Yoko Ono Quotes

I think the mystery of art lies in this, that artists’ relationship is essentially with their work — not with power, not with profit, not with themselves, not even with their audience.

Art is a way of survival.

I have a firm faith in art, a firm confidence in its being a powerful stream which carries a man to a harbor, though he himself must do his bit too.

I've always been creating my whole life, you know. I've just had a need to create, whether it was sculpting or writing or directing. It's just ever since I was a kid, I don't know.

Art is a fruit that grows in man, like a fruit on a plant, or a child in its mother's womb.

While drawing, I discover what I really want to say.

Sing in the shower. Dance to the radio. Tell stories. Write a poem to a friend, even a lousy poem. Do it as well as you possibly can. You will get an enormous reward. You will have created something.

I like the feeling of being able to confront an experience and resolve it as art.

Art! What a concept! It saved my life! A place where you can do as you please!

Art opens the closets, airs out the cellars and attics. It brings healing.

I make art, sometimes I make true art, and sometimes it fills the empty places in my life. Some of them. Not all.

I am interested in solving an unknown factor of art and an unknown factor of life.

Writing is mysterious, and it's supposed to be...any path that gets you there is a good path in the end. But one true thing among all these paths is the need to tap a deep vein of connection between our own uncontrollable interior preoccupations and what we're most concerned about in the world around us. We write in response to that world; we write in response to what we read and learn; and in the end we write out of our deepest selves, the live, breathing, bleeding place where the picture forms, and where it all begins.

Art is a spiritual practice. We may not, and need not, do it perfectly.

Art is a kind of innate drive that seizes a human being and makes him its instrument.

Art is for the artist is only suffering through which he releases himself for further suffering.

...when the words pour out of you just right, you understand that these sentences are all part of a river flowing out of your own distant, hidden ranges, and all words become the dissolving snow that feeds your mountain streams forever. The language locks itself in the icy slopes of our own high passes, and it is up to us, the writers, to melt the glaciers within us. When these glaciers break off, we get to call them novels, the changelings of our burning spirits, our life's work.

Art is not escape, but a way of finding order in chaos, a way of confronting life.

Music, art, writing - it gives us a sense of who we are, a sense of our history, a sense of our future and it should provide some kind of comfort. It's not just entertainment for entertainment's sake, it's an investment.

All the best parts of art come from pain turned to celebration.

The more I see and know about life, the more ideas I have and the more I want to make art.

In a lot of the art world, you have to present yourself as you know what you're doing at a young age. Music gave me another outlet. The 'no wave' bands were such an inspiration; it felt so free - once you start doing it, it's hard to stop. But I can't get away from art. It comes back around. I wouldn't be true to myself if I didn't pursue it.

Artwork is not like a commercial business; there is no such thing as a schedule for art. You can't hurry art.

Modeling isn't boring.

Art is the objectification of feeling.