Oskar Kokoschka Quotes

Most photographers would feel a certain embarrassment in admitting publicly that they carried within them a sense of wonder, yet without it they would not produce the work they do, whatever their particular field.

There are two kinds of artists in this world; those that work because the spirit is in them, and they cannot be silent if they would, and those that speak from a conscientious desire to make apparent to others the beauty that has awakened their own admiration.

When I get an artistic itch, I have to scratch it.

Not that painting would have been a release. The reason for doing it is the desire to create. I've got to do it! I've seen that, I can still remember it, I've got to paint it.

The cavemen, when they saw the antelopes, they had to scratch them on to the caves because they needed to express the immediacy of what they were being affected by - and I love that. That is why I do what I do. I need to express myself.

I don't know what drives me, but I wake up in the morning, and I want to participate in the creative cultural conversation.

An artist is nothing without his or her obsessions, and I have mine.

I'm always fascinated by why a person becomes a writer.

We write for the same reason that we walk, talk, climb mountains or swim the oceans - because we can. We have some impulse within us that makes us want to explain ourselves to other human beings. That's why we paint, that's why we dare to love someone - because we have the impulse to explain who we are.

I love cinema and creating new things, but essentially, I am creating all this because I want people to see it.

I don't think that writers or painters or filmmakers function because they have something they particularly want to say. They have something that they feel. And they like the art form; they like words, or the smell of paint, or celluloid and photographic images and working with actors. I don't think that any genuine artist has ever been oriented by some didactic point of view, even if he thought he was.

Artists, like yourself, are born with a need to express that's just innate.

When I have a breakthrough in music and I hear the melody in my hands: that's when I get compelled - something in my gut just has to rise up and sing and put something to that.

The writer doesn’t write for the reader. He doesn’t write for himself, either. He writes to serve…something. Somethingness. The somethingness that is sheltered by the wings of nothingness — those exquisite, enveloping, protecting wings.

How certain human beings are able to create works of art is a mystery, and why they should wish to do so, at a great cost to themselves usually, is another mystery. Works are not created by one's life; every life is rich in material.

What’s the impulse behind art? It’s saying in whatever language is the language of your work, “If I could move you as much as it moved me … if I can move anyone a tenth as much as that moved me, if I can spark the same sense of mystery and awe and surprise as that sparked in me, well that’s why I do what I do.”

When I see a white piece of paper, I feel I've got to draw. And drawing, for me, is the beginning of everything.

For me, drawing is a question of death and life. Every day I draw, I write, I do something.

People come to see beauty, and I dance to give it to them.

The ability to make somebody feel something: that's art. However you look at it, whether you're an author, a painter, a singer, a rapper, a spoken-word artist - art.

My compulsion is to create things.

Being a photographer is like listening to music. If you have a camera, by just living your life you're bound to find some things that are worth taking a picture of. You don't have to be an audiophile to have taste in music. It happens through osmosis.

I take photographs with love, so I try to make them art objects. But I make them for myself first and foremost - that is important.

I've always been creating my whole life, you know. I've just had a need to create, whether it was sculpting or writing or directing. It's just ever since I was a kid, I don't know.

Human requirements are the inspiration for art.