Wall Art And Quotes & Sayings

Dance, like music, knows no geographical boundaries, no linguistic barriers and no racial divisions. All walls crumble where art is concerned. It is a great unifying and integrating force. — Vempati Chinna Satyam

Barack Obama's life was so much simpler in 2009. Back then, he had refined the cold act of blaming others for the bad economy into an art form. Deficits? Blame Bush's tax cuts. Spending? Blame the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. No business investment? Blame Wall Street. — John Sununu

The garden reconciles human art and wild nature, hard work and deep pleasure, spiritual practice and the material world. It is a magical place because it is not divided. The many divisions and polarizations that terrorize a disenchanted world find peaceful accord among mossy rock walls, rough stone paths, and trimmed bushes. Maybe a garden sometimes seems fragile, for all its earth and labor, because it achieves such an extraordinary delicate balance of nature and human life, naturalness and artificiality. It has its own liminality, its point of balance between great extremes. — Thomas Moore

The Art Snob can be recognized in the home by the quick look he gives the pictures on your walls, quick but penetrating, as though he were undressing them. This is followed either by complete and pained silence or a comment such as 'That's really a very pleasant little water color you have there. — Russell Lynes

It is not hard to understand modern art. If it hangs on a wall it's a painting, and if you can walk around it it's a sculpture. — Tom Stoppard

The art of politics is learning to walk with your back to the wall, your elbows high, and a smile on your face. It's a survival game played under the glare of lights. — Jean Chretien

When I was fourteen, I had a massive poster on my wall of a giant pop-art mouth advertising a Swiss exhibition of abstract art. My friends and family mocked my pretention, but I loved that poster and the hope it offered of an exciting world of thought beyond the boundaries of stifling Solihull. But one day the poster fell off the wall and the dog pissed all over it, ruining it for ever, while my mother laughed. That poster is what the Alternative Comedy dream meant to me - the possibility of a better world. And now it is covered in dog's piss. — Stewart Lee

Comic books themselves are getting more literate. And there are people who are screenwriters and television writers and novelists who are writing for the comics, for some reason, they love doing it and some of the art work in the comics, I mean it rivals anything you'll see hanging on the walls of museums, they're illustrations more than drawings and all the people are discovering this and they're turning on to it. — Stan Lee

Art is not disposable. If you want it, you have to hold it and smell it and touch it and read the credits and enjoy it and put it on your wall. — John Malkovich

The silent painting speaks on the walls and does much good. — Gregory Of Nyssa

Through the last few decades it [the art object] has been ripped off the wall and twisted through every conceivable permutation, yet back to the wall it insists on going. — Ashley Bickerton

I'd like to go back to Paris someday and visit the Lourve museum, get a good running start, and hurl myself at the wall. — Warren Zevon

And the art was in every corner and wall ... a Mural of the Century of Progress in Colombia South America is rich in detail, painted by a student of the Fine Arts Academy of Chicago named Santiago Martinez; a name to remember ... — Santiago Martinez Delgado

Art is frightening. Art isn't pretty. Art isn't painting. Art isn't something you hang on the wall. Art is what we do when we're truly alive. An artist is someone who uses bravery, insight, creativity, and boldness to challenge the status quo. And an artist takes it (all of it, the work, the process, the feedback from those we seek to connect with) personally. — Seth Godin

A very young painter is seldom alone. If he is an art student, he is in an art school with other students. He does not yet know that one day he will have to face himself as a solitary creature enclosed in a space of four walls ... and that he will have to be a self-propelled being, with no one at is side. — Pierre Alechinsky

Art is the heart's explosion on the world. Music. Dance. Poetry. Art on cars, on walls, on our skins. There is probably no more powerful force for change in this uncertain and crisis-ridden world than young people and their art. It is the consciousness of the world breaking away from the strangle grip of an archaic social order. — Luis J. Rodriguez

We live today amid ritualized anithumanisms. Among those intelligent enough to feel despair, some seek salvation in the literary artist. Artists love flattery; and the scam doesn't work without mystifying the process.

The weather is unpredictable, but it is not mysterious.

Wall Street is unpredictable, but it is not mysterious.

