Philip Johnson Quotes

A great building must begin with the unmeasurable, must go through measurable means when it is being designed and in the end must be unmeasurable.

When you design a building, you start from a general philosophy, and you come down, and you start from detail and come up. Only the theoretical architect believes that you can make the concept and then sometime, somebody will come to build it.

I believe entertainment can aspire to be art, and can become art, but if you set out to make art you're an idiot.

You cannot set art off in a corner and hope for it to have vitality, reality, and substance.

Architecture begins where engineering ends.

But the one thing you should. not do is to suppose that when something is wrong with the arts, it is wrong with the arts ONLY.

I have been criticized rather strenuously by painters and sculptors for not incorporating their work in our buildings.

When art is defined by Damien Hirst and Jeff Koons, you've got a society that's impoverished.

There must be some one quality without which a work of art cannot exist; possessing which, in the least degree, no work is altogether worthless.

I do not have much patience with a thing of beauty that must be explained to be understood. If it does need additional interpretation by someone other than the creator, then I question whether it has fulfilled its purpose.

I don't think the critics could understand what we were doing.

You can't just take an image and randomly distort it and call it art - although many people in La Jolla where I come from do precisely that.

We made records to document ourselves, not to sell a lot of records. I still feel that way. I put out a record because I think it's beautiful, not necessarily commercial.

I think a smart person today realizes that you have to be part of the art films that are done just for the sake of the art.

I've always wanted to do pieces that have an integral sense of realism and aren't just there for titillation.

What makes art in general, and literature in particular, remarkable, what distinguishes them from life, is precisely that they abhor repetition. In everyday life, you can tell the same joke thrice and, thrice getting a laugh, become the life of the party. In art, though, this sort of conduct is called 'cliche.'

As an artist, I will always give art more importance and preference than pure entertainment.

I think that there's a difference between being an entertainer and being an artist.

I personally don't distinguish between artistic and commercial films.

A good painting should be the equivalent of a good deed.

I'm making entertainment, but I'm making art. This is my art. Hopefully, it's profitable, hopefully it makes money, but at the end of the day I want it to be remembered for its artistic value as well as its entertainment value.

All bad art is the result of good intentions.

Regard it as just as desirable to build a chicken house as to build a cathedral. The size of the project means little in art, beyond the money matter. It is the quality of the character that really counts.

Art for art's sake? I should think so, and more so than ever at the present time. It is the one orderly product which our middling race has produced. It is the cry of a thousand sentinels, the echo from a thousand labyrinths, it is the lighthouse which cannot be hidden. It is the best evidence we can have of our dignity.

The morality of art is in its very beauty.