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First of all, the art of living; then as my ideal profession, poetry and philosophy, and as my real profession, plastic arts; in the last resort, for lack of income, illustrations.

Paul Klee

When the American magazine Cinema asked Kubrick to name his favorite films, he listed the following titles:

1. I Vitelloni (Federico Fellini, 1953)
2. Wild Strawberries (Ingmar Bergman, 1958)
3. Citizen Kane (Orson Welles, 1941)
4. The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (John Huston, 1948)
5. City Lights (Charles Chaplin, 1931)
6. Henry V (Laurence Olivier, 1945)
7. La Notte (Michelangelo Antonioni, 1961)
8. The Bank Dick (W.C. Fields, 1940)
9. Roxie Hart (William Wellman, 1942)
10. Hell’s Angels (Howard Hughes, 1930)

Michel Ciment

This man who had returned could not remember any time in his life when he had not been fired with the will to become a great man; it was a desire Ulrich seemed to have been born with. Such a dream may of course betray vanity and stupidity, but it is no less true that it is a fine and proper ambition without which there probably would not be very many great men in the world.

Robert Musil

One dog that remained was Alpy, a ragged half-breed named after the American dog food Alpo. Strange and wolflike, Alpy softened around the master who loved her: “When God made all the dogs, he had little bits left over and put them in a drawer,” Herrmann would say.  “When he pulled the drawer out, there was Alpy.”

Steven C. Smith

Art is shit. Art galleries are toilets. Curators are toilet attendants. Artists are bullshitters.

The team devised a “Superman” test in which subjects donned virtual reality goggles and were dropped into an evacuated city.
Some were told that they had superhuman powers, and had to deliver a shot of insulin to a diabetic child stranded somewhere nearby. “You lift your arms above your head to fly, and rotate your body to go in another direction - just like Superman in the movies,” says Bailenson.
Other participants were taken on a tourists’ helicopter ride around the city instead.
Once the child had been found, or the helicopter ride was complete, the participants sat through an interview that they were not told was part of the experiment. Halfway through the meeting, the researcher would knock over a pot of stationery on a desk.
Interviewees who had been given superhuman powers in the virtual world rushed to help clean up the mess more often than those who had not - many of whom did nothing at all.

Good art should elicit a response of ‘Huh? Wow!’ as opposed to ‘Wow! Huh?’