Writing is unpredictable, (like street and sky, there are too many variables.) Its mystery vanishes, like a shadow, the moment the light aimed at your characters turns back upon yourself. — Doran Larson

Over middle of mantel, engraving - Washington Crossing the Delaware; on the wall by the door, copy of it done in thunder-and-lightning crewels by one of the young ladies - work of art which would have made Washington hesitate about crossing, if he could have foreseen what advantage was going to be taken of it. — Mark Twain

Rose's work of art took her all day, including two playtimes, story time, and most of lunch.
At the end of school it was stolen from her by the wicked teacher who had pretended to be so interested.
"Beautiful- what-is-it?" she asked as she pinned it high on the wall, where Rose could not reach.
"They take your pictures," said Indigo, ... when he finally made out what all the roaring and stamping was about. "They do take them ... Why do you want that picture so much?" he asked Rose.
"It was my best ever," said Rose furiously. "I hate school. I hate everyone in it. I will kill them all when I'm big enough."
"You can't just go round killing people," Indigo told her ... — Hilary McKay

People in coats and ties were milling around the Talley gallery, and on the wall were the minimally rendered still lifes by Giorgio Morandi, most of them no bigger than a tea tray. Their thin browns, ashy grays, and muted blues made people speak softly to one another, as if a shouted word might curdle one of the paintings and ruin it. Bottles, carafes, and ceramic whatnots sat in his paintings like small animals huddling for warmth, and these shy pictures could easily hang next to a Picasso or Matisse without feeling inferior. — Steve Martin

Art should exhilarate, and throw down the walls of circumstance on every side, awakening in the beholder the same sense of universal relation and power which the work evinced in the artist. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

Sometimes you don't get the value of the art or the painting you buy. The value you get from it is on the wall and you're looking at it. It's the same with your car. You're using it, so it goes down in value but you've used it. — Lemar

I will admit that I wanted to shout for standing on the top of a scaffold in front of a good new wall always goes to my head. It is a sensation something between that of an angel let out of his cage into a new sky and a drunkard turned loose in a royal cellar.
And after all, what nobler elevation could you find in this world than the scaffold of a wall painter? No admiral on the bridge of a new battleship designed by the old navy, could feel more pleased with himself than Gulley, on two planks, forty feet above dirt level, with his palette table beside him, his brush in his hand, and the draught blowing up his trousers; cleared for action. — Joyce Cary

Art and religion, carnivals and saturnalia, dancing and listening to oratory - all these have served, in H. G. Wells's phrase, as Doors in the Wall. — Aldous Huxley

It was said that [Vetinari] would tolerate absolutely anything apart from anything that threatened the city* ... [Footnote] And mime artists. It was a strange aversion, but there you are. Anyone in baggy trousers and a white face who tried to ply their art anywhere within Ankh's crumbling walls would very quickly find themselves in a a scorpion pit, on one wall of which was painted the advice: Learn The Words. — Terry Pratchett

derelict. my voice cracked and yolk poured out. wind chimes rigid, no breeze, no song. my wings found hidden in your suitcase. pleas for help mistaken for a swan song. i'm stuffing pages from my journal down my throat as kindling. hoping the smoke will get the taste of you out of my mouth. he looks at me from across the room and all i want is to push him against the wall. ravage. ravage. carnage has never been more vogue. is it still art if it doesn't bring you to your knees? lover, let me prey at your altar. let me bare my fangs in praise. don't i look so pretty in a funeral shroud? i keep time with the click of my creaking bones. dance with me under the milky translucence of a world suffocating. how did you find me? i buried myself beneath the cicadas. is a girl trapped in glass still a prize?
let me get under your skin. i want to know what your fears taste like. i want to consume. — Taylor Rhodes

If the art of gardening is at last to turn back from her extravagances and rest with her other sisters, it is, above everything, necessary to have clearly before you what you require ... It is certainly tasteless and inconsistent to desire to encompass the world with a garden-wall, but very practicable and reasonable to make a garden ... into a characteristic whole to the eye, heart, and nderstanding alike. — Friedrich Schiller

Sudenly Garge spring up and walk to the wall to admire some modarn art hanging on Frank and Estele Catandas wall. Hes impressed. Frank and Estele have always had a traditienel sensibility when it come to aesthetic matter's. For as long as he knew it, this space on the wall was ocupied by a Normen Rockwell print of a smileing child with a cast on his arm eating a handful of bird seed out of the hand of the postman. But now its replace with this minimelist art work, a large black rectangle. He make out hes bald reflectien in the imposibly smooth black surfece. It look like something that should be hang in the Moma (Museum Of Modarn Art).
"This is beauteful," Garge remark. "It seem like a stark comentary on the end of art. Who designe this?"
"Not art," Frank go. "Thats a televisien. — Seinfeld 2000

