British Artist Quotes

Francis Bacon (artist)

Henry Fox Talbot

Edward Burne-Jones

Edward Lear

Lucian Freud

John Tenniel

Cecil Beaton

When I have had such men before my camera my whole soul has endeavored to do its duty to them in recording faithfully the greatness of the inner as well as the features of the outer man. The photograph thus taken has almost the embodiment of a prayer.

Julia Margaret Cameron

I'm hoping to make a new thing for the world that remains in the mind like a new species of living thing.

Threads that drift alone will sometimes simply twine themselves together, without need for spindle or distaff: brought into each other's ambit, they bind themselves tight with the force of their own torsion. And this same torsion can, in the course of things, bundle the resulting cord back upon itself, ravelling it up into a skein, returning to the point of its beginning.

A household where a total unawareness of the world of ideas not only existed but was regarded as a matter for congratulation.

Osbert Lancaster

Pray for the repose of his soul. He was so tired.

Frederick Rolfe

How then can the curious drawer watch, and as it were catch these lovely graces, witty smilings, and those stolen glances which suddenly like lightning pass, and another countenance taketh place, except to behold and very well note and conceit to like.

Nicholas Hilliard

Everyone has a certain difficulty in growing up, even my children, although I've been a good mother. I'm still not grown up in some ways compared with other people I know.

Angelica Garnett

Chromophobia is perhaps only chromophilia without the colour.

David Batchelor (artist and writer)

In lang, lang days o' simmer,
When the clear and cloudless sky
Refuses ae weep drap o' rain
To Nature parched and dry,
The genial night, wi' balmy breath,
Gars verdue, spring anew,
An' ilka blade o' grass
Keps its ain drap o' dew.

James Ballantine

With languages, you can move from one social situation to another. With languages, you are at home anywhere.

Describing her visit to a slaughter facility in Pennsylvania:

The floor was very slippery and the walls and everything else were covered with blood. Dried blood had formed a crust on the chains. I surely didn't want to fall down in all that blood and guts. The workers wore non-slip boots, yellow aprons, and helmets. It was a scene of controlled, mechanized chaos.

I like who I am, and am puzzled to find that not everybody shares this opinion.

Ashleigh Brilliant

Everywhere I look and most of the time I look, I see photographs.

George: One man naked is a male study; more than one, well... that's quite serious - two men naked are more naked than one.

Gilbert & George

Somewhere on a hill facing the sea, there is a very beautiful ancient stone, and it's not going anywhere. It will be there, waiting for me.

About the fearful sphere which we inhabit, whose centre may be calculated and whose circumference is physically established, there spin metaphors whose centre is everywhere and whose circumference shows itself only through holes in the dark.

As in the fourteen lines of a sonnet, a few strokes of the pencil can hold immensity.

This century has needed witnesses more than it has needed artists. The camera asserts what it has seen. The artists are just looking.

Coleridge received the Person from Porlock
And ever after called him a curse,
Then why did he hurry to let him in?
He could have hid in the house.

Jerusalem is all about a very special relationship between the ground and the sky. This work attempts to bring the two together.
- India-born artist sculpts landmark symbol for museum.

A death was more than an ending; it was like pulling a thread from a richly patterned cloth.

It's just a penis, it's just a bit of flesh, just this one organ, people think makes you superior to another sex.

No one mirrors his age clearer than the artist, for here is the living moment made concrete, the particular made general.

Photography, because it stops the flow of life, is always flirting with death.

We girls aren't supposed to fall for the good boys.We are supposed to like a bit of grit in our oyster.That's how you get a pearl, after all.

James Lovegrove