Rainbow Rowell Quotes

A painting has to be beautiful. Even in its grotesqueness.

While art may instruct as well as please, it can nevertheless be true art without instructing, but not without pleasing.

We all agree now - by 'we' I mean intelligent people under sixty - that a work of art is like a rose. A rose is not beautiful because it is like something else. Neither is a work of art. Roses and works of art are beautiful in themselves.

I find beauty in the grotesque, like most artists.

No nude, however abstract, should fail to arouse in the spectator some vestige of erotic feeling, even if it be only the faintest shadow - and if it does not do so it is bad art and false morals.

The beautiful is always bizarre.

Real art has the capacity to make us nervous.

I don't know if it's art, but I know I like it.

Bad art is never really enjoyed in the same sense in which good art is enjoyed. It is only "liked": it never startles, prostrates, and takes captive.

Nothing so resembles a daub as a masterpiece.

A good painting should be the equivalent of a good deed.

Art does not exist for politics, or for instruction- it exists primarily for pleasure, or it is nothing.

a work that intends to be art must first be entertaining.

"The work of art must seize upon you...carry you away."

The pictures which do not represent an intense interest cannot expect to create an intense interest.

Beauty plus pity -- that is the closest we can get to a definition of art.

Art is about emotion; if art needs to be explained it is no longer art.

In the finished article, the only thing that is important is whether it moves you or not. There is nothing else that is important at all.

I think didactic art is boring. I mean, I love it in terms of, like, some of the historical precedents that I've learned from. You needed that. We needed those building blocks in terms of - you know, when I look at a great Barbara Kruger, for example, and you're thinking about, you know, the woman's position in society - you know, she found a way of making it beautiful, but at the same time it's very sort of preachy, you know what I mean?

I don't think that architecture is only about shelter, is only about a very simple enclosure. It should be able to excite you, to calm you, to make you think.

Is the Mona Lisa an 'accurate' representation of the actual human model for the painting? Who knows? Who cares? It's a great piece of art. It moves us. It makes us wonder, makes us gape - finally makes us look inward at ourselves.

Beauty can come in strange forms.

I realize that every picture isn't a work of art.

The greatness of art is not to find what is common but what is unique.

What is the use of theorizing as to wherein lies the charm that moves us?