Chuck Close Quotes

Is the Mona Lisa an 'accurate' representation of the actual human model for the painting? Who knows? Who cares? It's a great piece of art. It moves us. It makes us wonder, makes us gape - finally makes us look inward at ourselves.

As a consumer, I don't create art, but I think whatever the message is, art has to touch you.

When you walk past a painting in a museum, if it doesn't make you feel something, then it's probably a failure.

ALL ART, OF COURSE, IS INTELLECTUAL, BUT FOR ME, ALL THE ARTS, AND CINEMA EVEN MORE SO, MUST ABOVE ALL BE EMOTIONAL AND ACT UPON THE HEART.

What do I ask of a painting? I ask it to astonish, disturb, seduce, convince.

You know what makes me teary? Goya. Goya makes me cry.

A painting that doesn't shock isn't worth painting.

Art is the ultimate luxury good, but one that can make you think, give a you a blast of beauty and enhance your life. Even if the work's made of plasticine.

Even if you can't afford to buy a painting, you can experience it. You can go see the Mona Lisa and be transported. You can see the discipline and suffering in a van Gogh.

Painting that does not radiate feeling is not worth looking at. The deepest-and rarest-of grown-up pleasures is true feeling.

I have told myself a hundred times that painting - that is, the material thing called a painting - is no more than a pretext, the bridge between the mind of the painter and the mind of the spectator.

If after I read a poem the world looks like that poem for 24 hours or so I'm sure it's a good one—and the same goes for paintings.

A work of art... is not a living thing... that walks or runs. But the making of a life. That which gives you a reaction. To some it is the wonder of man's fingers. To some it is the wonder of the mind. To some it is the wonder of technique. And to some it is how real it is. To some, how transcendent it is. Like the 5th Symphony, it presents itself with a feeling that you know it, if you have heard it once.

Bad art is never really enjoyed in the same sense in which good art is enjoyed. It is only "liked": it never startles, prostrates, and takes captive.

Only when you are moved by a painting should you buy it. Being moved is what collecting is all about.

Only the very greatest art invigorates without consoling.

To awaken human emotion is the highest level of art.

My paintings seem to make the strongest impression on people who are, well, who are crazy.

To me, the technique was almost irrelevant; it was what was coming across.

The point of opera is that people are moved by the emotions and music.

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.

We go see theater, we take in art, because it makes us feel.

To so enter into it in nature and art that the enjoyed meanings of life may become a part of living is the attitude of aesthetic appreciation.

I'm much more about the emotion that a photograph provokes out of you and less about how technically brilliant it is.

I can weep pretty easily. I can get tears in my eyes from a beautiful work of art.