Hilton Als Quotes

I make pictures and someone comes in and calls it art.

Draw a line; draw a line that pleases you. And remember that it is not the artist's role to copy the outlines of things but to create a world of his own lines on paper." (pp.28-29)

The child and the great artist -- these alone receive the sensation fresh as it was at the beginning of the world.

Artists aren't looking for you to write them something; they're looking for you to give them something new.

The artist has to look at life as he did when he was a child. If he loses that faculty, he cannot express himself in an original, that is, a personal way.

How did I come to be an artist ? Endless curiosity, observation, research - and a great amount of joy in the thing

The artist is a receptacle for emotions that come from all over the place: from the sky, from the earth, from a scrap of paper, from a passing shape, from a spider's web.

To be an artist, you don't have to compose music or paint or be in the movies or write books. It's just a way of living. It has to do with paying attention, remembering, filtering what you see and answering back, participating in life.

If you have the ideas, and you're a creative person, then you don't really differentiate in how your ideas manifest themselves.

You know, you become an artist, you become an observer, of life, and you digest life by making art about it.

I believe and find in my study of art that the real artist is nine-tenths of the time a craftsman, and it is only in that small one-tenth of the time that he rises to the elevated position of a prophet and a master.

An artist observes, selects, guesses, and synthesizes.

Art is embedded in nature and they who can extract it, have it.

Thanks to art, instead of seeing one world, our own, we see it multiplied and as many original artists as there are, so many worlds are at our disposal.

As an aspiring artist, you should strive for originality of vision. Have something to say and a fresh way of saying it. No story is worth the writing, no picture worth the making, if it’s not the work of the imagination.

Craft can get you through ninety percent of a piece, but it's art that carries you at the end.

I don't really know where I got my artists idea. The scraps of what I remember do not explain to me where it came from. I only know that by this time it was definitely settled in my mind.

You think you're an artist; prove it

I think of memory as a game, that is as something one engages in with a very profound kind of "playfulness."

While most people in the arts think they have to be constantly looking forward to be edgy and creative....the real secret of creativity is to go back and remember.

Memory is the friend of wit, but the treacherous ally of invention; there are many books that owe their success to two things; good memory of those who write them, and the bad memory of those who read them

All men are creative but few are artists.

Painting is an illusion, a piece of magic, so what you see is not what you see. I don't know what a painting is; who knows what sets off even the desire to paint? It might be things, thoughts, a memory, sensations, which have nothing to do directly with painting itself. They can come from anything and anywhere.

A distinction is made between artists who work directly from nature and those who work purely from imagination. Neither if these methods should be preferred to the exclusion of the other. Often both are used in turn by the same man.

I'm a sponge, the more I absorb, the more I am able to articulate my vision, as artists do, like Picasso. I'm an artist in that light. I went from being an artist to an artiste.