Each age, each guilty age, builds high walls around its Versailles; and personally I hate those walls most when they are made by literature and art. — John Fowles

Home. the word always had air quotes around it in her mind. She'd done what she could to make her flat cozy, filling it with art, books, ornate lanterns, and a Persian carpet as soft as lynx fur. And of course there were her angel wings taking up one whole wall. But there was no help for the real emptiness; its close air was stirred by no breath but her own. When she was alone, the empty place within her, the missingness, as she thought of it, seemed to swell. Even being with Kaz had done something to keep it at bay, though not enough. Never enough. — Laini Taylor

The arts speak across epochs. If you think that people started to build a cathedral in 1315 and the people worked on that cathedral, it wasn't going to be finished until 1585. So they were thinking 200 years from now. Maybe by the time I die, this wall might be put up. — Wynton Marsalis

What is dangerous about the far right is not that it takes religion seriously - most of us do - but rather that it condemns all other spiritual choices - the Buddhist, the Jew, the Muslim, and many others who consider themselves to be good Christians. The wall of separation between church and state is needed precisely because religion, like art, is too important a part of the human experience to be choked by the hands of censors. — Barbra Streisand

While the Roman Empire was overrun by waves not only of Ostrogoths, Vizigoths and even Goths, but also of Vandals (who destroyed works of art) and Huns (who destroyed everything and everybody, including Goths, Ostrogoths, Vizigoths and even Vandals), Britain was attacked by waves of Picts (and, of course, Scots) who had recently learnt how to climb the wall, and of Angles, Saxons and Jutes who, landing at Thanet, soon overran the country with fire (and, of course, the sword). — W.C. Sellar

Wall-to-wall masterpieces, after all, ought to be preferred to wall-to-wall decorative arts, even if the decorative arts are of the highest quality peppered and salted with dukes and tiaras. — Joseph Alsop

Rumors sound of galleries asking artists for upsized art and more of it. I've heard of photographers asked to print larger to increase the wall power and salability of their work. Everything winds up set to maximum in order to feed the beast. — Jerry Saltz

When I was young I was constantly reading walls; I took in everything written on walls, from love messages to political messages. It was my hobby and became my art. — Jose Parla

Look at them. Where are they looking? They're not looking at each other, they're not looking at the art on the wall or the sun in the sky; they're looking at their phones. They hang on to every beep and alert and tweet and status update. I don't want to be that. I'm distracted enough as it is by the actual, tangible, physical world. I've embraced the efficiency of a desktop PC for work and research, and I even use a laptop on my own time, but I draw the line at a cell phone. If I want social media, I'll join a book club. I will not be collared and leashed and tracked like a tagged orca in the ocean. — Penny Reid

I had already imagined how it would be next year.
I'd be at Columbia, and Marcus would move to Manhattan, or maybe one of the outer boroughs. I would study hard, and he would make money playing gigs at dingy bars. We'd spend countless hours going to clubs to see bands on the verge, touring obscure art exhibits, and sipping pot after pot of black coffee at hole-in-the-wall cafes. Many more hours would be spent lounging under the covers. We would never run out of witty and fascinating things to say to each other. Eventually, he'd apply to Columbia, and we'd be the sort of well-educated, cosmopolitan couple that confuse the suburbumpkins who never leave Pineville. — Megan McCafferty

Zero dimensions! Have you seen such a thing done?" "No. We've only witnessed two-dimensionalization. We've never even seen one-dimensionalization. But somewhere, some Zero-Homers must be trying. No one knows if they've ever succeeded. Comparatively, it's easier to lower the speed of light to zero, so we've seen more evidence of such attempts to lower the speed of light past zero and return it to infinity." "Is that even theoretically possible?" "We don't know. Maybe the Zero-Homers have theories that say yes, but I don't think so. Zero-lightspeed is an impassable wall. Zero-lightspeed is absolute death for all existence, the cessation of all motion. Under such conditions, the subjective cannot influence the objective in any way, so how can the 'hour hand' be shifted past it? I think the Zero-Homers are practicing a kind of religion, a kind of performance art." Cheng — Liu Cixin

