O. Henry Quotes

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

As an artist, I want a reaction.

I think a painting should include more experience than simply intended statement.

Art is something that opens up and enhances your emotions and that's what I like to think I'm doing.

I don't have to come up with a ha-ha belly laugh every day, but drawings with warmth and love or ones that put a lump in the throat. That's more important to me than a laugh.

In its primary aspect, a painting has no more spiritual message than an exquisite fragment of Venetian glass. The channels by which all noble and imaginative work in painting should touch the soul are not those of the truths of lives.

An artist’s job is to captivate… if we stumble into truth, we got lucky.

Velazquez found the perfect balance between the ideal illustration which he was required to produce, and the overwhelming emotion he aroused in the spectator.

The artist's job? To be a miracle worker: make the blind see, the dull feel, the dead to live.

I think art is the ability to change people with your work, to see things as they are and then create stories, images, and interactions that change the marketplace.

When people look at my pictures I want them to feel the way they do when they want to read a line of a poem twice.

I do believe strongly in photography and hope by following it intuitively that when the photographs are looked at they will touch the spirit in people.

The work of art must seize upon you, wrap you up in itself, carry you away. It is the means by which the artist conveys his passion; it is the current which he puts forth which sweeps you along in his passion.

There's still a part of me that thinks I have to write a really good novel. I'm not trying to say I'm not happy with the novels I've written in the past. But it always feels to me like there's another one that I have to write that will really say what I want to say, and really paint this world that I can see hazily in my head.

Color is the keyboard. The eye is the hammer. The soul is the piano, with its many strings.

The wonderful thing about films is how they can be understood by so many different people on so many different levels.

It's my dream to make music that can make people feel like they're flying

If art is not to be life-enhancing, what is it to be?

I feel like you have to make art because you have to make it. But the end result of it- that last stage- you have to show it to somebody else to hopefully get a rise or reaction out of them- [to see] if it’ll affect someone else.

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

Art has a unique capacity to take one or other facet of the message and translate it into colors, shapes and sounds which nourish the intuition of those who look and listen.

The true test of all the arts is not solely whether the production is a true copy of nature, but whether it answers the end of art, which is to produce a pleasing effect upon the mind.

People have often assumed that for music to be emotionally powerful it has to come directly from a human hand, whereas I disagree with that, and enjoy proving these people wrong. This project is an excellent way of exploring that area more.

Art should exhilarate, and throw down the walls of circumstance on every side, awakening in the beholder the same sense of universal relation and power which the work evinced in the artist.

The camera would miss it all. A magnificent picture is never worth a thousand perfect words. Ansel Adams can be a great artist, but he can never be Shakespeare. His tools are too literal.