Robert G. Ingersoll Quotes

A critic has no right to the narrowness which is the frequent prerogative of the creative artist.

With an artist no sane man quarrels, any more than with the colour of a child's eyes.

Artists are the gatekeepers of truth.

If artists do see fields blue they are deranged, and should go to an asylum. If they only pretend to see them blue, they are criminals and should go to prison.

Everything an artist spits is art.

The artist can within limits make what he likes of his life... It is only the artist, and maybe the criminal, who can make his own.

What is an artistic picture? An artistic picture is very simple. The creator is not the producer. The creator is not the star. The creator is the director, the person who realizes the picture, like a poet, like an artist. The creator of the picture is free to do whatever he wants, how he wants to do it. That is an artistic picture.

I kind of think that artists throughout history, poets throughout history have been criticized for sharing what's on people's minds and I don't think it's any different now.

My job as art critic is to watch artists dance naked in public, and then I will, in turn, dance naked critically in public.

The critical sense is so far from frequent that it is absolutely rare, and the possession of the cluster of qualities that minister to it is one of the highest distinctions... In this light one sees the critic as the real helper of the artist, a torchbearing outrider, the interpreter, the brother... Just in proportion as he is sentient and restless, just in proportion as he reacts and reciprocates and penetrates, is the critic a valuable instrument.

The past is a work of art, free of irrelevancies and loose ends.

The idea of space is given to the artist to change if he can. The subject matter in the abstract is space.

Christian art today should be twentieth-century art.

An artist must have imagination. An artist who does not use his imagination is a mechanic.

When I paint green, it doesn't mean grass; when I paint blue, it doesn't mean sky.

All my pictures are a kind of revision of my original idea. This is surely very different from the way in which Japanese or Chinese artists work: their themes are pre-ordained, whereas mine are invented at will.

The longer I've been writing scripts, the more I find that you have to give the artist more leeway or else you'll just be disappointed. You can't force them to draw every image that's in your head. Since I'm a horrific artist, I wouldn't want them to anyway. So I definitely give them a lot more leeway now than I did at the beginning.

The central icon of Catholic Christianity is mother and child. That motif is so deep in not just our human experience but in our animal, biological past.

I always feel when you work with an artist and whenever I work with a really good photographer, I try to give him or her their own artistic freedom because that's the way you get the best work or at least the most interesting work.

Don't be dismayed by the opinions of editors, or critics. They are only the traffic cops of the arts.

The connection between art and Christ is like the connection between sunlight and the sun. It is, in fact, the connection between Sonlight and the Son.

The writer of history is perhaps closer to the artist than the scholar.

We might adapt for the artist the joke about there being nothing more dangerous than instruments of war in the hands of generals. In the same way, there is nothing more dangerous than justice in the hands of judges, and a paint brush in the hands of a painter! Just think of the danger to society! But today we haven't the heart to expel the painters and poets because we no longer admit to ourselves that there is any danger in keeping them in our midst.

God does not ask for 'religious' art or 'Catholic' art. The art he wants for himself is Art, with all its teeth

Critics are more committed to the rules of art than artists are.