As for Madelyne, she continued to ply her trade. But such a life takes a fast toll on a woman. It is easy to be a remote, untouchable beauty and stay that way for many, many years. And if a stunning tapestry is hung upon a wall, it remains unsullied and a work of art. However, if one drapes it across the floor of a pub and all manner of men tread upon it with their heavy boots, it's going to be worn rather thin, and rather quickly. Such was the case with my mother. — Peter David

I made a body of work, which was like trying to make movies on a wall and was made up of all different images and materials. I had the aspiration to make movies because I thought that was the cycle. I had this insane egomaniac idea that I could make movies because I made these gigantic art projects. — Robert Longo

The most important thing in art is The Frame. For painting: literally; for other arts: figuratively
because, without this humble appliance, you can't know where The Art stops and The Real World begins. You have to put a 'box' around it because otherwise, what is that shit on the wall? — Frank Zappa

Art is what we call ... the thing an artist does.
It's not the medium or the oil or the price or whether it hangs on a wall or you eat it. What matters, what makes it art, is that the person who made it overcame the resistance, ignored the voice of doubt and made something worth making. Something risky. Something human.
Art is not in the ... eye of the beholder. It's in the soul of the artist. — Seth Godin

Brave old-flowers! Wall-flowers, Gilly flowers, Stocks! For even as the field-flowers, from which a trifle, a ray of beauty, a drop of perfume, divides them, they have charming names, the softest in the language; and each of them, like tiny, art-less ex-votos, or like medals bestowed by the gratitude of men, proudly bears three or four. — Maurice Maeterlinck

It's perfectly possible to enjoy a good, civilized, person-to-person conversation with a picture on a museum wall. Talk to it, listen carefully, and it will more than likely talk back to you. — Peter Clothier

I was walking down a street and after his death and saw a billboard on the side of a brick wall for Van's shoes. It was a picture of Hopper's face, and all it said was, 'Hopper Lives.' So I think he's still part of youth culture. There are lessons to be learned from Hopper about being a young person who wants to live the art life in America. — Tom Folsom

The organic laws of construction tangled me in my desires, and only with great pain, effort, and struggle did I break through these 'walls around art. — Wassily Kandinsky

When you're jealous, especially of someone else's art or creations you automatically put up these selfish walls that reinforce your stupid ideas. It's hard to pull those walls down and look at what you're hiding. Look at your own weakness and realize that the jealousy came from knowing that you're intimidated by someone else's work, and that when you compare it to your own, you fall short. — Joe Rogan

Religion, a mediaeval form of unreason, when combined with modern weaponry becomes a real threat to our freedoms. This religious totalitarianism has caused a deadly mutation in the heart of Islam and we see the tragic consequences in Paris today. I stand with Charlie Hebdo, as we all must, to defend the art of satire, which has always been a force for liberty and against tyranny, dishonesty and stupidity. 'Respect for religion' has become a code phrase meaning 'fear of religion.' Religions, like all other ideas, deserve criticism, satire, and, yes, our fearless disrespect."

[I Stand With Charlie Hebdo, as We All Must (Wall Street Journal, January 7, 2015)] — Salman Rushdie

The mob not only grabs hold of art without being entitled to do so, but it also enters the artist. It takes up residence inside the artist and smashes a few holes in the wall, windows to the outer world: The mob wants to be seen. — Elfriede Jelinek

What is drawing? It is working oneself through an invisible iron wall that seems to stand between what one feels and what one can do. - Vincent van Gogh, The Letters of Vincent van Gogh to His Brother — Hokusai

I don't collect art at all. I'm fascinated by art. I receive a lot of presents. My house is full of things, but I am not a collector; it's just that people I work for, and friends, give me a lot of things. There are pictures all over the walls, sculptures, mobiles and paintings. I am embarrassed because I wonder what I should do with them. — Peter Lindbergh

Confidence and courage are special skills to the art ... Within the four walls of his study, the artist should be modest, work diligently and conscientiously. While for the public, he'll show himself audacious, yes even into cheerful boldness. And so a new public's darling has arisen. — Robert Schumann

Just as the development of earth art and installation art stemmed from the idea of taking art out of the galleries, the basis of my involvement with public art is a continuation of wall drawings. — Sol LeWitt

