Top 50 Peter Schjeldahl Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Comic books, graphic novels, involve constant toggling and it’s hard work. You get tired reading comic books, but you never get tired looking at pictures or reading words.”

— Peter Schjeldahl

2. “Love and fear, the two strongest emotions we have. It all starts with emotion.”

— Peter Schjeldahl

3. “You could say that clinical depression is an incapacity to aesthetic response. It’s like there’s a constant agreement within ourselves, a kind of mutual understanding between ourselves and the world.”

— Peter Schjeldahl

4. “A lot of education is like teaching marching; I try to make it more like dancing.”

— Peter Schjeldahl

5. “Life doesn’t go on. It goes nowhere except away. Death goes on. Going on is what death does for a living. The secret to surviving in the universe is to be dead.”

— Peter Schjeldahl

6. “Beauty is a physiological reaction. Beauty is not an object.”

— Peter Schjeldahl

7. “Everything that would begin to make somebody a good student would tend to make him or her a poor artist, and vice versa.”

— Peter Schjeldahl

8. “The experience of beauty is in the eye of the beholder, as they say. The artist’s relation to the object of beauty, how the art makes that happen, is a whole other subject. Beauty is an event. Beauty is something that happens. There is no such thing as a beautiful object or a beautiful woman.”

— Peter Schjeldahl

9. “The aesthetic experience has to be given. And beauty is a regular experience of every person – every person who is not clinically depressed!”

— Peter Schjeldahl

10. “My problem with political art is not that it’s bad art necessarily, but that it is terrible politics.”

— Peter Schjeldahl

11. “Photography is the art of anticipation, not working with memories, but showing their formation. As such, it has relentlessly usurped imaginative and critical prerogatives of older, slower literature and handmade visual art.”

— Peter Schjeldahl

12. “Rembrandt was way ahead of his time. It’s as if he was painting an amateur theatrical, or a professional theatrical, in his studio. It’s a kind of performance.”

— Peter Schjeldahl

13. “Death is like painting rather than like sculpture, because it’s seen from only one side.”

— Peter Schjeldahl

14. “Art teachers are always the doormats of the previous generation.”

— Peter Schjeldahl

15. “Beauty is not a concept. It is the animal joy of the mind.”

— Peter Schjeldahl

16. “Picasso had nicknamed Georges Braque “Wilbur,” thereby becoming “Orville” in their Wright Brothers-like ambition to get painting off the ground of conventional representation.”

— Peter Schjeldahl

17. “All artists and creative people are basically unhappy people. If you were happy, that would mean you were content with the world as it was and why would you ever want to change it?”

— Peter Schjeldahl

18. “The problem of making artists talk about their work is that when they’re making their work the left-brain is shut off. So if you talk to an artist about it, you’re talking to someone who wasn’t there. It’s hopeless.”

— Peter Schjeldahl

19. “You don’t need everybody to agree with you, but you do need a few people. And by this point I have a fairly high degree of confidence in my judgment, in that I don’t doubt my sanity; or, even if I do, I don’t have to be reassured.”

— Peter Schjeldahl

20. “Why do you need street smarts? Shrewdness? Toughness? It’s to protect something soft that is going to be in danger if it’s exposed at the wrong time and place. It’s to protect a soul. But to protect your soul, you have to have one to start with.”

— Peter Schjeldahl

21. “The artist is a strange being. I think it’s safe to say that a real artist is conscious of having a personal singularity that is partly a blessing and partly a curse. An artist enjoys and suffers from isolation. As solitude, isolation can nurture. It can also destroy.”

— Peter Schjeldahl

22. “Minimalism itself had a very strong iconoclast impulse. You think of the sixties as loose and liberated, but in art it was actually quite the contrary.”

— Peter Schjeldahl

23. “Art is always subject to change in a moment by somebody who’s strong enough to shed new light on it.”

— Peter Schjeldahl

24. “Black and white can show how something is. Color adds how it is, imbued with temperatures and humidities of experience.”

