Leonardo da Vinci Quotes

When you look at a wall spotted with stains...you may discover a resemblance to various landscapes, beautiful with mountains, rivers, rocks, trees. Or again, you may see battles and figures in action, or strange faces and costumes, and an endless variety of objects which you could reduce to complete and well-drawn figures.

The poet doesn't invent. He listens.

Art is embedded in nature and they who can extract it, have it.

What is art if not a concentrated and impassioned effort to make something with the little we have, the little we see?

Imagination, which is a quality writers must have, does not mean the ability to weave pretty stories out of nothing. In the right sense, imagination is a response to what is going on — a sensitiveness to which outside things appeal. It is a composition of sympathy and observation.

There is creation in the eye.

Somebody at one of these places asked me: "What do you do? How do you write, create?" You don't, I told them. You "don't try". That's very important: not to try, either for Cadillacs, creation or immortality. You wait, and if nothing happens, you wait some more. It's like a bug high on the wall. You wait for it to come to you. When it gets close enough you reach out, slap out and kill it. Or if you like it's looks, you make a pet out of it.

To be an artist, you don't have to compose music or paint or be in the movies or write books. It's just a way of living. It has to do with paying attention, remembering, filtering what you see and answering back, participating in life.

Some people would say my paintings show a future world and maybe they do, but I paint from reality. I put several things and ideas together, and perhaps, when I have finished, it could show the future.

Art is not what you see, but what you make others see.

Art is not in some far-off place. A work of art is the expression of a man's whole personality, sensibility and ability.

I try to give people a different way of looking at their surroundings. That's art to me.

I try not to be overly literal. When I'm writing songs, I write down a lot of words, and then I try to simplify it. I like to give people hints or words that make visual pictures for them.

I think it's very important for writers and artists generally to be witnesses to the world, and to be transparent. To let other people speak... to travel... to experience the world. And memorialize it.

Sometimes I see it and then paint it. Other times I paint it and then see it. Both are impure situations, and I prefer neither.

Art doesn't interest me. Only artists interest me.

You can't do sketches enough. Sketch everything and keep your curiosity fresh.

Art is about play and about transcendent meanings, not reducible to politics.

I didn't write this song. Someone was talking in a room. I just wrote down everything they said.

People who get into animation tend to be kids. We don't have to grow up. But also, animators are great observers, and there's this childlike wonder and interest in the world, the observation of little things that happen in life.

The pictures I make come from every blink of my lashes.

Painting from nature is not copying the object; it is realizing one's sensations.

I enjoy looking beyond the obvious and look at the stories happening all around me - you kind of formulate things in your mind and get excited about them.

Anything you can do to express yourself is a form of art. That's why I love my craft so much. I always wanted to play other artists. If I can't play an instrument, then I want to play a character that can. There is an artist behind everything, and I think that's beautiful.

Acting is an art form. If you are not creating something that's unusual and informative and at least has the possibility of being illuminating, then you are not into it as an art form.