H. L. Mencken Quotes

Why do people think artists are special? It's just another job.

Many have genius, but, wanting art, are forever dumb. The two must go together to form the great poet, painter, or sculptor.

a work that intends to be art must first be entertaining.

Art is amoral; so is life. For me there are no obscene pictures or books; there are only poorly conceived and poorly executed ones.

Often while reading a book one feels that the author wouold heave preferred to paint rather than to wirte; one can sense the pleasure he derives from describing a landscape or a person, as if he were painting what he is saying, because deep in his heart he would have preferred to use brushes and colors.

Normal people do not create art.

The power of works of art still continues to be secretly nourished by imitation... kitsch

Alekhine is a poet who creates a work of art out of something that would hardly inspire another man to send home a picture post card.

If you study a great work of art, you'll probably find the artist was a kind of genius. And geniuses are different to you and me. So let's have no talk of temperamental, self-absorbed and petulant babies. Being a good artist is the toughest job you could pick, and you have to be a little nuts to take it on. I love them all.

I gave my genius to my life, but my talent to my art.

The only people who get paid what they're worth are people who don't follow the instruction book, who create art, who are innovative, who work without a map.

Genius gives birth, talent delivers. What Rembrandt or Van Gogh saw in the night can never be seen again.

Conceptual art is only good if the idea is good.

As a great democratic society, we have a special responsibility to the arts. For art is the great democrat, calling forth creative genius from every sector of society, disregarding race or religion or wealth or color. What freedom alone can bring is the liberation of the human mind and a spirit which finds its greatest flowering in the free society. I see of little more importance to the future of our country and our civilization than the full recognition of the place of the artist.

It's in our nature. If you are a plumber, there is an objective way to establish whether you put together a great piping system or not. Art is a bit more slippery than that. So, when you fill a gallery with dirt and someone comes along waving wads of bills, it's difficult not to take them because they become a tangible acknowledgement that what you've been doing actually makes sense.

The thing I hate the most about advertising is that it attracts all the bright, creative and ambitious young people, leaving us mainly with the slow and self-obsessed to become our artists.. Modern art is a disaster area. Never in the field of human history has so much been used by so many to say so little.

A work of art, so far as it is a work of art, cannot - whatever the artist's personal intention - advocate anything at all.

I was an artist, but not a self-proclaimed great artist, just a common man who was working in a form of art which is universal.

I think that for thousands of years people have made the observation that there are certain kinds of extreme depressive states that seem to be more likely to produce philosophers, people in the arts, unusually brilliant scientists.

There is nothing so remote from vanity as true genius. It is almost as natural for those who are endowed with the highest powers of the human mind to produce the miracles of art, as for other men to breathe or move. Correggio, who is said to have produced some of his divinest works almost without having seen a picture, probably did not know that he had done anything extraordinary.

Why not spend that time on art: painting, sculpting, charcoal, pastel, oils? Are words or numbers more important than images? Who decides this? Does algebra move you to tears? Can plural possessives express the feelings in your heart? If you don't learn art now, you will never learn to breathe!

Art can be very political but that can't be the purpose of art, it can't be the driving force. It isn't with any of the books that I love, anyway.

Of all the arts poetry (which owes its origin almost entirely to genius and will least be guided by precept or example) maintains the first rank.

You cannot create a piece of art merely for money. Doing it as part of commerce so denudes art of wonder that it ceases to be art.

Smart art galleries know it's not the words on paper but the emotion in the piece that makes clients pull out the credit card or check book. The gallery's number one concern is will this stuff sell? What your bio, artist's statement or resume articulates will be of no help if you don't make art that connects with buyers.