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Artists to my mind are the real architects of change, and not the political legislators who implement change after the fact.
~William S. Burroughs

I see painting as an evocative magic, and there must always be a random factor in magic, one which must be constantly changed and renewed.
~William S. Burroughs

In my writing I am acting as a map maker, an explorer of psychic areas... a cosmonaut of inner space, and I see no point in exploring areas that have already been thoroughly surveyed.
~William S. Burroughs

What the artist must render is a living moment somehow, a living moment actually in action or an inward experience.
~Joseph Campbell

The creative act is not hanging on, but yielding to a new creative movement. Awe is what moves us forward.
~Joseph Campbell

A man of genius makes no mistakes; his errors are volitional and are the portals of discovery.
~James Joyce

Irresponsibility is part of the pleasure of all art; it is the part the schools cannot recognize.
~James Joyce

That's the artist's role - to strike out always for something new, to break away, to defy, to... grapple with the unfamiliar.
~Brian Aldiss

Creative artists are mankind's awakeners: through the language of metaphor we are the summoners of the outward mind to conscious contact with our inner selves as spirit.
~Ran Andrews

Man will begin to recover the moment he takes art as seriously as physics, chemistry or money.
~Ernst Levy

The artist is the opposite of the politically minded individual, the opposite of the reformer, the opposite of the idealist.  The artist does not tinker with the universe, he recreates it out of his own experience and understanding of life.
~Henry Miller

The progress of an artist is a continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality.
~T.S. Eliot

Art is either plagiarism or revolution.
~Paul Gauguin

Listen carefully to first criticisms made of your work.  Note just what it is about your work that critics don't like - then cultivate it.  That's the only part of your work that's individual and worth keeping.
~Jean Cocteau

The work of art may have a moral effect, but to demand moral purpose from the artist is to make him ruin his work.
~Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

As far as I am concerned, a painting speaks for itself.  What is the use of giving explanations, when all is said and done?  A painter has only one language.
~Pablo Picasso

The world today doesn't make sense, so why should I paint pictures that do?
~Pablo Picasso

Life isn’t divided into genres. It’s a horrifying, romantic, tragic, comical, science-fiction cowboy detective novel. You know, with a bit of pornography if you're lucky.
~Alan Moore

To me, all creativity is magic. Ideas start out in the empty void of your head - and they end up as a material thing, like a book you can hold in your hand. That is the magical process. It's an alchemical thing. Yes, we do get the gold out of it but that's not the most important thing. It's the work itself.
~Alan Moore

I think that storytelling and creation are very close to what the center of what magic is about. I think not just for me, but for most of the cultures that have had a concept of magic, then the manipulation of language, and words, and thus of stories and fictions, has been very close to the center of it all.
~Alan Moore

Our society is run by insane people for insane objectives. I think we're being run by maniacs for maniacal ends and I think I'm liable to be put away as insane for expressing that. That's what's insane about it.
~John Lennon

I am enough of an artist to draw freely upon my imagination. Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world.
~Albert Einstein

All religions, arts and sciences are branches of the same tree. All these aspirations are directed toward ennobling man's life, lifting it from the sphere of mere physical existence and leading the individual towards freedom.
~Albert Einstein

There is one thing one has to have: either a soul that is cheerful by nature, or a soul made cheerful by work, love, art, and knowledge.
~Friedrich Nietzsche

Art is essentially the affirmation, the blessing, and the deification of existence.
~Friedrich Nietzsche

There is no must in art because art is free.
~Wassily Kandinsky

I found I could say things with color and shapes that I couldn't say any other way - things I had no words for.
~Georgia O'Keeffe

The aim of every artist is to arrest motion, which is life, by artificial means and hold it fixed so that a hundred years later, when a stranger looks at it, it moves again since it is life.
~William Faulkner

Every child is an artist.  The problem is how to remain an artist once we grow up.
~Pablo Picasso

Painting is poetry that is seen rather than felt, and poetry is painting that is felt rather than seen.
~Leonardo da Vinci

What garlic is to salad, insanity is to art.
~Augustus Saint-Gaudens

The aim of art is to represent not the outward appearance of things, but their inward significance.
~Aristotle

To send light into the darkness of men's hearts - such is the duty of the artist.
~Schumann

We all know that Art is not truth.  Art is a lie that makes us realize truth, at least the truth that is given us to understand.  The artist must know the manner whereby to convince others of the truthfulness of his lies.
~Pablo Picasso

I believe that if it were left to artists to choose their own labels, most would choose none.
~Ben Shahn

To live a creative life, we must lose our fear of being wrong.
~Joseph Chilton Pearce

The creation of art is not the fulfillment of a need but the creation of a need. The world never needed Beethoven's Fifth Symphony until he created it. Now we could not live without it.
~Louis I Kahn

Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once he grows up.
~Pablo Picasso