Art is merely the refuge which the ingenious have invented, when they were supplied with food and women, to escape the tediousness of life.  

—W. Somerset Maugham

 Mystery is the basic element of all works of art.  

—Luis Buñuel

The process of making art is the process of becoming a person with agency, with independent thought, a producer of meaning rather than a consumer of meanings that may be at odds with your soul, your destiny, your humanity. 

 —Rebecca Solnit 

 Good taste is the death of art.  

—Marcel Duchamp 

 Art has an obligation to offend.  

—Edward Albee  

The first mistake of art is to assume that it’s serious.  

—Lester Bangs

  No art ever came out of not risking your neck. 

 —Eudora Welty

  I am for an art that takes its form from the lines of life itself, that twists and extends and accumulates and spits and drips, and is heavy and coarse and blunt and sweet and stupid as life itself. 

 —Claes Oldenburg

  It is the function of art to conceal the difficulties of its execution.  

—Susan Sontag 

 You read something which you thought only happened to you, and you discover that it happened 100 years ago to Dostoyevsky. This is a very great liberation for the suffering, struggling person, who always thinks that he is alone. This is why art is important. Art would not be important if life were not important, and life is important. 

 —James Baldwin  

Art is a means of venting our craziness, our meanness, our towering disgust. 

 —Robert Crumb 

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

—Anthony Burgess

  There’s never a market for true art.  

—Nell Zink

  Life beats down and crushes the soul and art reminds you that you have one.  

—Stella Adler

  A work of art does not answer questions, it provokes them; and its essential meaning is in the tension between the contradictory answers.  

—Leonard Bernstein     

  Winokur’s Quotations