Octavio Paz Quotes

I think if you're a creative person, then you're always kinda looking to move things along - 'Where else can I go? Where can I take this?' From painters to photographers - anything creative in the arts - if you're a true artist, I think you'll always look to do something else. 'Where else can I go with it?' Do you know what I mean?

Art is the imposing of a pattern on experience.

Art is an intersection of many human needs.

And what is 'art'? - a firestorm rushing through Time, arising from no visible source and conforming to no principles of logic or causality.

Art always demands of us something new.

The aim of art is to create space.

If something gets too easy... I want to do something else. But every album is going to be me, no matter what.

Since age seven, I've been composing and have never stopped composing, yet, the creative process is as elusive to me as it has ever been.

Art begins in imitation and ends in innovation.

I'm a huge fan of David Hockney. I love the way he keeps reinventing himself.

Artists live in unknown spaces and give themselves over to following something unknown.

There's no way to really mock up or simulate what I'm doing until I'm there. An exhibition for me is not a statement but an experiment.

I think the idea of art kills creativity.

Like all artists, I go through creative spurts.

Art is the human disposition of sensible or intelligible matter for an esthetic end.

The enemy of art is the absence of limitations.

I think when you're being creative, you still attach it to reality somehow.

Art brings to life things that can seemingly be dead, and can put a fresh perspective on things that are living. It's so important we keep creating.

I think it was Roger Fry who first coined what he took to be a final definition of a work of art, whether it was a painting, building, poem or Hepplewhite chair. He said that the best works of art are finished products that preserve 'a valuable state of mind'.

How do I define a work of art? It is not an asset in the stock-exchange sense, but a man's timid attempt to repeat the miracle that the simplest peasant girl is capable of at any time, that of magically producing life out of nothing.

Art is about the dynamics of the human experience.

Mine was not pop art. I maybe started with a subject, but I changed the subject.

Nothing as drastic an innovation as abstract art could have come in to existence, save as the consequence of a most profound, relentless, unquenchable need. The need is for felt experience - intense, immediate, direct, subtle, unified, warm, vivid, rhythmic.

The starting point of a picture for any painter is a matter of colors and form...I believe that the poetry of art - if that is what one may call it - is a matter of animating these forms and colors.

Is there a necessary succession in style, or are these things pure chance?