Francoise Sagan Quotes

Art is the expression of imagination, not the reproduction of reality.

Artists are people who are not at all interested in the facts - only in the truth.

In art, as long as you have ideas and think, you are bound to deform nature. Art is deformation.

Art is a severe business; most serious when employed in grand and sacred objects. The artist stands higher than art, higher than the object. He uses art for his purposes, and deals with the object after his own fashion.

This is what it is the business of the artist to do. Art is theft, art is armed robbery, art is not pleasing your mother.

Without art we would be nothing but foreground and live entirely in the spell of that perspective which makes what is closest at hand and most vulgar appear as if it were vast, and reality itself.

If art reflects life, it does so with special mirrors.

I will preach with my brush.

Art is not what you see, but what you make others see.

Sometimes my art is just an illusion - or is it?

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 don't care if people think I am an overactor, as long as they enjoy what I do. People who think that would call Van Gogh an overpainter.

An artist is a dreamer consenting to dream of the actual world.

You can't just take an image and randomly distort it and call it art - although many people in La Jolla where I come from do precisely that.

The work of art is always unfaithful to its creator... Art lays at a higher level; it says something more, and almost always, it says something different from what the artist wanted to say.

Copy nature and you infringe on the work of our Lord. Interpret nature and you are an artist.

To say to the painter that Nature is to be taken as she is, is to say to the player that he may sit on the piano.

When you draw or paint a tree, you do not imitate the tree; you do not copy it exactly as it is, which would be mere photography. To be free to paint a tree or a flower or a sunset, you have to feel what it conveys to you: the significance, the meaning of it.

Art has always been and is in its very essence the boldest departure from nature. It is the bridge into the spirit world.

Art and power will go on as they have done,--will make day out of night, time out of space, and space out of time.

You know what ART stands for? Above Real Truth.

No photographer should be blamed when, instead of capturing reality, he tries to show things he has seen only in his imagination. Photography is the youngest art form. All attempts to enlarge its frontiers are important and should be encouraged.

The work of art is the exaggeration of an idea.

The artist is not the transcriber of the world, he is its rival.

Art is the only serious thing in the world. And the artist is the only person who is never serious.