Virginia Woolf Quotes

Nature engenders the science of painting.

A work of art is one of mystery, the one extreme magic; everything else is either arithmetic or biology.

Art is a sense of magic.

I like to write about painting because I think visually. I see my writing as blocks of color before it forms itself. I think I also care about painting because I'm not musical. Painting to me is not a metaphor for writing, but something people do that can never be reduced to words.

There is something magical in seeing what you can do, what texture and tone and colour you can produce merely with a pen point and a bottle of ink.

With the brush we merely tint, while the imagination alone produces colour.

Art is everywhere, and everywhere is art.

From the age of six I wanted to be an artist. At that point I meant a painter, but it turned out what I really meant was I was someone who was very interested in watching the world and making copies of it.

I'm inspired by art - in whatever form it takes. I love when I see a painting or a photograph that captures my attention.

I think there's something beautiful about the art of making art, and it just will live and breathe.

When you're a kid, and someone's an artist, you think of Leonardo da Vinci. You don't think that's a job; you just think of a man with a beard, painting the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel.

I sometimes set myself thinking and imagining that I find amongst men but one single art or science, and that is drawing or painting, all others being members proceeding therefrom.

People get inspired to write, paint, draw, sing, sculpt, dance in many different ways. And there are many types of art. But the one thing that they all have in common is that they are all a sort of magic. Sometimes the magic flows from one’s fingers, other times it is transferred to the person who experiences the result. Magic has always worked in mysterious ways.

But ‘art’ is not anything serious or exclusive: it is the smell of oil paint, Henri Murger’s Vie de Boheme, corduroy trousers, the operatic Italian model: but the poetry, above all, of linseed oil and turpentine.

You need the art in order to love the life.

Art is both creation and recreation.

For art is order, but it is born out of the chaos of life.

My reason for writing stories is to give myself the satisfaction of visualising more clearly and detailedly and stably the vague, elusive, fragmentary impressions of wonder, beauty, and adventurous expectancy which are conveyed to me by certain sights (scenic, architectural, atmospheric, etc.), ideas, occurrences, and images encountered in art and literature.

How rich art is, if one can only remember what one has seen, one is never empty of thoughts or truly lonely, never alone.

I've always had a certain fascination. It's basically paint what you know, and this is what I grew up with.

I suppose an artist takes the elements of his life and rearranges them and then has them perceived by others as though they were the elements of their lives.

My first love is art, and I see a lot of things in an artistic way.

To me, art begets art. Painting feeds the eye just as poetry feeds the ear, which is to say that both feed the soul.

I've only wanted paper and beautiful colors. It was my dream, and it still is my dream. And books. They're all I need, and the rest I can do without.

Grant that the true organ with which the beautiful is apprehended is the imagination, and it follows that all arts are likely to affect the feelings indirectly.