For me, the canvas is an abstract interpretation of a wall. It's a piece of art with its own history, one that alludes to the passage of time and to the theater of life. — Jose Parla

Set in the remote and harsh high desert landscape of Idaho, Outpost is an artist live/work studio and sculpture garden for making and displaying art. An important aspect of the complex is the protected paradise garden, which is separated from the wild landscape by thick masonry walls. The materials used in the structure, including concrete block, car-decking, and plywood, require little to no maintenance, and are capable of withstanding the extreme weather that characterize the desert's four seasons. — Tom Kundig

Art is the provocation for talking about enigma and the search for sense in human life. One can do that by telling a story or writing about a fresco by Giotto or studying how a snail climbs up a wall. — John Berger

She will be busy writing novels. As soon as she had has gotten far enough away from this frighteningly puritanical country, her mind will be set free, and she will be able to turn all of her observations in richly drawn characters and intricately themed stories."
"But what will she eat, dear Grass?" Barnard leaned against the wall, his arms crossing his chest skeptically.
"Baguette and red wine, pure art, filthy air. Look at her, she is made of rose petals, and the world will take good care of her. And if it does not, we will have our hearts moved by such an exquisitely gorgeous tragedy. — Anna Godbersen

You have a person in a very tiny cell banging himself from one wall to the other and not being able to find any way out of it. What that person can do is talk. Is create a whole balloon of language which would carry him through the ceiling to somewhere else. This is the art. This is what a story is. — Dan Miron

For something to become a work of art, a labeling process must take place that requires three participants: an artist who produces an apt object, a client or public, and a critic or connoisseur who mediates between the artist and the public to assure them of the artness of the thing. If I make a painting, it is not sufficient for the painting to be "art" that I consider it so, nor even that you, my friend and neighbor, admire it and hang it on your wall; it must be certified as art by competent authority and exhibited in the institutionally appropriate place, a gallery or museum. — Wyatt MacGaffey

To be a good artist, you have to serve the work of art and allow it to be what it is supposed to be. — Larry Wall

The true professional makes art when he is not feeling good, if the studio is too cold or too warm or the walls are falling down. We are painters and we paint. If I were a sculptor, I'd sculpt. — Jack White

That little guy, said Boris in the car on the way to Antwerp. You know the painter saw him-he wasn't painting that bird from his mind, you know? That's a real little guy, chained up on the wall, there. If I saw him mixed up with dozen other birds all the same kind, I could pick him out, no problem.
And he's right. So could I. And if I could go back in time I'd clip the chain in a heartbeat and never care a minute that the picture was never painted. — Donna Tartt

The 10 or 12 artists I have known really well all my life are at least as competitive as professional athletes. They may express it in slightly different terms, but you look at the Jackson Pollocks et al., and they are as interested in wall space in the galleries as Joe Montana is in the percentage of completed passes. So the notion that symphonic conducting, or stage play, or pure art, is not a competitive business is real bullshit. — Tom Peters

The only thing I collect is art. I collect it because I like looking at it. A lot of it is really personal stuff that my friends have made, paintings that my husband's mother made, and things that I bought. I buy abstract art on eBay, and I buy some outsider art on eBay, or what is called folk art, I buy a lot of. I have a lot of professional art work as well as more stuff my friends' kids make. To have a wall of art to look at, I feel really surrounded by love, because so much of the work is related to my friendships. — Kathleen Hanna

Art is rare and sacred and hard work, and there ought to be a wall of fire around it. — Anthony Burgess

I was a masterpiece; a painting in itself. He was changing me, molding me, and making me into something brand new. I was a blank canvas when I came to him, ready to absorb all the paint he would slather on me. He kept going, adding layer upon layer, sometimes even shedding them just so I could turn out beautiful. And he was done now, ready to let me leave and display me on a wall for people to see. — Evelyn Deshane

On the opposite wall was a Damien Hirst spot painting, bought by Arabella after a decent bonus season. Roger's considered view of the painting, looking at it from aesthetic, art-historical, interior-design, and psychological points of view, was that it had cost forty-seven thousand pounds, plus VAT. — John Lanchester

Not stones, nor wood, nor the art of artisans make a state; but where men are who know how to take care of themselves, these are cities and walls. — John Quincy Adams

To understand Occupy Wall Street, you have to understand artists. Art is freedom - freedom of expression - and its message has resonated through society for centuries. — Peter M. Brant

