Art will not solve your problems. It will not enable you to live merrily.
— Robert Pinsky
I think my first experience of art, or the joy in making art, was playing the horn at some high-school dance or bar mitzvah or wedding, looking at a roomful of people moving their bodies around in time to what I was doing. There was a piano player, a bass player, a drummer, and my breath making the melody.
There was once a time when art history and film were basically the same medium, but art history is frozen in late-19th-century technology that has survived into the early 21st century.
— Robert Nelson
The thought came to me that all one loves in art becomes beautiful. Beauty is nothing but the expression of the fact that something is being loved. Only thus could she be defined.
— Robert Musil
Most painting in the European tradition was painting the mask. Modern art rejected all that. Our subject matter was the person behind the mask.
— Robert Motherwell
Alchemy is the art of far and near, and I think poetry is alchemy in that way. It's delightful to distort size, to see something that's tiny as though it were vast.
— Robert Morgan
I see things like they've never been seen before. Art is an accurate statement of the time in which it is made.
— Robert Mapplethorpe
To make pictures big is to make them more powerful.
The web, then, or the pattern, a web at once sensuous and logical, an elegant and pregnant texture: that is style, that is the foundation of the art of literature.
— Robert Louis Stevenson
Making art in big cities is often frustrating and difficult. It's why artists are drawn to smaller places.
— Robert Lepage
I have two parents who are brilliant storytellers. The art of developing a story and nurturing a story was present in my household from the day I was born.
— Robert Kurson
Remember the great adversity of art or anything else is a hurried life.
— Robert James Waller
Gardening always has been an art, essentially.
— Robert Irwin
My art is a disciplined high dive - high soar, simultaneous & polychromous, an exaltation of the verbal-visual... my dialogue.
— Robert Indiana
I think of my peace paintings as one long poem, with each painting being a single stanza.
Nothing they design ever gets in the way of a work of art.
— Robert Hughes
Not to make too much of a claim for poetry, but this is a question that goes to the moral heart of the business of any art: 'How do you see the world, and what right do you have to see the world in the way that you do?'
— Robert Hass
For a lot of people, well-meaning teaching has made poetry seem arcane, difficult, a kind of brown-knotting medicine that might be good for you but doesn't taste so good. So I tried to make a collection of poetry that would be fun. And that would bring out poetry as an art, rather than the challenge to say smart things.
All the world old is queer save thee and me, and even thou art a little queer.
— Robert Owen
Don't you know that every perfect life would mean the end of art?
Art is much less important than life, but what a poor life without it.
It may be that the deep necessity of art is the examination of self-deception.
We want to raise the art of living well.
— Robert Mondavi
One must ease the public into it - that's an art in itself.
When I work, and in my art, I hold hands with God.
I'm not an advocate of true rhymes, I don't think. I think that everyone who writes musical theater needs to know how to do true rhymes, because that's the tradition of it, but I do think that in order for the art form to grow, it's important to not let tradition get in the way of innovation.
— Robert Lopez
Opera should be a place for art forms to meet. I've worked a lot with Peter Gabriel; his music isn't operatic, but he creates big, popular gatherings to which architecture, dance, and music are all invited.
More than reading - much more than reading, in fact - I developed a love for telling stories from listening to two parents who really knew how to do it. And it really is an art.
Fiction is all about vicarious experiences and getting into other people's heads in a way that no other art form lets you.
— Robert J. Sawyer
The whole thrust of modern art, as far as I understand it, is expanding the role of the artist as a kind of esthetician, someone who actually spends his time, is trained in a way to deal with qualities.
I never had the exposure to techniques and so forth that children have today with art workshops, but I always had crayons and pencils and still have work going right back to when I was five or six years old.
I realize that protest paintings are not exactly in vogue, but I've done many.
Ruskin's concern for art education applied to the development of the power of the hand and eye for everyone.
— Robert Hewison
Walt Whitman defended the sacredness of love, the purity of passion - the passion that builds every home and fills the world with art and song.
— Robert Green Ingersoll
Poetry is a vocal art for me - but not necessarily a performative one. It might be reading to oneself or recalling some lines by memory.
The visual information of art history is going to students seamlessly, without the enormous trouble those of us who are older had when we studied art history many years ago.
Layer by layer art strips life bare.
Wherever art appears, life disappears.
The idea of avant-garde art is a very suspicious thing to me, the idea that poetry is new and it keeps being new the way Chevrolets every year are new.
If you go back to the Greeks and Romans, they talk about all three - wine, food, and art - as a way of enhancing life.
The photographs that are art have to be separated from the rest - then preserved.
The study of the art of motorcycle maintenance is really a miniature study of the art of rationality itself. Working on a motorcycle, working well, caring, is to become part of a process, to achieve an inner peace of mind. The motorcycle is primarily a mental phenomenon.
— Robert M. Pirsig
The great advantage of the circus, and the reason it is so popular, is really the ideal combination of art and sport. It's the ideal art form, in a certain way, if you want to be accessible.
Of course theater will always be associated intimately to literature, but the themes or whatever have to penetrate you by the senses. Theater is a sensuous experience, and that's its main difference from film or any other dramatic art.
I like good stories above all else... and kickin' art really goes the final stretch to ensure a comic is good.
— Robert Kirkman
Hard science fiction, which is what I write, often is rightly criticized for having either negligible or unbelievable characterization, but the science I've actually studied most post-secondarily is psychology, and characterization is the art of dramatizing psychological principles.
I really have to think of myself as a painter first because sculpture came much, much later. As a student at the Art Institute in Chicago, I simply never became involved in sculpture. I did prints, and I did paintings.
I was the least Pop of all the Pop artists.
The new job of art is to sit on the wall and get more expensive.
I am interested in art as a means of living a life; not as a means of making a living.
— Robert Henri
