Saul Williams Quotes

Art has a smaller audience than, say, movies or other forms of mass consumption. But that doesn't mean the work doesn't have an impact in a way that transcends just a few cultural arbiters.

I have a suggestion for all of those award seekers and blue ribbon hunters. Spend your efforts on making art that connects with people. Awards impress the grandkids but they don't move the gauge on selling your product. Art needs to touch the emotions of the buyer.

And if out of a million visitors there is even one to whom art means something, that is enough to justify museums.

Patti, did art get us?' I looked away, not really wanting to think about it. 'I don't know, Robert. I don't know.' Perhaps it did, but no one could regret that. Only a fool would regret being had by art; or a saint.

To be honest, I think, for me, the power is always with art. The art world clearly couldn't happen without art.

There is a connection between me and the collectors, and as admirers of the work they tell me about the differences the pieces are able to make in their lives on a daily basis.

As an artist, you have an opportunity to get in and move things around in people.

The claims I'm making for art are simply the claims that we naturally make around music or around poetry. We're much more relaxed around those art forms. We're willing to ask, 'How could this find a place in my heart?'

The more people who look at great art, the better for our culture.

It doesn't matter that your painting is small. Kopecks are also small, but when a lot are put together they make a ruble. Each painting displayed in a gallery and each good book that makes it into a library, no matter how small they may be, serve a great cause: accretion of the national wealth.

The good we get from art is not what we learn from it; it is what we become through it.

Great art has dreadful manners. The greatest paintings grab you in a headlock, rough up your composure, and then proceed in short order to re-arrange your reality.

Nobody is fully alive who cannot apply to art as much discrimination and appreciation as he applies to the work by which he earns his living.

The final test of a work of art is not whether it has beauty, but whether it has power.

Art is an irreplaceable way of understanding and expressing the world.

Music is art, and art is important and rare. Important, rare things are valuable. Valuable things should be paid for.

The ordinary bloke will not voluntarily pay for "art" that leaves him unmoved--if he does pay for it, the money has to be conned out of him, by taxes and such.

I believe that art has incredible power.

Art moves. Hence its civilizing power.

A work of art... is not a living thing... that walks or runs. But the making of a life. That which gives you a reaction. To some it is the wonder of man's fingers. To some it is the wonder of the mind. To some it is the wonder of technique. And to some it is how real it is. To some, how transcendent it is. Like the 5th Symphony, it presents itself with a feeling that you know it, if you have heard it once.

I guess that storytelling would be for me to keep making art that touches people in a way that nothing else can.

It is in its pure form that an art hits hard.

The work of art is to dominate the spectator: the spectator is not to dominate the work of art.

Art isn't only a painting; it's anything that changes someone for the better, any nonanonymous interaction that leads to a human (not simply a commercial) conclusion.

I know when I watch certain actors or if I watch Thom Yorke sing on stage, I'm affected by it emotionally. I guess that's what we are all striving for in art but that's such a beautiful thing that happens between two people that may never even meet. So when you do get to meet someone who was affected in that way, it's awesome.