We are most artistically caged.

Imprisoned in our bodies...and our soul has its windows.

We are powerfully imprisoned by the terms in which we have been conducted to think.

Nestroy's words ought to apply to an artist and an idea: "I have made a prisoner, and he won't let go of me!"

we are all prisoners of our thoughts.

We artists are indestructible, even in a prison cell or a concentration camp I would be all right in my own world of art. Even if I had to paint my pictures with my tongue on the dusty floor of my cell.

Great art is an instant arrested in eternity.

We artists are indestructible; even in a prison, or in a concentration camp, I would be almighty in my own world of art, even if I had to paint my pictures with my wet tongue on the dusty floor of my cell.

We are prisoners of our own metaphors, metaphorically speaking.

What was any art but an effort to make a sheath, a mold in which to imprison for a moment the shining, elusive element which is life itself.

It’s time for us to wake up and face the truth, that we are a captive species on a prison planet, but the fact that we are so close to understanding the science of our imprisonment means that we are also just beginning to touch the key that locks the door, and if we are strong, if we defy and defeat the sinister forces that rule us now, we have a chance at last to unlock this place and do what we are able to do, that we are richly capable of doing, that those who love us—and they are out there, too—have hoped and sought that we should do from time immemorial.

Cultural confinement takes place when a curator imposes his own limits on an art exhibition , rather than asking an artist to set his limits. Artists are expected to fit into fraudulent categories. Some artists imagine they've got a hold on this apparatus, which in fact has got a hold of them. As a result, they end up supporting a cultural prison that is out of their control.

A mind enclosed in language is in prison.

A masterpiece of art has in the mind a fixed place in the chain of being, as much as a plant or a crystal.