Roy Lichtenstein Quotes

What the imagination seizes as beauty must be truth.

People understand what art is supposed to look like, and so it's easy to make something that looks like art but isn't - especially in an abstract form.

Great art picks up where nature ends.

Art is not a study of positive reality, it is the seeking for ideal truth.

Art is not merely an imitation of the reality of nature, but in truth a metaphysical supplement to the reality of nature, placed alongside thereof for its conquest.

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 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.

I suppose an artist takes the elements of his life and rearranges them and then has them perceived by others as though they were the elements of their lives.

To create a work of art is to create the world.

Art is not what you see, but what you make others see.

I have to say that I reject somewhat the distinction between something called art and something called public art. I think all art demands and desires to be seen.

Some painters transform the sun into a yellow spot, others transform a yellow spot into the sun.

The mission of art is to represent nature not to imitate her.

Illusions are art, for the feeling person, and it is by art that we live, if we do.

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

Far from creating a new formalism, what these can yield is something far transcending surface values since they not only embody form as beauty, but also form in which intuitions or ideas or conjectures have taken visible substance.

I hardly need to abstract things, for each object is unreal enough already, so unreal that I can only make it real by means of painting.

Who would dare assign to art the sterile function of imitating nature?

What I am really concerned about is what art is supposed to be - and can become.

The principles of true art is not to portray, but to evoke.

We all know that Art is not truth. Art is a lie that makes us realize the truth, at least the truth that is given to us to understand.

When I first made a grid, I happened to be thinking of the innocence of trees, and then a grid came into my mind and I thought it represented innocence, and I still do, and so I painted it and then I was satisfied. I thought, 'This is my vision.'

Art is the most beautiful deception of all. And although people try to incorporate the everyday events of life in it, we must hope that it will remain a deception lest it become a utilitarian thing, sad as a factory.

All that we call ideal in Greek or any other art, because to us it is false and visionary, was, to the makers of it, true and existent.

The first mistake of art is to assume that it's serious.