Edvard Munch Quotes

Art arises when the secret vision of the artist and the manifestation of nature agree to find new shapes.

I read things and imagine them and then kind of start trying to kind of take what I imagine and make it visual for everybody else to see. It just happens to be my personal vision, and every person's is going to be different, every book reader.

In the same way I accumulate objects, I also accumulate images, and I find them arranging themselves into categories, too. And some images insist on being painted; others don't.

Love is art, not truth. It’s like painting scenery.

If your vision of the world is of a certain kind you will put poetry in everything, necessarily.

I can do my part of the storytelling. I can carry it. I can paint it. I can maneuver it. I can massage it. But if I don't have anything to work with, then there's nothing.

Art begins . . . when someone interprets, when someone sees the world through his own eyes. Art happens when what is seen becomes mixed with the inside of the person who is seeing it.

The power of painter or poet to describe what he calls an ideal thing depends upon its being to him not an ideal but a real thing. No man ever did or ever will work well but either from actual sight or sight of faith.

A distinction is made between artists who work directly from nature and those who work purely from imagination. Neither if these methods should be preferred to the exclusion of the other. Often both are used in turn by the same man.

Picturing things, taking a view, is what makes us human; art is making sense and giving shape to that sense. It is like the religious search for God.

An artist is a man who digests his own subjective impressions and knows how to find a general objective meaning in them, and how to express them in a convincing form.

Where does beauty begin? Where does it end? Where it ends is where the artist begins.

By his very profession, a serious fiction writer is a vendor of the sensuous particulars of life, a perceiver and handler of things. His most valuable tools are his sense and his memory; what happens in his mind is primarily pictures.

Art flies around truth, but with the definite intention of not getting burnt. Its capacity lies in finding in the dark void a place where the beam of light can be intensely caught, without this having been perceptible before.

Art is contemplation of the world in a state of grace and imaginatively reflecting that subjective understanding.

(Art is) the residue of vision.

A picture is first of all a product of the artist's imagination, it must never be a copy.

A director is a man, therefore he has ideas; he is also an artist, therefore he has imagination. Whether they are good or bad, it seems to me that I have an abundance of stories to tell. And the things I see, the things that happen to me, continually renew the supply.

Writing is reporting what we saw after the vision has left us. It is catching the fish which the tide has left far up on our shores in the low and depressed places.

The longer I look at something, the more my imagination churns and I can find somewhere to put it.

Someone who is an artist can say, 'I can create and can make what I create disappear.'

A line, an area of tone, is not really important because it records what you have seen, but because of what it will lead you on to see. Following up its logic in order to check its accuracy, you find confirmation or denial in the object itself or in your memory of it.

Art - be it painting, sculpture, music - they are all creations, they are creative acts. I consider a film, with everything that is involved in it, an art.

A design that I create is like my own extension. It's 'thinking made visible.'

A great painter can paint something really complex, but they can crystallize it into something really simple.