Charles Simic Quotes

If I set out to sculpt a standing man and it becomes a lying woman, I know I am making art.

I'm certain, as we filled down the great staircase, that I appeared the same as ever, a moping twelve years-old, all arms and legs. But secretly I knew I had been transformed, moved by the revelation that human beings create art, that to be an artist was to see what others could not.

What marks the artist is his power to shape the material of pain we all have.

Sometimes my art is just an illusion - or is it?

Art is not for the cultivated taste. It is to cultivate taste.

What is art but a way of seeing?

Art does not reproduce what we see; rather, it makes us see.

Art is everywhere, and everywhere is art.

No great artist ever sees things as they really are. If he did, he would cease to be an artist.

I paint and work as a sculptor, and I see architecture as an art… If you follow this approach you can use techniques to the service of man and to the service of an artistic idea, and beauty.

Art is the microscope of the mind, which sharpens the wit as the other does the sight; and converts every object into a little universe in itself. Art may be said to draw aside the veil from nature. To those who are perfectly unskilled in the practice, unimbued with the principles of art, most objects present only a confused mass.

Art is continually working to take the crust of familiarity off everyday objects.

I always wanted to show the world that art is everywhere, except it has to pass through a creative mind.

In art, as long as you have ideas and think, you are bound to deform nature. Art is deformation.

All great art ... creates in the beholder not self-satisfacti on but wonder and awe. Its great liberation is to lift us out of ourselves.

Through art we express our conception of what nature is not.

It is harder to see than it is to express. The whole value of art rests in the artist's ability to see well into what is before him. ... The model will serve equally for a Rembrandt drawing or for anybody's magazine cover. A genius is one who can see. The others can often 'draw' remarkably well. ... Those who get their technique first, expecting sight to come to them later, get a technique of a very ready-made order.

Art is a severe business; most serious when employed in grand and sacred objects. The artist stands higher than art, higher than the object. He uses art for his purposes, and deals with the object after his own fashion.

Such is the strength of art, rough things to shape.

A sculptor is a person obsessed with the form and the shape of things, and it's not just Ihe shape of any one thing, but the shape of any thing and everything.

What an artist is for is to tell us what we see but do not know that we see.

Realism and Naturalism rely mostly on the eye of the flesh. Abstract, conceptual and surrealistic art rely mostly on the eye of the mind. Great works of art rely on the eye of contemplation, the eye of the spirit.

The poem is the dream made flesh, in a two-fold sense: as work of art, and as life, which is a work of art.

What is wonderful about my art is that dream and reality can become one. There is just one step between the two.

Only through art can we get outside of ourselves and know another's view of the universe which is not the same as ours and see landscapes which otherwise would remain unknown to us like the landscapes of the moon. Thanks to art, instead of seeing a single world, our own, we see it multiply until we have before us as many worlds as there are original artists.