Arthur Koestler Quotes

Writing is a creative art form and the acting and directing is more of an interpretive art form.

I wonder if the artist ever lives his life--he is so busy recreating it.

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.

An artist is a man who digests his own subjective impressions and knows how to find a general objective meaning in them, and how to express them in a convincing form.

The best of artists hath no thought to show which the rough stone in its superfluous shell doth not include; to break the marble spell is all the hand that serves the brain can do.

When an artist explains what he is doing, he usually has to do one of two things: either scrap what he has explained, or make his work fit in with the explanation.

Art is a crime scene in a sense, a crucible, of the mind and heart and our dreams.

The important thing is to remember what most impressed you and to put it on canvas as fast as possible.

Art doesn't transform. It just plain forms.

I'm trying to interpret the film through the director's head, but it all comes out through me. So, a composer is kind of like a psychic medium.

The mission of art is to represent nature not to imitate her.

Art, to me, is the interpretation of the impression which nature makes upon the eye and brain.

The artist is the medium between his fantasies and the rest of the world.

Art is the objectification of feeling, and the subjectification of nature.

There's traditionally been a large disconnection in contemporary art between the audience and the artist. Generally, audiences are looking towards what they like, and I can tell you, that's the last thing on an artist's mind.

In the nineteenth century the Germans painted their dream and the outcome was invariably vegetable. The French needed only to paint a vegetable and it was already a dream.

That's what art is. You don't make up stories. You live your life.

All the things an artist must be: poet, explorer of nature, philosopher!

I haven't the slightest idea what art is, but to be a painter is something of which you have to prove.

I do have a dream, a tableau of the bathing place of La Grenouillère, for which I've done some bad pochades (sketches), but it is a dream. Renoir, who have just spent a couple of months here, also wants to paint this subject.

When I did "Seven Easy Pieces," I actually re-performed the performances of other artists. It was such difficult work because I had to really go through the documentation, look through the sources, to ask the witnesses who saw it.

An artist’s job is to captivate… if we stumble into truth, we got lucky.

The artist is called a creator.

So is fighting incompleteness the source of artistic neurosis? I doubt it. At most, this would apply to artists who deal with particular kinds of problems. I don't think we should think of Haydn or Mozart or Dickens or George Eliot in these terms.

I think about sculpture all the time. I work at it for ten to twelve hours a day. I even dream about it. If as a result I was only to produce something that everyone immediately understood I would't have been thinking very profoundly.