Vivienne Westwood Quotes

I really wish people - maybe it's naive - wish people had priorities and were willing to be artistic patrons.

Cleveland is really good about recognizing its artists because of the Arts Council.

One measure of the degree of civilization attained by a nation might fairly be the extent to which the nation's creative artists are supported, encouraged and esteemed by the nation as a whole.

Exposure to the arts and culture is enormously valuable.

We have to support our local artists. It's just that simple. Otherwise, we will have no art.

I'm enamored with the art world. Anytime you look at anything that's considered artistic, there's a commercial world around it: the ballet, opera, any kind of music. It can't exist without it.

I want to give my compliments to Australia. Ever since your government paid a few million dollars for a Jackson Pollack painting, I figure that it must be a marvellous country.

Imagine if all those kings and dukes hadn't commissioned those crazy cathedrals, paintings and music... we'd still be living in sticks and mud. Because none of those things made any economic sense. Human beings' capacity to 'waste time' is a miracle - but that's exactly what art is for.

Without a good cultural policy, without adequate help, we will always have individualists, shooting stars who are rapidly forgotten or who stop painting for a more profitable occupation.

I wish that the arts were better supported, and you can't say that enough times, but I also believe that whatever happens, artists will keep going.

I feel that the arts have an impact in a way that just makes the world more beautiful.

Bring the arts back, and treat it with respect.

I think the problem is when people hear 'arts education,' they think, 'I don't want my son to be some painter that's going to be hanging in some museum after he dies. I don't want my daughter to be a struggling artist making no money.' People don't realize it's more than that. It's beautiful. It brings beauty to our lives.

If you wait until you're an adult to be exposed to the arts, it could seem elitist, it could seem out of reach, it could seem scary.

My grandfather was a great advocate of Scottish art at a time when Scottish artists struggled to be taken seriously. They were not highly regarded, but he fought for them, befriended them, and championed them.

One thing I wanted to say in my Tony speech, which I didn't because I forgot what I was doing because I couldn't believe the view from where I was standing, was that I really, truly believe in an investment in young people in the arts. It is an investment in a more beautiful world.

The notion that the great artist requires a great patron has been around since the Pharaohs. That the born patron also needs an artist to patronize is a less-studied phenomenon.

The only reward one should offer an artist is to buy his work.

The arts in America exist in spite of America, not because of America.

I love painters because I don't paint, so I get to enjoy art; I like collecting paintings.

If you're not educated to enjoy the arts, if you're not taken to a concert, or you don't hear something beautiful, you don't know what you're missing.

When the arts are taken out of the syllabus, people are not going to know what it's like to value the theater.

I think the poets and musicians, they belong to everybody.

For me, the Sundance Institute is just an extension of something I believed in, which is creating a mechanism for new voices to have a place to develop and be heard.

I've always believed that as an artist, as a writer, you need a lot of contact with other people to make your art good.