William Goldman Quotes

Not all art is great; most of it's rubbish.

If the goal is to get the best artists, actors, and filmmakers in the world to create the best movies, Hollywood does a decent job. And I think no one would disagree with me that it also makes a ton of bad movies and employs a bunch of hacks.

The best of any artist is in their art.

Great art is the contempt of a great man for small art.

The ad business has some of the great artists, but because there are so many, its hard to determine the true gems.

There are very few great poets in the world.

The test of the artist does not lie in the will with which he goes to work, but in the excellence of the work he produces.

I think some of our most talented people are not going to pick the arts as a way that they're going to spend their lives.

Do I belong in the conversation about the best artists in the world? My answer is yes, I do.

Poetry is an art, the easiest to dabble in, but the hardest to reach true excellence.

Even a true artist does not always produce art.

We don't really want to think that the artist is only very skilled, that he has merely devoted his life to perfecting a certain set of intelligible skills.

In an art school it's very hard to tell who is the best.

I am an enthusiast on the subject of the arts…. its object is to improve the taste of my countrymen, to increase their reputation, to reconcile to them the respect of the world, and procure them its praise.

I never choose a genre over quality. I never think, 'I want to do that,' and sacrifice the fact it might not be very good.

It seems this is an age of clever critics who keep bewailing the fact that there are no works worthy of criticism.

For me, the only value a celebrity has, or any artist or actor or anything, is the things that they make, you know?

The best of pop in our country is among the best of the arts that we do. And Britain does the arts as well as, and sometimes better than, anybody else on the planet.

In Portland, there are so many trained artists and technicians, there's an enormous talent base. And it's not like second-stringers.

If the standard for art is the decency of its creators, we're going to have a lot of empty museums.

There's no making art for art's sake. You've got to make the best art you can.

Most works of art are, necessarily, bad...; one suffers through the many for the few.

It reflects no great honour on a painter to be able to execute one thing well.

Even if virtually anything can be art, there are levels of quality.

Great art is never perfect; perfect art is never great.