Barnett Newman Quotes

I try to put my own history in my work.

All worthy work is open to interpretations the author did not intend. Art isn't your pet -- it's your kid. It grows up and talks back to you.

The greatest thing about music is putting it out there for people to figure out.

I'm not really a guy who draws on things from my own past.

I often need a long time to understand things, to imagine a painting I might make.

Symmetry is overrated. Overrated is symmetry.

Once they're on paper, they're gone. I like to do as much with the words, as far as image goes, so that it's really left open for a lot of things, even though I remember a specific impression of something I had at the time. I can't say a song is about this or that; in fact, I wouldn't even want to. I just prefer to have people live it anyway they want. Because it's theirs after that. There's nothing I can do about it anymore

I’m doing badly, I’m doing well; whichever you prefer.

It is certain because it is impossible. -Certum est quia impossibile

POZZO: I am blind. (Silence.) ESTRAGON: Perhaps he can see into the future.

Writing is both mask and unveiling.

An actor only has his own understanding and experience to work with.

You must put the essence of what you want to say into a painting. The rest is arbitrary. Chosen with discernment, but chosen, and choice involves elimination.

Art and poetry cannot do without one another. Yet the two words are far from being synonymous. By Art I mean the creative or producing, work-making activity of the human mind. By Poetry I mean, not the particular art which consists in writing verses, but a process both more general and more primary: that intercommunication between the inner being of things and the inner being of the human Self which is a kind of divination (as was realized in ancient times; the Latin vates was both a poet and a diviner). Poetry, in this sense, is the secret life of each and all of the arts.

I want to get a tattoo of the word irony, only misspelled.

The world is a funny paper read backwards. And that way it isn't so funny.

Half the fun of writing a novel is finding out from other people later on what you actually meant.

My own eyes are no more than scouts on a preliminary search, for the camera's eye may entirely change my idea, even switch me to different subject matter. So I start out with my mind as free from image as the silver film on which I am to record, and I hope as sensitive.

You have to get beyond your own precious inner experiences. The actor cannot afford to look only to his own life for all his material nor pull strictly from his own experience to find his acting choices and feelings. The ideas of the great playwrights are almost always larger than the experiences of even the best actors.

I have nothing to say, and I am saying it.

The art has to make it on its own, without explanations, and it’s the same for poetry. If the poem or the painting has to be explained, then it’s a failure in communication.

The one thing I learned is not to say anything about my own paintings. Keep my mouth shut. You'll never stop hearing what you said. It will come back to you again and again, people will always tell you about it. Even if you were the source of what's wrong with it.

I suppose I wanted to have my cake and eat it. But then again, what were you going to do with your cake if not eat it? Frame it? Use it as a sachet in your underwear drawer?

People say nothing is impossible, but I do nothing every day.

I don't think you need to be so result-oriented when you're trying to define the success of an art work. I think we can allow some unpredictability.