Max Ernst Quotes

What matters is what happens in the soul of an artist when you're playing.

The amateur believes he must first overcome his fear; then he can do his work. The professional knows that fear can never be overcome. He knows there is no such thing as a fearless warrior or a dread-free artist.

As an artist, I want to interpret my feelings

I think being an artist is having the courage to be original. Many great artists, including Picasso, have all been influenced by the great master paintings... And then finally, they leap, they take off... they become themselves. Then it looks like they just came out of nowhere. Just like 'Pow!'

The artist does not see both eyes alike. There is always 'the eye' and the other eye... It adds life and plasticity to the drawing if the eye in the light is darker than the one in the shadow. It gives the head vividness.

The modern artist is living in a mechanical age and we have a mechanical means of representing objects in nature such as the camera and photograph. The modern artist, it seems to me, is working and expressing an inner world - in other words - expressing the energy, the motion, and other inner forces.

The artist should once and forever emancipate himself from the bondage of appearance.

I'm known as a light artist. But rather than be someone who depicted light, or painted light in some way, I wanted to have the work be light.

the unconscious of an artist is her greatest treasure. It is what transmutes the dross of autobiography into the gold of myth.

Everything that I saw became something to be made, and it had to be exactly as it was, with nothing added. It was a new freedom: there was no longer the need to compose. The subject was there already made, and I could take from everything. It all belonged to me: a glass roof of a factory, with its broken and patched panels, lines on a road map, a corner of a Braque painting, paper fragments in the street. It was all the same: anything goes.

A writer's subconscious is one of the filthiest places there are: as a matter of fact, you can find the whole world there.

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.

All art is autobiographical.

Greek architecture taught me that the column is where the light is not, and the space between is where the light is. It is a matter of no-light, light, no-light, light. A column and a column brings light between them. To make a column which grows out of the wall and which makes its own rhythm of no-light, light, no-light, light: that is the marvel of the artist.

As an artist you have a choice. You can add more confusion and darkness to the world or you can shine a light, make a beauty.

Every person who is really an artist desires to create inside of himself another, deeper, more interesting life than the one that actually surrounds him.

There's something exciting and incredibly liberating for an artist to finish something Friday night and the world hears it Friday night instead of eight months later after marketing people and all those assholes get involved.

Most people just want to be part of the world, they want to live, love, and enjoy themselves - to take part in the world around them. Whereas artists are always retreating, locking the door, and inventing other worlds.

It was Sophie ( Sophie Arp Tauber, woman artist and later Arp's wife) who, by the example of her work and her life, both of them bathed in clarity, showed me the right way. In her world, the high and the low, the light and the dark, the eternal and the ephemeral, are balanced in prefect equilibrium.

It is an error common to many artists, who strive merely to avoid mistakes, when all our efforts should be to create positive and important work. Better positive and important with mistakes and failures than perfect mediocrity.

All poets have signalized their consciousness of rare moments when they were superior to themselves, -when a light, a freedom, a power came to them which lifted them to performances far better than they could reach at other times.

An artist must smash down the systems that domesticate the mind.

The grace to be a beginner is always the best prayer for an artist.

I'm a sponge, the more I absorb, the more I am able to articulate my vision, as artists do, like Picasso. I'm an artist in that light. I went from being an artist to an artiste.

We do live, all of us, on many different levels, and for most artists the world of imagination is more real than the world of the kitchen sink.