Pablo Picasso Quotes

All my life as an artist I have asked myself: What pushes me continually to make sculpture? I have found the answer. art is an action against death. It is a denial of death.

Just do exactly what it is that makes you want to do what you do. The stuff I listen to in my private collection, it's what moves me, makes me want to play. I want to make other people feel like I feel when I listen to that music. Whether other people like it or criticize it - even if there's only 10 people on the planet that love it, you're touching 10 people that way.

Picasso says that an artists paints not to ask a question but because he has found something and he wants to share—he cannot help it—what he has found.

Why one writes is a question I can answer easily, having so often asked it of myself. I believe one writes because one has to create a world in which one can live. I could not live in any of the worlds offered to me - the world of my parents, the world of war, the world of politics. I had to create a world of my own, like a climate, a country, an atmosphere in which I could breathe, reign, and recreate myself when destroyed by living. That, I believe, is the reason for every work of art.

What’s the impulse behind art? It’s saying in whatever language is the language of your work, “If I could move you as much as it moved me … if I can move anyone a tenth as much as that moved me, if I can spark the same sense of mystery and awe and surprise as that sparked in me, well that’s why I do what I do.”

I always wonder what drives us as Artists.

Art for the most part, is about concentration, solitude and determination. It's really not about other people's needs and assumptions. I'm not interested in the notion that art serves something. Art is useless, not useful.

When you build a building, you finish a building. You don't finish a garden; you start it, and then it carries on with its life. So my analogy was really to say that we composers or some of us should think of ourselves as people who start processes rather than finish them. And there might be surprises.

Maybe now if you're not an exhibitionist you're private. Or maybe it's just that for a lot of people - sometimes in interesting ways, sometimes in stupid ways - there's no division between the art object and what surrounds it.

All music has political dimensions because it suggests a way of being.

(There is) art that states the problems of society and wakes people up to make changes in their lives or in their communities,...art that offers an alternative, that demonstrates human behavior that can become a model for creativity, cooperation, freedom and playfulness, and...art that in itself provides glimpses of a larger consciousness or reflects upon the inexplicable.

It is all very well for people with fine arts degrees, but for ordinary people like myself, we want a statue to look like the person.

The purpose of art is to reflect new emerging values and to define the new heroes and heroines so that people can absorb them into their perceptions.

One of my mission statements with all of my art has been to stop the world for people. I want to stop the worrying and stop the world.

There's obviously always danger in making music or art for art's sake. Even as Christians we can be guilty of that, being more about the art than the Artist who gave us this gift.

I begin my pictures under the effect of a shock which I feel and which makes me escape from reality... I need a point of departure, even if it's only a speck of dust or a flash of light.

I support the idea that artists have to make a stand. I'm with that - you're putting the discussion on the table and you're letting people know. You're being brave as an artist and responsible to the community.

The Welsh are the only nation in the world that has produced no graphic or plastic art, no architecture, no drama. They just sing. Sing and blow down wind instruments of plated silver.

I have performed for thousands when they found me exotic, the vogue, daring, but I have danced, at any given time, for about ten people... They were the ones that left the theater forever different from the way they were when they came in. All of my long, long life, I have danced for those ten.

Art is how a culture records its life, how it poses questions for the next generation and how it will be remembered.

If there’s a thing, a scene, maybe, an image that you want to see real bad, that you need to see but it doesn’t exist in the world around you, at least not in the form that you envision, then you create it so that you can look at it and have it around, or show it to other people who wouldn’t have imagined it because they perceive reality in a more narrow, predictable way. And that’s it. That’s all an artist does.

If sculpture can really deal with the body, because we all inhabit ourselves, and if sculpture can really do that, which it is supposed to be able to do, and through it ask questions, philosophical questions, about being, I think these are all things we work on, all of us in our different ways, so perhaps somewhere in there, there are moments where dumb objects can speak.

An artist needs not so much an audience, as to feel a need to answer, a promise to respond... a good feeling about his art.

I kept my culture. I kept the music of my roots. Through my music I became this voice and image of Africa and the people without even realising.

A man climbs a mountain because it is there. An artist makes a work of art because it is not there.