A Poster Is a Poster and Not a Pipe
A poster has a message. Sometimes. A poster is a sheet of paper without a backside. A poster is a stamp. You can put it on the wall or on the window, on the celing or on the ground, upside down or wrong side up. There are young posters that look very old and old posters that never die. A good poster attacks you. A bad poster loves you. And there are "l'art-pour-l'art" posters that love themselves and want to be beautiful. These type of posters confuse the viewer, muddle up his eyes, and force him to look for something in the poster that is not inside. If you like, you can smoke it in your pipe. — Uwe Loesch

I don't care about truth; I care about art and style and writing and occupying the wall. For me, my writing style is very linked to the fact that it is a work of art on the wall. I had to find a way to write in concise, effective phrases that people standing or walking into a room could read. — Sophie Calle

Character, that subtle art, disappeared among them during those days and nights, existed only in a book or on a painted wall. — Michael Ondaatje

I'm lucky enough and wealthy enough to be able to buy photographs and buy art that inspires me from day to day. I don't want a Picasso on my wall; it's great art, but it's dead art to me. I'd rather have a photograph by someone I've never heard of that really inspires me. — Elton John

I like druggy downtown kids who spray paint walls and trains. I like their lack of training, their primitive technique. I think it hurts you, when you stay too long in school. — Lou Reed

He came face-to-face with the rude paradox fame had dealt him: The secret of his extraordinary art had been his ability to observe human interaction anonymously, thereby gaining insight into the emotions on display in ordinary life
it was his ability to become a fly-on-the-wall that made him famous, and fame had destroyed his ability to become a fly-on-the-wall. — C.R. Strahan

There was no sign of life round the domed emplacement of the Moonraker, and the concrete, already beginning to shimmer in the early morning sun, stretched emptily away towards Deal. It looked like a newly laid aerodome or rather, he thought, with its three disparate concrete 'things', the beehive dome,the flat-iron blast-wall, and the distant cube of the firing point, each casting black pools of shadow towards him in the early sun, like a Dali desert landscape in which three objets trouves reposed at carefully calculated random. — Ian Fleming

There's this shop in New York I go to; it has bones and fossils and insects that are like works of art. I have a few on my wall. — Eva Green

In a way, composing on the melodic level is an expression of a melodic truth, almost like a geometric truth. If it has clarity, other people will recognize it. There's no way of isolating it in a gallery on a white wall and saying, "This is a work of art. This is a mathematical proof." — Eyvind Kang

Mene mene tekel upsharin,' Jace said with a faint smile. 'You don't recognize it? It's from the Bible, vampire. The old one. That's your book, isn't it?'
Just because I'm Jewish doesn't mean I've memorized the Old Testament.'
It's the Writing on the Wall. "God hath numbered thy kingdom, and brought it to an end; thou art weighed in the balance and found wanting." It's a portent of doom
it means the end of an empire. — Cassandra Clare

I like that about art, that what you see is sometimes more about who you are than what's on the wall. I look at this painting and think about how everyone has some secret inside, something sleeping like that yellow bird. — Cath Crowley

THE ART OF DRAWING YOU
In a bed by the Gulf of Corinth, a woman contemplates by firelight the profile of her sleeping lover.
On the wall, his shadow flickers.
The lover, who lies by her side, will leave. At dawn he will leave to war, to death. And his shadow, his traveling companion, will leave with him and with him will die.
It is still dark. The woman takes coal out of the embers and draws on the wall the outline of his shadow.
Those lines will not leave.
They will not embrace her, and she knows it. But they will not leave. — Eduardo Galeano

The new job of art is to sit on the wall and get more expensive. — Robert Hughes

I make videos which are works of art in themselves which have nothing to do with Hollywood movies or anything along those lines and I like videos because they deal with light and dark and time and change and they're just another kind of medium that I can get into and work with when I choose to other than, say, doing something on the wall or a window. — Robert Barry

Although you might have to creep about at night and lie to your mum it's actually one of the more honest art forms available. There is no elitism or hype, it exhibits on the best walls a town has to offer and nobody is put off by the price of admission. — Banksy

