Eric Fischl Quotes

What's great about art is that if you can reach people, if they hear or see what you do and it moves them, there's a commonality.

Art, well good art at least, takes you to a place you go during the experience of it, and then after you experience it you are different.

Music is about communication... it isn't just something that maybe physically sounds good or orally sounds interesting; it's something far, far deeper than that.

It's good for art to make us think, to give us a shared experience that creates a dialogue, makes us talk to each other, including strangers.

You have to think about why you're asking an audience to come to the theater. It's not that they should come because it's good for them, because it's the vegetables that they should eat and the culture shot that they should get... It's about experience and building community and catalyzing dialogue and bringing people together.

Art is essentially communication. It doesn't exist in a vacuum. That's why people make art, so other people can relate to it.

As a consumer, I don't create art, but I think whatever the message is, art has to touch you.

For me, art is about learning and about living with people. It's alive.

In terms of helping people understand and know each other a little better, music is universal - universal and transporting.

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?'

If buying art is to matter to us deeply, then it has to engage with our emotions and bring something to what one might as well, and with no supernatural associations whatsoever, call our souls.

All great art allows us this: a glimpse across the limits of our self.

Artists make our lives livable and enjoyable.

The value of the arts cannot be measured by its ability to preserve life but rather to enhance existence.

I can see that everybody has their own challenges that they are dealing with. But what's so beautiful about music is that it brings people together, levels the playing field and opens people up.

When you walk past a painting in a museum, if it doesn't make you feel something, then it's probably a failure.

Art is meant to bring people together. It's meant to raise consciousness.

The fact that people break down and cry when confronted with my pictures shows that I can communicate those basic human emotions.. the people who weep before my pictures are having the same religious experience I had when painting them. And if you say you are moved only by their color relationships then you miss the point.

The greatest benefit we owe to the artist, whether painter, poet, or novelist, is the extension of our sympathies.

A work of art is one through which the consciousness of the artist is able to give its emotions to anyone who is prepared to receive them. There is no such thing as bad art.

The importance of the arts to the societies in which they thrive is well documented.

Human beings have a lot of problems identifying themselves with other human beings who don't resemble them exactly. But there's something about drawing that means that anyone can identify to a drawing. I mean, people can identify themselves with Donald Duck and Mickey Mouse.

When art wins, everyone wins.

It's hard to explain your emotions when you see a work of art.

What makes people the world over stand in line for Van Gogh is not that they will see beautiful pictures but that in an indefinable way they will come away feeling better human beings. And that is exactly what Van Gogh hoped for.