Painting: The art of protecting flat surfaces from the weather and exposing them to the critic.

Ambrose Bierce

So you see, imagination needs moodling - long, inefficient, happy idling, dawdling and puttering.

Brenda Ueland

I merely took the energy it takes to pout and wrote some blues.

Duke Ellington

Art is on the side of the oppressed. Think before you shudder at the simplistic dictum and its heretical definition of the freedom of art. For if art is freedom of the spirit, how can it exist within the oppressors?

Edith Wharton

Art forms of the past were really considered elitist. Bach did not compose for the masses, neither did Beethoven. It was always for patrons, aristocrats, and royalty. Now we have a sort of democratic version of that, which is to say that the audience is so splintered in its interests.

David Cronenberg

I can't criticize what I don't understand. If you want to call this art, you've got the benefit of all my doubts.

Charles Rosin

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

Ben Shahn

I suppose no matter what I'm drawing, there will always be some sort of question in my mind about it. A work of art (even cartoon art)is never really finished; it is abandoned.

Brooke McEldowney

Art is a collaboration between God and the artist, and the less the artist does the better.

Andre Gide

All art is a kind of confession, more or less oblique. All artists, if they are to survive, are forced, at last, to tell the whole story; to vomit the anguish up.

James Baldwin

[Abstract art is] a product of the untalented, sold by the unprincipled to the utterly bewildered.

Al Capp