Siri Hustvedt Quotes

Under his (Marc Chagall, ed.) sole impulse metaphor made its triumphal entry into modern painting.

As far as the style, I was fascinated by surrealism.

I myself saw the great works of Western civilization for the first time in my high school in Lithuania in bad black-and-white reproductions on miserable paper. That was, for many years, what art was for me. But from those miserable black-and-white reproductions, I got something, something unmistakable.

I love Damien Hirst. I respect his work a great deal, and I am happy that the polka dots I started using have become a symbol of love and peace around the world with everybody joining hands to use them in this way.

But I was in awe of the painters; I mean I was new in New York, and I thought the painting that was going on here was just unbelievable.

Wolfgang Tillman's stunning large-scale pictures, being shown for the first time, were so offhand I failed to see them as art.

Science gave me a cosmic religious feeling, and I would get the same feeling when I was dragged to the Met and the Museum of Modern Art.

I had tried painting, mostly to give myself a greater appreciation of the craft and to inform how I looked at paintings. That led to collaging some of the work I had done on paper, and I found myself mixing in found pieces as well.

Within one hour of touching the brush to canvas for the first time, my students have a total, complete painting.

It is my hope that visitors, artists, and students from around the world will experience all that MoMA has to offer for generations to come.

I'm not an Abstraction Expressionist, but I think dedication to paintings comes from an early interest in that work.

In my case, everything starts from Marcel Duchamp and the new expressive possibilities he gave us with his ready-mades. I transferred his artistic language into today's world, choosing, for example, to use pedestrian-crossing stripes as a symbol.

I love surrealism.

Growing up I was very into art. In high school I was into the surrealists and impressionists, and I loved Klimt. In '91 or '92 I saw one of those Felix Gonzalez-Torres Untitled billboards. I was just really arrested by it. It was kind of my first foray into contemporary art. It was a turning point for me as to what art could be and what it meant and the impact it could have.

Warhol influenced me because of his writing. If I had never read his writings and interviews, I would never have understood his work.

My name is Schwitters, Kurt Schwitters... I'm a painter and I nail my pictures... I'd like to be accepted into the Dada Club

I didn't see an abstract painting until I was 18, when I went to Vincent Price's house and saw Richard Niebencorn, Wolff, Jackson Pollack. He had an amazing collection. I didn't know people painted abstractly, I thought I was just doing something wholeheartedly.

Here on the drawing board fingers and noses leak from the air brush maggots lie under if i should die before if i should die in the back room stacked up in smooth boxes like soapflakes or tunafish wait the undreamt of.

I liked working in advertising, but don't believe my taste in art, such as it is, was entirely formed by TV commercials. And I don't feel especially conflicted enjoying a Mantegna one day, a Carl Andre the next day and a brash student work the next.

In the art world Robert Rauschenberg had been combining common materials that people thought was art and beautiful, and it was. If he could do that, I could emulate him.

An epithet or metaphor drawn from nature ennobles art; an epithet or metaphor drawn from art degrades nature.

You are in every line I have ever read.

Surrealism could not be made up. It was the very electricity of the real.

The great grey beast February had eaten Harvey Swick alive.

This was my first encounter with art as art (he saw 'Pinky' painted by Sir Thomas Lawrence and 'The Blue Boy" painted by Thomas Gainborough).. ..somebody actually MADE those paintings.. ..(it) was the first time I realized you could be an artist.