Charles Saatchi

If you study a great work of art, you’ll probably find the artist was a kind of genius. And geniuses are different to you and me. So let’s have no talk of temperamental, self-absorbed and petulant babies. Being a good artist is the toughest job you could pick, and you have to be a little nuts to take it on. I love them all.  [The Art Newspaper Nov 2004]

Peter Schjeldahl

Matisse can make you hate your life for its comparatively insipid joys.
[The New Yorker, 1999 review of exhibition Max Beckmann and Paris]

Arthur Schopenhauer

Treat a work of art like a prince: let it speak to you first.

Nettie Seabrooks

The history of civilizations is defined by their art and culture.

David Sedaris

Given enough time, I guess, anything can look good.  All it has to do is survive.  [This Old House, published in The New Yorker, July 2007]

Dr Seuss

I like nonsense, it wakes up the brain cells.

Ben Shahn

I've been asked often what is the difference between an amateur and a professional artist, and I will tell you.  An amateur artist is one who works all week at something else so he can paint on Saturday and Sunday.  A professional artist is one whose wife works so he can paint all the time.  
[Quoted by William Bostick in the Archives of American Art]

George Bernard Shaw

Without art, the crudeness of reality would make the world unbearable.

George Bernard Shaw

Which painting in the National Gallery would I save if there was a fire?  
The one nearest the door of course.

Gilda Snowden

All art is local - that's what grew you.  
[Talk at the Detroit Institute of Arts, Nov 2010]

Susan Sontag

Interpretation is the revenge of the intellectual on art.

Susan Sontag

Do stuff. Be clenched, curious. Not waiting for inspiration’s shove or society’s kiss on your forehead. Pay attention. It’s all about paying attention. Attention is vitality. It connects you with others. It makes you eager. Stay eager.  [Commencement address to Vassar students]

Susan Sontag

Our task is not to find the maximum amount of content in a work of art, mush less to squeeze more content out of the work than is already there. Our task is to cut back on content so we can see the thing at all.  The aim of all commentary on art now should be to make works of art - and, by analogy, our own experience - more, rather than less, real to us. [Against Interpretation]  

Gertrude Stein

For a long time everybody refuses and then almost without a pause almost everybody accepts.

John Steinbeck

Literature is not a game for the cloistered elite.  Literature is as old as speech.  It grew out of a human need for it and it has not changed except to become more needed.  
[Acceptance speech for 1962 Nobel Prize for literature]

Pat Steir
(born 1938)

To handle paint the way Pollock did, you need the muscularity of a ballet dancer. [Quoted in Art News, November 1985]

Alfred Stieglitz

To demand the portrait that will be a complete portrait of a person is as futile as to demand that a motion picture be condensed into a single still.

Alfred Stieglitz

A work is not art until enough noise has been made about it and someone rich comes along and buys it.

Luke Syson

Great art does work on people in mysterious ways. [Curator for Leonardo da Vinci: Painter at the Court of Milan in New York Times, Dec 4, 2011]

Clyfford Still
(1904-1980)

I never wanted color to be color.  I never wanted texture to be texture, or images to become shapes.  I wanted them all to fuse into a living spirit. [quoted in Clyfford Still, ed. John O'Neill, 1979]

Albert Szent-Györgyi
(1893-1986)

Creativity is seeing what everyone else has seen and thinking what no-one else has thought.