Art Borrowing Quotes & Sayings

I've learned from my mistakes and I'm sure I can repeat them exactly." - Peter Cook — Tracy Schorn

I don't believe in originality in art. I think we exist on this earth to inspire each other, through our actions, through our deeds, and through who we are. We're always borrowing. — Bill Viola

MRS. ALLONBY. It is only fair to tell you beforehand he has got no conversation at all.
LADY STUTFIELD. I adore silent men.
MRS ALLONBY. Oh, Ernest isn't silent. He talks the whole time. But he has got no conversation. What he talks about I don't know. I haven't listened to him for years. — Oscar Wilde

To write without any awareness of a tradition you are trying to become a part of would be self-defeating. Every artist alive responds to the history of his or her art - borrowing, stealing, rebelling against, and building on what other artists have done. — Dorianne Laux

And health in art - what is that? It has nothing to do with a sane criticism of life. There is more health in Baudelaire than there is in [Kingsley]. Health is the artist's recognition of the limitations of the form in which he works. It is the honour and the homage which he gives to the material he uses - whether it be language with its glories, or marble or pigment with their glories - knowing that the true brotherhood of the arts consists not in their borrowing one another's method, but in their producing, each of them by its own individual means, each of them by keeping its objective limits, the same unique artistic delight. The delight is like that given to us by music - for music is the art in which form and matter are always one, the art whose subject cannot be separated from the method of its expression, the art which most completely realises the artistic ideal, and is the condition to which all the other arts are constantly aspiring. — Oscar Wilde

Science fiction is the fiction of ideas. Ideas excite me, and as soon as I get excited, the adrenaline gets going and the next thing I know I'm borrowing energy from the ideas themselves. Science fiction is any idea that occurs in the head and doesn't exist yet, but soon will, and will change everything for everybody, and nothing will ever be the same again. As soon as you have an idea that changes some small part of the world you are writing science fiction. It is always the art of the possible, never the impossible. — Ray Bradbury

The temple of art is built of words. Painting and sculpture and music are but the blazon of its windows, borrowing all their significance from the light, and suggestive only of the temple's uses. — J.G. Holland

No authority is wholly natural or native; when we're not borrowing from our neighbors, we're borrowing from our ancestors. One reason art tends to come from looking outward and not just inward is that we're always speaking from a shaky authority, even when narrating our own experiences - maybe especially when narrating just ourselves. — Rivka Galchen

I had a psychiatrist tell me that shyness is a form of hostility. They tell everybody that, you know. That was a couple of years ago, so I have had a long time to think about it. I have persuaded myself that it isn't true. It's fear and laziness and realism. It's an embarrassed apology which says in effect: Hey - I'm sorry, I probably don't like life as much as you do. — Kurt Vonnegut

Be soft. Petals are cherished for this, and still you condemn it as weakness. — Erica Alex

Working with Bruno Mars would be really awesome. I'm such a fan of his, and I love that he's a real artist. — Becky G

Neutrality in a situation of oppression always supports the status quo. — Walter Wink

But if it so happens ... a work ... under pain of otherwise becoming shameful or false, requires fantasy ... [and that] certain limbs or elements of a figure are altered by borrowing from other species, for example transforming into a dolphin the hinder end of a griffon or a stag ... these alterations will be excellent and the substitution, however unreal it may seem, deserves to be declared a fine invention in the genre of the monstrous.
When a painter introduces into this kind of work of art chimerae and other imaginary beings in order to divert and entertain the senses and also to captivate the eyes of mortals who long to see unclassified and impossible things, he shows himself more respectful of reason than if he produced the usual figures of men or of animals. — Michelangelo Buonarroti

Fear imprisons,
courage liberates,
and love strengthens. — Matshona Dhliwayo

Assuming a sentence rises into the air with the initial capital letter and lands with a soft-ish bump at the full stop, the humble comma can keep the sentence aloft all right, UP like this, UP, sort-of bouncing, and then falling down, and then UP it goes again, assuming you have enough additional things to say, although in the end you may run out of ideas and then you have to roll along the ground with no commas at all until some sort of surface resistance takes over and you run out of steam anyway and then eventually with the help of three dots ... you stop. But the thermals that benignly waft our sentences to new altitudes - that allow us to coast on air, and loop-the-loop, suspending the laws of gravity - well, they are the colons and semicolons. — Lynne Truss

As for borrowing Mr. Whistler's ideas about art, the only thoroughly original ideas I have heard him express have had reference to his own superiority as a painter over painters greater than himself. — Oscar Wilde

Love is needed to strengthen the weak; love becomes tyrannical when it exacts obedience from an unbeliever. — Mahatma Gandhi

Clearly the hardest thing for the working artist is to create his own conception and follow it, unafraid of the strictures it imposes, however rigid these may be ... I see it as the clearest evidence of genius when an artist follows his conception, his idea, his principle, so unswervingly that he has this truth of his constantly in his control, never letting go of it even for the sake of his own enjoyment of his work. — Andrei Tarkovsky

Writing a new play shouldn't be seen as a mystery belonging to a priesthood, but as a challenge, a technical challenge, just to get into it. — Tom Stoppard

Perhaps art criticism cannot be reformed in a logical sense because it was never well-formed in the first place. Art criticism has long been a mongrel among academic pursuits, borrowing whatever it needed from other fields ... — James Elkins

We call those works of art concrete that came into being on the basis of their inherent resources and rules - without external borrowing from natural phenomena, without transforming those phenomena, in other words: not by abstraction. — Max Bill

Monogamy is probably enforced because society if mostly comprised of beta males. — David M. Buss

Afflictions make the heart more deep, more experimental, more knowing and profound, and so, more able to hold, to contain, and beat more. — John Bunyan

You'd think hindsight would do us some good
But all it does sometimes
Is add glass to the kaleidoscope — J.D. Estrada