Thomas Sowell Quotes

We don't really want to think that the artist is only very skilled, that he has merely devoted his life to perfecting a certain set of intelligible skills.

The best of any artist is in their art.

Not all art is great; most of it's rubbish.

A proof of really great art is that it is generally true - it seldom falls into the misapprehensions to which minor art is liable.

If modern painters feel qualms about applying the term "masterpiece" to describe a work of capital importance, this is because it has come to convey a notion of perfection: a notion that leads to much confusion when applied to artists other than those who made perfection their ideal.

Great art is the contempt of a great man for small art.

Unless the work of art has wholly exhausted its maker's attention, it fails. This is why works of great significance are demanding and why they are infinitely rewarding.

The test of the artist does not lie in the will with which he goes to work, but in the excellence of the work he produces.

Art is good but it isn't the best.

I think that an artist should be a skilled craftsman.

Do I belong in the conversation about the best artists in the world? My answer is yes, I do.

In an art school it's very hard to tell who is the best.

I didn't watch 'The A-Team' movie. I'm an artist. You can't re-paint a Rembrandt. You can't duplicate that; I don't care who you get.

I'm not saying I'm the best. There are many painters in the world. But there is only one Picasso.

They[ Lana and Andy Wachowski]are true artists. They really are trying to say something and trying to create something original, and there aren't that many people who do that.

Then Martine said: "So yuo will be poor now all your life, Babette?" Poor?" said Babette. She smiled as if to herself. "No, I shall never be poor. I told you that I am a great artist. A great artist, Mesdames, is never poor.We have something, Mesdames, of which other people know nothing.

The old-fashioned idea that the simple piling up of experiences, one on top of another, can make you an artist, is, of course, so much rubbish. If acting were just a matter of experience, then any busy harlot could make Garbo's Camille pale.

The public want actresses, because they think all actresses bad. They don't want music or poetry because they know that both are good. So actors and actresses thrive and poets and composers starve.

Only mediocrities progress. An artist revolves in a cycle of masterpieces, the first of which is no less perfect than the last.

I refuse the title of artist to those who owe their reputations to a physical deformity. I regard them as buffoons.

People want to be successful, and they want to be acknowledged for what they do. Sometimes they make really great art and aren't. Historically, the best artists weren't. But their work survived.

Those who are concerned with the arts are often asked questions, not always sympathetic ones, about the use or value of what they are doing. It is probably impossible to answer such questions directly, or at any rate to answer the people who ask them.

There are a lot of self important people who make you believe they're artistes and high on the intelligence quotient and I've sat down and listened to them and just been bored.

We live in a world that treats the dead better than the living. We, the living are askers of questions and givers of answers, and we have other grave defects unpardonable by a system that believes death, like money, improves people.

A truly great artist has many talents.