Herbert Read Quotes

In a machine age, dressmaking is one of the last refuges of the human, the personal, the inimitable.

Art is great only when it bears the stamp of the individual.

Anything you do, let it come from you. Then it will be new.

Individuality of expression is the beginning and end of all art.

It's because the idea of what's cool is different. When you talk to a girl who goes to regular school, what's cool is whether or not you've been to jail, or if you have a car. If you talk to a girl who goes to art school, what's cool to her is if you do art projects on the weekend with your dad, if you can build something - out-of-the-norm stuff.

I think fashion is just part of my life and if it hadn't been fashion then it would have been something else.

We have lived through the epoch of suppression of the masses; we are living in an epoch of suppression of the individual in the name of the masses; tomorrow will bring the liberation of the individual - in the name of man.

Properly understood, style is not a seductive decoration added to a functional structure; it is of the essence of a work of art. The necessary elements of style are lucidity, elegance, and individuality; these three qualities combine to form a preservative which ensures the nearest approximation to permanence in the fugitive art of letters.

I love the process of cutting everything out with a scalpel yourself: I don't want to have my stencils drawn up in Illustrator, then laser-cut. I like the fact that it's slightly wrong; I think it gives it a beauty. The individual and handmade will always be worth more than what a computer can do, at least until computers can learn how to make mistakes.

Art is magic, not logic. This craze for the logical spirit in irrational shape is part of the present harmful mania for uniformity.

Fashion is fun, and fashion is a form of art and self-expression. And I think it should have a wink-wink nature to it. For me, it's about the way it makes you feel. If you want to feel sexy, you want to feel bright, you want to feel good. That's what people are attracted to - when they see you execute an emotion or an idea clearly and proudly.

Art is craft: all art is always and essentially a work of craft: but in the true work of art, before the craft and after it, is some essential durable core of being, which is what the craft works on, and shows, and sets free. The statue in the stone. How does the artist find that, see it, before it's visible? That is a real question.

People come to New York to be different, but I go to Starbucks to be the same.

I don't enjoy lettering very much, but that's the way I write and that belongs in the strip because the strip is a reflection of me.

Everyone has a desire, if not a need, to use their individual signatures. Whenever people meet to talk about a project, even stuffy old businessmen, they say they want to create something new.

As someone who is obsessed with fashion, I personally own non-vegan materials and am very open about that. I don't think it's right to pretend to be someone you're not to get sales. People know me on a real level because of how open I am in my videos. It was a simple choice: I didn't want to exclude anyone, that wasn't fair. I wanted EVERY customer to be able to wear my art. And it's morally right. End of story.

You can’t be a non-conformist if you don’t wear the proper uniform.

Art isn't only a painting. Art is anything that is creative, passionate and personal. Art is the unique work of a human being created to touch another. Art is created to have an impact, to change someone else.

The painter makes real to others his innermost feelings about all that he cares for. A secret becomes known to everyone who views the picture through the intensity with which it is felt.

It doesn't matter what you do, he said, so long as you change something from the way it was before you touched it into something that's like you after you take your hands away. The difference between the man who just cuts lawns and a real gardener is in the touching, he said. The lawn-cutter might just as well not have been there at all; the gardener will be there a lifetime.

I like real art. It's difficult to define 'real' but it is the best word for describing what I like to get out of art and what the best art has. It has the ability to convince you that it's present - that it's there. You could say it's authentic... but real is actually a better word, broad as it may be.

I fear uniformity. You cannot manufacture great men any more than you can manufacture gold.

Don't you get tired of seeing so many "non-conformists" with the same non-conformist look?

Technique does not constitute art. Nor is it a vague, fuzzy romantic quality known as ‘beauty,’ remote from the realities of everyday life. It is the depth and intensity of an artist’s experience that are the first importance in art.

The nature of language may determine what most people say, but I always speak my own meaning.