Robert Venturi Quotes

I suppose I'm trying to build an architecture that's as timeless as possible, although we're all creatures of our age.

Whatever an artist's personal feelings are, as soon as an artist fills a certain area on the canvas or circumscribes it, he becomes historical. He acts from or upon other artists.

The artist is the medium between his fantasies and the rest of the world.

A great painter can paint something really complex, but they can crystallize it into something really simple.

I work from a subjective palette.

I was a painter before I was a writer, so I was always a visual artist. And my writing, to me, was always visual.

As an artist, you've got to see the mess. That's what we do. We get a human being, and it's like putting together a puzzle. And the puzzle has got to be a mixture, a multifaceted mixture of human emotions, and not all of it is going to be pretty.

All the things an artist must be: poet, explorer of nature, philosopher!

I haven't the slightest idea what art is, but to be a painter is something of which you have to prove.

An artist’s job is to captivate… if we stumble into truth, we got lucky.

The artist is called a creator.

I don't think that my work is actually effectively dealing with history. I think of my work as subsumed by history or consumed by history.

So is fighting incompleteness the source of artistic neurosis? I doubt it. At most, this would apply to artists who deal with particular kinds of problems. I don't think we should think of Haydn or Mozart or Dickens or George Eliot in these terms.

You hear it said time and time again by successful directors: You have to make a movie for yourself. Don't make it for anyone else. My style of filmmaking happens to be give the audience what they know they don't want, but they want. Ultimately I have to write and direct in a way that let's just say, you don't want to regret making a choice.

The artist who paints the emotions creates an enclosed world... the picture... which, like a book, has the same interest no matter where it happens to be. Such an artist, we may imagine, spends a great deal of time doing nothing but looking, both around him and inside him.

As an artist, you have the job of working out whatever is given you to work out.

In literary art, as in the art of the architect, the painter, the musician, signs that the artist is thinking of his own achievement more than of his subject always offend me.

The artist's job? To be a miracle worker: make the blind see, the dull feel, the dead to live.

The frame is the reward of the artist.

Often when I write I am trying to make words do the work of line and color. I have the painter's sensitivity to light. Much of my writing is verbal painting.

I pay tribute to the writing always. The writer is a creative artist and the director is an interpretive artist and the actors are interpretive. You take zero and make it into something, that's always amazing to me.

Writing is a creative art form and the acting and directing is more of an interpretive art form.

When a painting is finished, it's like a new born child, and the artist himself must have time for understanding. How then do you expect an amateur to understand that which the artist dos not yet comprehend.

A craftsman knows in advance what the finished result will be, while the artist knows only what it will be when he has finished it.

What do artists do? Artists give people something they didn't know they were missing: a dance, a piece of music, a painting, a piece of sculpture. Catering to that need is the best business strategy.