Edgar Degas Quotes

...assume that art begins in unhappiness. True, the goal of art is to convey a vision of coherence and peace, but the effort to develop that vision starts in the more common experience of confusion and pain.

This is what art is all about. It is weaving fabric from the feathers you have plucked from your own breast. But no one must ever see the process - only the finished bolt of goods. They must never suspect that that crimson thread running through the pattern is blood.

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

Art is accusation, expression, passion. Art is a fight to the finish between black charcoal and white paper.

Marvin Gaye said there's a song inside of me and I can't get it out. And I know it's in there, and I can feel that it's in there, and I can't get it out. There's so much that I want to say, and I haven't been able to figure out how to say it in my art. I can only say it in ham-fisted, clumsy, nonpoetic ways, and I'm trying to figure out how to talk about life and talk about love and talk about pain and trials and tribulation in an artistic form.

Art never comes from happiness.

When I am halfway there with a painting, it can occasionally be thrilling... But it happens very rarely; usually it's agony... I go to great pains to mask the agony. But the struggle is there. It's the invisible enemy.

We do not make art. We have unnamable motors and dangerous impulses that occupy our thoughts.

To make great art, you had to expose your soul, and some things should be left safely in the dark.

To write is to pour one’s innermost self passionately upon the tempting paper, at such frantic speed that sometimes one’s hand struggles and rebels, overdriven by the impatient god which guides it - and to find, next day, in place of the golden bough that bloomed miraculously in that dazzling hour, a withered bramble and a stunted flower.

Art is the act of doing work that matters while dancing with the voice in your head that screams for you to stop.

My paintings are only the ashes of my art

I think it's always difficult to reconcile the needs of art and business.

People don't have fun making music all the time.

I'd rather get back to making art than talk about it.

Designis a revelation to me. It's like taking something that is not alive and giving it form, shape, substance, and life.

Art is the stored honey of the human soul, gathered on wings of misery and travail.

Art is the objectification of feeling.

The creative act amazes me. Whether it's poetry, whether it's music, it's an amazing process, and it has something to do with bringing forth the old out into the world to create and to bring forth that which will rejuvenate.

Art is an investigation.

Where the spirit does not work with the hand, there is no art.

Art revolves around creating something that isn't there.

War scenes are less difficult than love scenes.

Art is born of humiliation.

I think all art is about control - the encounter between control and the uncontrollable.