Bernard Berenson Quotes

That's what art is. You don't make up stories. You live your life.

You paint the way you have to in order to give. That's life itself, and someone will look and say it is the product of knowing, but it has nothing to do with knowing, it has to do with giving.

A work of art which did not begin in emotion is not art.

All this angst, all this stuff we all feel, is just tied to making art. It's so ancient.

It's easier and sociabler to talk technique than it is to make art.

You can’t teach art, so ART SCHOOL is a contradiction in terms.

You know a trillion times more about art than me. But I’ve learned that it isn’t necessary to know all that much. You just make what you wanna see, right? It’s a game, right? It’s like being paid for dreaming.

You're confusing product with process. Most people, when they criticize, whether they like it or hate it, they're talking about product. That's not art, that's the result of art. Art, to whatever degree we can get a handle on (I'm not sure that we really can) is a process. It begins in the heart and the mind with the eyes and hands.

Art and life go together. I have to have a life filled with experiences to make art, and I have to have art around me to live well.

Art is science made flesh.

Art is a way of survival.

Art is a little bit larger than life - it's an exhalation of life and I think you probably need a little touch of madness.

Art is the funnel, as it were, through which spirit is poured into life.

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

Take a quart of nature, boil it down to a pint, and the residue is art.

Art is foremost a state of mind, and only secondarily a problem of form.

If I was an artist, and I was in the studio, then whatever I was doing in the studio must be art.

the arts are life accelerated and concentrated.

I write because to write a new sentence, let alone a new poem, is to cross the threshold into both a larger existence and a profound mystery. A thought was not there, then it is. An image, a story, an idea about what it is to be human, did not exist, then it does. With every new poem, an emotion new to the heart, to the world, speaks itself into being.

Becoming an artist does not merely mean learning something, acquiring professional techniques and methods. Indeed, as someone has said, in order to write well you have to forget the grammar.

Everything was a song. Every conversation, every personal hurt, every observance of people in stress, happiness and love... if you could feel it, I could feel it. And I could write a song about it.

Art doesn't transform. It just plain forms.

Art is something that opens up and enhances your emotions and that's what I like to think I'm doing.

Art is an investigation.

To give a body and a perfect form to one's thought, this - and only this - is to be an artist.