Stephen King Quotes

Life is very nice, but it lacks form. It's the aim of art to give it some.

What would life be without art? Science prolongs life. To consist of what-eating, drinking, and sleeping? What is the good of living longer if it is only a matter of satisfying the requirements that sustain life? All this is nothing without the charm of art.

Art is the funnel, as it were, through which spirit is poured into life.

Those who are concerned with the arts are often asked questions, not always sympathetic ones, about the use or value of what they are doing. It is probably impossible to answer such questions directly, or at any rate to answer the people who ask them.

Art is the perpetual motion of illusion. The highest purpose of art is to inspire. What else can you do? What else can you do for any one but inspire them?

A life lived for art, is never a life wasted.

Art doesn't transform. It just plain forms.

Art is something that opens up and enhances your emotions and that's what I like to think I'm doing.

I don't believe in art. I believe in artists.

An artist is not paid for his labor but for his vision.

Art in relation to life is nothing more than a glove turned inside out. It seems to have the same shapes and contours, but it can never be used for the same purpose. Art teaches nothing about life, just as life teaches us nothing about art.

I tend to get very suspicious of anything that thinks it's art while it's being created.

I don't know of any good work of art that doesn't have a mystery.

Warhol influenced me because of his writing. If I had never read his writings and interviews, I would never have understood his work.

Born of the sensibility, art sows and creates life in its turn.

No art goes unmediated by other art.

In my low periods, I wondered what was the point of creating art. For whom? Are we animating God? Are we talking to ourselves? And what was the ultimate goal? To have one's work caged in art's great zoos - the Modern, the Met, the Louvre?

For all the years I'd spent talking about pictures, the truth was that I had no idea how to draw or what it felt like to do it. I would mistrust a poetry critic who couldn't produce a rhyming couplet. Could one write about art without knowing how to draw?

Well, Daddy, I used to believe that artists went crazy in the process of creating the beautiful works of art that kept society sane. Nowadays, though, artists make intentionally ugly art that’s only supposed to reflect society rather than inspire it. So I guess we’re all loony together now, loony rats in the shithouse of commercialism.

The power of works of art still continues to be secretly nourished by imitation... kitsch

In general, and most especially with artists, I pay as much attention to the man who does the work, as to the work itself.

All bad art is the result of good intentions.

I always felt that my work hadn't much to do with art; my admirations for other art had very little room to show themselves in my work because I hoped that if I concentrated enough the intensity of scrutiny alone would force life into the pictures. I ignored the fact that art, after all, derives from art. Now I realize that this is the case.

I cannot conceive any work of art as having a separate existence from life itself

The artist and his work are not to be separated. The most willfully foolish man cannot stand aloof from his folly, but the deed and the doer together make ever one sober fact.