Robert Hughes Quotes (24 Quotes)


    The new job of art is to sit on the wall and get more expensive.

    A Gustave Courbet portrait of a trout has more death in it than Rubens could get in a whole Crucifixion.

    Less is more, and Moore is a bore was what one heard from English art students.

    An ideal museum show would . . . be a mating of Brideshead Revisited . . ., with House Garden. . . ., provoking intense and pleasurable nostalgia for a past that none of its audience has had.

    Most of the untranscribed and unpublished manuscripts in the book popped out of boxes at me when I wasn't looking for them I picked them up out of the corner of my eye.


    One gets tired of the role critics are supposed to have in this culture: It's like being the piano player in a whorehouse; you don't have any control over the action going on upstairs.

    At 40 years of age, I thought I knew everything. I got a reality check with this class. Kenny (Winston) has become like a big brother to me. We've learned to agree to disagree. I hope and pray that this program continues and we all keep in touch. I'm a st

    America is a construction of mind, not of race or inherited class or ancestral territory.


    The prisons are the monuments of Australia-the Paestums of an extraordinary time-an effort to exile en masse a whole class.

    Transportation made sublimation literal. It conveyed evil to another world.

    I can work four hours on the right side of the project and go back to the left side, and it's all changed.

    It was a secular cathedral, dedicated to the rites of travel.

    A determined soul will do more with a rusty monkey wrench than a loafer will accomplish with all the tools in a machine shop.

    Landscape is to American painting what sex and psychoanalysis are to the American novel.

    It was the basilica of gossip, the Vatican of inside dope.

    Distanced from the work by crowds and railings, they may listen on their Acoustiguides to the plummy vowels of the Met's director, Philippe de Montebello, discoursing like an undertaker on the merits of the deceased.

    Nine-eleven shut this country down. I feel more violated than anything because the statue used to be free, but it's no longer free. To me, that's a travesty.

    Today is just the beginning of this effort. It (the disaster) isn't something we should tuck away and hide from our history. It's who we are.


    Popular in our time, unpopular in his. So runs the stereotype of rejected genius.

    if sanity is to be defined in terms of exact judgment of ends and means and the power of visual analysis.

    The greater the artist, the greater the doubt. Perfect confidence is granted to the less talented as a consolation prize.

    Nothing they design ever gets in the way of a work of art.


    More Robert Hughes Quotations (Based on Topics)


    Art - America - Work & Career - Power - Boredom - Mind - Hair - Garden - World - Time - Doubt & Skepticism - Reality - Confidence - Past - History - Actions - Genius - Travel - Efforts - View All Robert Hughes Quotations

    Related Authors


    Walter Pater - Stanley Crouch - M. H. Abrams - Louis Kronenberger - Joel Siegel - James Wolcott - Irving Babbitt - Henry Louis Gates - Christopher Ricks - Alphonse Karr


Authors (by First Name)

A - B - C - D - E - F - G - H - I - J - K - L - M
N - O - P - Q - R - S - T - U - V - W - X - Y - Z

Other Inspiring Sections