Rebecca West:
Art is not a luxury, but a necessity.

Beverly Sills:
Art is the signature of civilizations.

Diane Ackerman:
Nothing reveals more about the inner life of people than their arts.

Twyla Tharp:
Art is the only way to run away without leaving home.

Elizabeth Bowen:
Art is the only thing that can go on mattering once it has stopped hurting.

Rebecca West:
I cannot see that art is anything less than a way of making joys perpetual.

Louise Bogan:
True revolutions in art restore more than they destroy.

Rebecca West:
Art is at least in part a way of collecting information about the universe.

Edith Sitwell:
The arts are life accelerated and concentrated.

Nikki Giovanni:
Art is not for the cultivated taste. It is to cultivate a taste.

Margaret Fuller:
Always Art is Art, only by presenting an adequate outward symbol of some fact in the interior life.

Iris Murdoch:
All art deals with the absurd and aims at the simple.

Iris Murdoch:
Art is a kind of artificial memory and the pain which attends all serious art is a sense of that factitiousness.

Edith Sitwell:
All great art contains an element of the irrational.

Arlene Croce:
A masterpiece doesn't so much transcend its time as perpetuate it; it keeps its moment alive.

Susan Sontag:
Real art has the capacity to make us nervous.

Georgia O'Keeffe:
To create one's own world in any of the arts takes courage.

Elizabeth Janeway:
Art is a framework, a kind of living trellis, on which public dreaming can take shape.

Marya Mannes:
Art can excite, titillate, please, entertain, and sometimes shock; but its ultimate function is to ennoble.

Francoise Sagan:
Art must take reality by surprise.

Ouida:
Belief of some sort is the lifeblood of Art.

Ann Petry:
All truly great art is propaganda.

Susanne K. Langer:
Art is the objectification of feeling, and the subjectification of nature.

Susan Sontag:
The basic unit for contemporary art is not the idea, but the analysis of and extension of sensations.

Nadia Boulanger:
Art is not emotion. Art is the medium in which emotion is expressed.

Eleanor Roosevelt:
We need emotional outlets in this country, and the more artistic people we develop the better it will be for us as a nation.

Ayn Rand:
Art is the indispensable medium for the communication of a moral idea.

Han Suyin:
Moralists have no place in an art gallery.

Elizabeth Janeway:
What society requires from art… is that it function as an early warning system.

Ruby Dee:
Art is in the process of redefining our relationships to each other…The creative minds are bubbling, and I know the soup that's coming up next time is going to feed a lot more of us.

Pauline Kael:
Art doesn't come in measured quantities; it's got to be too much or it's not enough.

Edith Hamilton:
Great art is the expression of a solution of the conflict between the demands of the world without and that within.

Rebecca West:
Any authentic work of art must start an argument between the artist and his audience.

Simone Well:
A work of art has an author and yet, when it is perfect, it has something which is essentially anonymous about it.

Elizabeth Hardwick:
Art is a profession, not a shrine.

Uta Hagen:
One cannot demand of art that it pay you in any other way than in the satisfaction of the work itself.

Eileen Walkenstein:
The reward of art is not fame or success, but intoxication; that is why so many bad artists are unable to live without it.

Marlene Dietrich:
Nobody can foresee what will please the critics. Every artistic activity is, and always will be, a poker game.

Hallie Flanagan:
Art in America has always been regarded as a luxury.

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