Museum Quotes

There's a statue of Jimmy Stewart in the Hollywood Wax Museum, and the statue talks better than he does.

I moved to New York in the 1970s and started writing when I was at the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program.

Uncritical semantics is the myth of a museum in which the exhibits are meanings and the words are labels. To switch languages is to change the labels.

I do not exactly remember at what period I started my museum which absorbed so much of my time.

An art book is a museum without walls.

I was in Beijing a month ago working on the smoke project in collaboration with an architect there, and I was asked very directly whether it was safe to breathe in the smoke. They did not have confidence in the museum not to use harmful smoke, and they certainly didn't have confidence that the city would protect them from harmful smoke.

I never can pass by the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York without thinking of it not as a gallery of living portraits but as a cemetery of tax-deductible wealth.

Give me a museum and I'll fill it.

A museum is a place where one should lose one's head.

Black people should have recognition for themselves and their backgrounds and their relationships with other people in the world and thus lose some of their alienation. This museum has certainly stood for that in this town.

If an army of monkeys were strumming on typewriters, they might write all the books in the British Museum.

I would love to see as many of the black players as possible in today's Major League Baseball make every effort to go to the Negro Leagues Museum and get a first-hand view of how it all started.

By a museum, I assume you mean an institution dedicated to the events of Sept. 11 and the aftermath. If that is done with sensitivity, I think it would be most appropriate.

Many people will say, well, clothes should be worn; but I think people can look at them in public, like seeing a film. I think museum exhibitions are very important.

I maintain that if you're a novelist and you go into an art museum, you'll come out a better novelist. And if you paint a picture for an hour you're a better actor at the end of it.

We talk about theatre museums filled with old costumes and things. What we also need is a theatre museum of the old routines on videotape. We are only the custodians of those techniques, and they should be preserved.

If it gets to the Supreme Court, I'll have the directors of every museum in the country as expert testimony that my work is legitimate art.

I also got a chance to go to the American Museum in New York, which helped my interest.

The Whitney is a museum that has a great rapport with younger artists and the community.

In Paris, it used to feel like you were living in a museum. As beautiful as it was, it's still limited. But here you have just everything.

Eco sees the intellectual as an organizer of culture, someone who can run a magazine or a museum. An administrator, in fact. I think this is a melancholy situation for an intellectual.

It was a movement that had all the art critics, all the museum directors in its thrall.

A museum has to renew its collection to be alive, but that does not mean we give on important old works.

Museums are tombs, and it looks like everything is turning into a museum.

I think about that all of the time and I have this fantasy that I am going to work at a museum someday! I would love to do something like that!

We have created indoor installations inside museums, like the Wrapped Floor at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago in 1968, and not monumental at all by any standards.

I don't know a single collector or museum director who says: 'Oh, he's on a list, so I think I'll buy something of his.' The people who buy my art put a little more thought into it than that.

Living is like tearing through a museum. Not until later do you really start absorbing what you saw, thinking about it, looking it up in a book, and remembering - because you can't take it in all at once.

Shouldn't a great museum foster serious seeing before all else?

We have a group of friends of the museum who try to raise, if they can, periodically something to help us. Of course, the main thing about a building like this is its upkeep. It needs central heating and it needs central air conditioning.