— Peter Schjeldahl

25. “Beauty is a willing loss of mental control, surrendered to organic process that is momentarily under the direction of an exterior object. The object is not thought and felt about, exactly. It seems to use my capacities to think and feel itself.”

— Peter Schjeldahl

26. “There is an ineffable but fatal difference in attitude between people behaving naturally and people behaving naturally for a camera.”

— Peter Schjeldahl

27. “I retain, but suspend, my personal taste to deal with the panoply of the art I see. I have a trick for doing justice to an uncongenial work: “What would I like about this if I liked it?” I may come around; I may not. Failing that, I wonder, What must the people who like this be like? Anthropology.”

— Peter Schjeldahl

28. “Education is this funny thing. You deal for several years with organized information, and then you go out into the world and you never see any of that ever again. There’s no more organized information.”

— Peter Schjeldahl

29. “Matisse can make you hate your life for its comparatively insipid joys.”

— Peter Schjeldahl

30. “Artists are people who are subject to irrational convictions of the sacred. Baudelaire said that an artist is a child who has acquired adult capacities and discipline. Art education should help build those capacities and that discipline without messing over the child.”

— Peter Schjeldahl

31. “There’s a double standard between writers and readers. Readers can be unfaithful to writers anytime they like, but writers must never ever be unfaithful to the readers.”

— Peter Schjeldahl

32. “It’s possible I am the only art critic that a lot of people read. And maybe Robert Hughes, if he’s still writing.”

— Peter Schjeldahl

33. “I find that the mask of the critic is to have distance.”

— Peter Schjeldahl

34. “I can do pretty good work in various short forms, but anything over 1400 words, I’d be of no use. I like to say I’m a river navigator. I need to see the shore behind the shore.”

— Peter Schjeldahl

35. “With art criticism it’s difficult to discuss beauty, to assess it, because there’s always the possibility that we’re insane.”

— Peter Schjeldahl

36. “Your medium has to be alive to you, no matter what you do.”

— Peter Schjeldahl

37. “I’m absolutely convinced that people cannot look and read at the same time. Not any more than you can kneel and jump at the same time. It’s a completely different physiological setting.”

— Peter Schjeldahl

38. “Everybody’s got plants, but most are just growing weeds. The cultivated have greater gardens, finer and gaudier gardens.”

— Peter Schjeldahl

39. “Beauty makes us more like ourselves and more like each other.”

— Peter Schjeldahl

40. “Artists are sometimes in a position to tell the truth, but they’re positioned as a Cassandra. They’re gifted with impeccable prophecy and the assurance of never being listened to.”

— Peter Schjeldahl

41. “To me, the greatest artists are almost entirely non-verbal.”

— Peter Schjeldahl

42. “I have a total responsibility to the reader. The reader has to trust me and never feel betrayed.”

— Peter Schjeldahl

43. “It’s my duty to sell the ideas. But there’s always a question when it comes to beauty.”

— Peter Schjeldahl

44. “There’s art that I would readily buy if I could afford it, and enjoy, but would never write about because it doesn’t seem significant.”

— Peter Schjeldahl

45. “A lot of writers and artists are like chefs who eat their own cooking in the kitchen and then deliver an empty plate with assurances that it’s great.”

— Peter Schjeldahl

46. “A word is a thought, of course. But any image, including a photograph, may become an instrument of sufficiently lucid cogitation.”

— Peter Schjeldahl

47. “I have painted enough to have a lot of respect for mediocre painters. It’s really hard.”

— Peter Schjeldahl

48. “Artists are expected to talk about their work but writers aren’t expected to talk about their writing.”

— Peter Schjeldahl

49. “I think being interested is really what being civilized is about. I mean, you have to be conscious of everything.”

— Peter Schjeldahl

50. “I do have pleasure when I’m writing. I mean, I’m aware of pleasure. And sometimes I make myself laugh, with a joke or something; or I feel gleeful.”

— Peter Schjeldahl