George Jean Nathan Quotes

I was particularly proud of my performance as the Joker. I considered it a piece of pop art.

I look at everything in an artistic way.

The creative artist seems to be almost the only kind of man that you could never meet on neutral ground. You can only meet him as an artist. He sees nothing objectively because his own ego is always in the foreground of every picture.

I look at every piece of furniture and every object as an individual sculpture.

Theatrical times are different from concert times, to put it simply. Taking a figure like [Mahatma] Gandhi and setting him on a stage requires thinking about what theater is about and what the whole experience is about and what we're trying to communicate in that way, so you get into certain less abstract considerations.

Look, it's my misery that I have to paint this kind of painting, it's your misery that you have to love it, and the price of the misery is thirteen hundred and fifty dollars.

The imagination demands that life be told slant because of its need of distance.

Mel Bochner was able to give me the tools to look at those types of experiences, register them with my own, but also hold them far enough away to see them 360.

If you try to make interesting films, you're going to be disappointed most of the time. I choose just not to look at it that way.

I turned my thoughts to a still more novel mode... to compose pictures on canvas similar to representations on the stage... my picture is my stage, and men and women my players exhibited in a 'dumb' show.

To say that a writer's hold on reality is tenuous is an understatement-it's like saying the Titanic had a rough crossing. Writer's build their own realities, move into them and occasionally send letters home. The only difference between a writer and a crazy person is that a writer gets paid for it.

If art reflects life, it does so with special mirrors.

Most artists look for something fresh to paint; frankly I find that quite boring. For me it is much more exciting to find fresh meaning in something familiar.

The only thing worse than a silly politician analyzing art is a silly artist analyzing politics

The essence of painting has actually always been to make it [the universal] plastically perceptible through colour and line.

I often told the fanatics of realism that there is no such thing as realism in art: it only exists in the mind of the observer. Art is a symbol, a thing conjuring up reality in our mental image. That is why I don't see any contradiction between abstract and figurative art either.

Drawing is a kind of hypnotism: one looks in such a way at the model, that he comes and takes a seat on the paper.

Without art we would be nothing but foreground and live entirely in the spell of that perspective which makes what is closest at hand and most vulgar appear as if it were vast, and reality itself.

a likeness different from the products of the God-fearing photographer.

I have no evangelical feelings about art at all. I despise art education. Art doesn't lend itself to education. There is no knowledge there. It's a set of propositions about how things should look.

Art feels like it has this frame, and it's either outside or inside.

Art is not in the ...eye of the beholder. It's in the soul of the artist.

Loads of people, particularly artists, hate pretty pictures. Now I've never met anyone who didn't like a pretty face.

The most important thing in art is The Frame. For painting: literally; for other arts: figuratively - because without this humble appliance, you can't know where The Art stops and The Real World begins.

You are right in demanding that an artist should take an intelligent attitude to his work, but you confuse two things: solving a problem and stating a problem correctly.