Robert Quillen Quotes

Great art is never produced for its own sake. It is too difficult to be worth the effort.

My primary thing is to make a painting, not necessarily to make a painting to sell for gazillions of dollars, but just to make a painting.

We work in the dark - we do what we can - we give what we have. Our doubt is our passion and our passion is our task. The rest is the madness of art.

I don't think there's any formula for what makes great 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.

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

But where there is no art show, I would still be painting.

I believe entertainment can aspire to be art, and can become art, but if you set out to make art you're an idiot.

Art is a gift and if nobody hears it, that doesn't make it any less of a gift.

We need writers who know the difference between the production of a commodity and the practice of an art.

Art for art's sake? I should think so, and more so than ever at the present time. It is the one orderly product which our middling race has produced. It is the cry of a thousand sentinels, the echo from a thousand labyrinths, it is the lighthouse which cannot be hidden. It is the best evidence we can have of our dignity.

Art is certainly not a pursuit for anyone who wants to make money.

I think art must be tough! I think art has to be hard. I don't think it should be easy. I think it should take foot-pounds of energy to produce that art, otherwise we would have more mediocre writers, and we don't have room for any more mediocrity in the world. There's already enough of it being visited on us night and day through the Internet, and through television, and through politics.

The Arts are man's most useless ... and essential ... activity.

We do not judge great art. It judges us.

Art begins with resistance - at the point where resistance is overcome. No human masterpiece has ever been created without great labor.

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

Art doesn't transform. It just plain forms.

I don't think I'm making any great statements, and I certainly don't think I'm making art.

No matter how hard I tried to popularize, I never cheapened a great work of art.

I don't believe that artists really are interested in money. That's not the motivation for art.

I can't ask for every movie I make to be great and brilliant. I can only try.

Any work that aspires, however humbly, to the condition of art should carry its justification in every line.

A great painting is a great painting.

An artist is not paid for his labor but for his vision.