Patti Smith Quotes

In any art, you don't know in advance what you want to say - it's revealed to you as you say it. That's the difference between art and illustration.

With all their damned talk of modern painting, I've been forty years discovering that the queen of all colours is black!

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.

I grew up thinking art was pictures until I got into music and found I was an artist and didn't paint.

Art does not reproduce what we see; rather, it makes us see.

I never knew I was an artist until I did 'Last of the Mohicans'.

I decided that what I really wanted to do was go off and paint.

Art is the window to man's soul. Without it, he would never be able to see beyond his immediate world; nor could the world see the man within.

I always feel that my films ought to teach me something about life.

I was a weird kid. It wasn't until I saw 'Aguirre: The Wrath of God' at 16 that my whole world changed. The obsession with that was equal to the obsession with writing.

As I showed the world my art, my heart, I wasn't just an actress. I was actually an artist. And that was my transformation.

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.

I always wanted to show the world that art is everywhere, except it has to pass through a creative mind.

If life is a blank canvas and all people are artists, the big challenge we all face may be expressed this way: Will we ultimately produce something approaching a masterpiece, an acceptable but not particularly memorable work of art, or a creation that wouldn't even be purchased at a yard sale?

Art does not reflect what is seen, rather it makes the hidden visible.

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.

I like the feeling of being able to confront an experience and resolve it as art.

It took me 40 years to find out that painting is not sculpture.

I called it a baptism in flaming ink that forced me to shed my shyness about recognizing myself as a poet and to accept the fact that life had never given me any choice in the matter. And then I had to discover exactly what that meant.

In art, one does not aim for simplicity; one achieves it unintentionally as one gets closer to the real meaning of things.

As an experienced artist, I carry my work like a secret pregnancy. I am always aware of inner life and the need to protect it.

All poetry like every work of art proceeds from a swift vision of things.

To love something as an artist ... means to be shaken not by its ultimate value or lack of value, but by a side of it that suddenly opens up. Where art has value it shows things that few have seen. It's conquering, not pacifying.

All art is a vision penetrating the illusions of reality, and photography is one form of this vision and revelation.

The particulars of life do not matter to the artist; they merely provide him with the opportunity to lay bare his genius.