate to without knowing about contemporary art. I wasn't thinking in terms of precious prints or archival quality; I didn't want the work to seem like a commodity.

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

Berenice Abbott

Life without labor is crime, and labor without art is brutality.

John Wesley Hardrick

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