As a kid I never knew what I wanted to be when I grow up, but the only thing I knew was that I wanted to create things. And then I wanted to be an astronaut. I would paint stars and the atmosphere and then frame and hang the universe up on my bedroom wall. A few years down the line while I was still stargazing, I came to realize that I'm halfway around the world chasing something and the whole time it's in my backyard. From the very beginning I was who I always wanted to be. — Shawn Lukas

If I took a candy bar, ripped off the wrapper, ate the candy bar, and pinned the wrapper to the wall, is that art, performance art, both, or neither? — Jarod Kintz

"Contemporary art" for me is a kind of historical term that describes the 40 years between the Berlin Wall going up and then coming down. I'm not sure who will come up with a better term to describe art, but I think contemporary art is actually done for. — Liam Gillick

Matt asked me to join the Upright Citizens Brigade, a relatively young sketch group. They needed a girl. I had heard of their shows around town, which seemed like a mixture of improvisation and performance art. They had done a show where each member sat on a street corner and had a Thanksgiving dinner. They did a show where they pretended a member was committing suicide. They did a show where they took an audience member for a virtual-reality tour out into the streets of Chicago. Most of their stuff was about getting the audience out of their chairs and out of their comfort zone. The Upright Citizens Brigade name came from a fake big bad corporation that was mentioned in one of their shows. The idea was this group had co-opted the name and was causing chaos on purpose - picture Occupy Wall Street if they renamed themselves "Halliburton Inc." Like I said, Matt had big ideas. He had a big plan for the UCB and I wanted to be part of it. I grabbed his coattails and held on tight. — Amy Poehler

Life is politics, basically, but you don't just go to a gallery and put the words 'art' and 'politics' on the wall. — Luc Tuymans

On the wall hung a picture of an ugly old Cape Cod house. His friends said, 'Why do you have that ugly thing hanging there?' and Bull said, 'I like it because it's ugly. — Jack Kerouac

I thought art was dead rabbits hanging by their feet on a wall. I went to Italy and saw all the religious paintings, and they didn't move me all that much. Then someone invited me to see this van Gogh exhibit at the Rosenberg Gallery in San Francisco. — Irving Stone

No matter how screwed up the artist might be, there's still the chance that they can produce art that people like us hang on our wall and talk about long after their death. That the sum is greater than one part. That maybe one incident does not a life make. — Charles Martin

At the moment, in Britain we're facing such enormous cutbacks in education programs and music programs and art programs that you feel you are knocking your head against a brick wall. — Peter Maxwell Davies

Because this week I've started in on a hundred reproductions of Rembrandt van Rijn, a hundred portraits of the old artist with the mushroom face, the face of a man pushed to the brink of eternity by art and drink, the door handle starting to turn, the final door pushed open from without by an unknown hand, and I'm beginning to have his puff-paste face, that peeling, piss-soaked wall of a face, I'm beginning to smile his half-moronic smile, to look at the world from the other side of human causes and events, and all my bales these days are framed with that portrait of Rembrandt van Rijn as an old man while I keep filling my drum with wastepaper and open books. — Bohumil Hrabal

I came across Nell like you would a Robert Mapplethorpe at a street art fair, gobsmacked that something so valuable would be lumped in with a bunch of other crap like that. She'd been slumped against the bathroom wall in Butterfields, a dorm we later took to calling Butterfingers, for the lacrosse team residents who manhandled girls made Gumby-legged by Popov vodka. Even with her mouth hanging open, her tongue dry and pebbled white from all the medically sanctioned stimulants, there was no question that she had a movie star face. "Hey," I said, my — Jessica Knoll

Meditation is a deliberate attempt to pierce into the higher states of consciousness and finally go beyond it. The art of meditation is the art of shifting the focus of attention to ever subtler levels, without losing one's grip on the levels left behind. ( ... ) Save all your energies and time for breaking the wall your mind had built around you. Believe me, you will not regret. — Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj

I started collecting art ... simply because I wanted pictures to hang on the wall. I noticed what a difference a picture could make to the ambience of a room, and indeed how shifting work around could change a room's whole feeling. — Michael Audain

Art is the space between the viewer and the rectangle that hangs on the wall. Unless something of the person that created the work is there, there's nothing for the viewer to take away. — T. Allen Lawson

The progress of manufactures and commerce insensibly collects a large multitude within the walls of a city: but these citizens are no longer soldiers; and the arts which adorn and improve the state of civil society, corrupt the habits of the military life. — Edward Gibbon