Kiki Smith Quotes

Art in relation to life is nothing more than a glove turned inside out. It seems to have the same shapes and contours, but it can never be used for the same purpose. Art teaches nothing about life, just as life teaches us nothing about art.

Painting relates to both art and life. Neither can be made - I try to act in the gap.

All art is a memory of age-old things, dark things, whose fragments live on in the artist.

We possess art lest we perish of the truth.

We have our Arts so we won't die of Truth.

I think the point of art is to be controversial in a lot of ways. It's to cause conversations, and it's to get people excited about and talking about the things that the films are about.

I love the art form of songwriting. I get to carry a lot of vibes to a lot of people. My songs are all about the human condition, and people will be able to find themselves in my songs.

I'm not a politician or a scholar or political historian. I'm just a photographer who's trying to capture a spirit. It's not an intellectual process; it's an intuitive process.

I strongly believe cinema is popular culture. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. That's life.

How do I define a work of art? It is not an asset in the stock-exchange sense, but a man's timid attempt to repeat the miracle that the simplest peasant girl is capable of at any time, that of magically producing life out of nothing.

I think art is about human existence. Almost by default I'm expressing my experiences as a human.

Art when really understood is the province of every human being. It is simply a question of doing things, anything, well. It is not an outside, extra thing.

Art is mind and heart and touch as much and more than it is mere instrument, technique - without which however it cannot exist at all.

Art is the result of a creative impulse derived out of a consciousness of life.

Art is science made flesh.

Art is the highest form of hope.

That's the real power of art, I think. Not to chide but to provoke challenge. Otherwise why bother?

The arts open your heart and mind to possibilities that are limitless. They are pathways that touch upon our brains and emotions and bring sustenance to imagination. Human beings' greatest form of communication, they walk in tandem with science and play, and best describe what it is to be human.

Many people seem to think that art is a luxury to be imported and tacked on to life. Art springs out of the very stuff that life is made of. Most of our young authors start to write a story and make a few observations from nature to add local color. The results are invariably false and hollow. Art must spring out of the fullness and richness of life.

In many ways my paintings are about energy — both in how they are created and the image itself.

Art knows, life applies knowledge; art feels, life acts.

An actor must interpret life, and in order to do so must be willing to accept all the experiences life has to offer. In fact, he must seek out more of life than life puts at his feet. In the short span of his lifetime, an actor must learn all there is to know, experience all there is to experience, or approach that state as closely as possible. He must be superhuman in his efforts to store away in the core of his subconscious everything that he might be called upon to use in the expression of his art.

Art is wine and experience is the brandy we distill from it.

Art informs life in so many ways, and vice versa.