Mark Rothko Quotes

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

Comics seldom move me the way I would be moved by a novel or movie. I say this as someone who would rather read comics than watch movies, listen to music, anything. But it's not an operatic medium. I hear other people talk about being moved to tears by comics. I can't imagine that.

I'm interested only in expressing basic human emotions. And the fact that a lot of people break down and cry when confronted with my pictures shows that I can communicate these basic human emotions.

I think that music is still a mystery to most people. It kind of goes through most people without a specific thought. They feel the music, which is what's supposed to happen. They're not supposed to be curious about who wrote the music; they're supposed to feel what the show is trying to get them to feel. So if I help get that feeling across, that's good enough for me.

It's hard to explain your emotions when you see a work of art.

All sensitive people agree that there is a peculiar emotion provoked by works of art.

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

It is not sufficient to see and to know the beauty of a work. We must feel and be affected by it.

Any piece of art has the potential to emotionally touch you and nudge you.

I know when I watch certain actors or if I watch Thom Yorke sing on stage, I'm affected by it emotionally. I guess that's what we are all striving for in art but that's such a beautiful thing that happens between two people that may never even meet. So when you do get to meet someone who was affected in that way, it's awesome.

I get letters from people about my work. The thing that pleases me most is that my work touches their feelings. In fact, they don't talk about the paintings. They end up telling me the story of their life or how their father died.

The people that weep before my paintings are having the same religious experience that I had when I painted it.

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

The final test of a painting, theirs, mine, any other, is: does the painter's emotions come across?

Artists don't really want to be marginalized. They believe that everybody should be able to appreciate the experience that an artist gives them, an experience that connects us to each other in a deep way.

If art doesn't move people, then art has failed.

To me, art's highest purpose is to entertain, to enlighten, to inspire, to evoke emotion and to change an audience in some way, big or small.

In music, you feel a connection to the voice and think about the person behind it. In art that's secondary.

I really, really love music. I'm affected by it and uplifted by it, and made to laugh and cry, and almost fall in love with the person who has made me feel so brilliant and communicated so profoundly to me.

I tend not to be so attracted to films that force me into an intellectual place over an emotional one.

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

If the picture speaks to me, if it tells me something about myself, then I want it. Then I have to have it.

I have no interest in making a work that doesn't elicit a feeling.

The claims I'm making for art are simply the claims that we naturally make around music or around poetry. We're much more relaxed around those art forms. We're willing to ask, 'How could this find a place in my heart?'

If buying art is to matter to us deeply, then it has to engage with our emotions and bring something to what one might as well, and with no supernatural associations whatsoever, call our souls.